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EXHIBITION OF DRAWING BY CHRISTOPHER GREEN 24TH FEBRUARY 2014 - 24 MARCH 2014 I ARTMOORHOUSE MOOR HOUSE, 120 LONDON WALL, LONDON EC2Y5ET
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EXHIBITION CURATED BY CHRISTOPHER GREEN, ELISA MARTINELLI BROCHURE CONCEPT ARTMOORHOUSE ALL IMAGES © CHRISTOPHER GREEN CHRIS GREEN'S NEW DRAWINGS © WILLIAM FEAVER UNPAIRED VISION © SILVIO SAURA
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! ARTIST’S STATEMENT ! !! I specialise in making large-scale monochrome ink drawings of the landscape, cityscapes and interiors. Working entirely on-site my aim is to represent the visual experience of being somewhere in particular. I am especially interested in what happens when a drawing expands from the centre into the periphery of vision. I have developed a method of joining together sheets of usually A3 paper allowing the angle of vision to widen while continuing to draw. I use measuring to keep track of the relative scale and position of things. Being unable to see the whole drawing at once for practical reasons, misjudgements often occur leading to sometimes surprising inconsistencies and fractures. The drawings reveal my successive attempts to get to grips with space.
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The work takes place over long periods of time. I aim to stay true to my experience by recording everything as it appears in the moment. The result is drawings where multiple states of time exist simultaneously. The effects of morning and afternoon, different weather conditions even different seasons can be seen in the same drawing. I describe rapidly moving people and traffic in as much detail as the moment allows. The final picture is built from my attempt to draw the way things appear in space, and everything that happened in a particular place over time.
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CHRISTOPHER GREEN’S NEW DRAWINGS By William Feaver Writer and Critic
Deployed on a new world, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover trundles around treating every little lump of rock or
trackless dune as a photo opportunity. Raising its snout , it has also sighted a distinct twinkle in the blackness: Mother Earth. Certainly this is a far-fetched parallel to draw to Chris Green’s drawings but it’s one that holds good. For
what he draws and the persistence with which he lengthens, broadens and deepens his take on ordinariness, has a strange pioneering quality. Within his panoramic scope the London area takes on a newly discovered look. Landing himself with immense scenic challenges he works his way outwards from every centre, taking in foreground and distance with deep field focus, his concentration urging him on from feature to feature, attending to the complexities that pixels deal with routinely but that, with him, become wonderfully insistent. Indoors he reminds us that spaces enclose us in much the same way that a skull contains the brain. Outdoors he ranges widely from each selected spot -from the Thames northwards to Alexandra Park
providing with each great composite image a sense of having just landed somewhere marvellous, a land where, after the aridity of Mars, there’s business and cultivation, atmosphere, cloud cover, breeze on the grasses and proliferation of species.
How wonderful to see where we live now so diligently and appreciatively and transcendently set down on so many conjoined bits of paper.
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UNPAIRED VISION By Silvio Saura Editorial Director of ARTEiN Magazine
Away from the glare and the show of new technologies, there is movement: a new generation of artists returning to the essential - to a pure, direct, unplugged stroke as a way to define an immediate visual awareness of reality.
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Christopher Green works slowly, without haste, brush in hand. The new concept of ‘time’ as a medium, developed in the 1970’s by artists like Jenny Holzer and Christian Boltanski, is adapted here, anachronistically, to the contemporary. Speaking about his work, Green states that he draws on A3 paper sheets that he combines to form the complete picture. This aspect of his work is very “important” - the composition of the images is fragmented, as if it were a film. He draws frame by frame to create the full image. Sometimes there are changes, anomalies, inconsistencies that create a sort of a time lapses between one paper sheet and the next. The edge of each single sheet becomes then the boundary between two adjacent yet different dimensions.
!Even his technique, ink on paper, relates to this concept; the time passes only once and does not allow for
corrections. The ink sketch does not admit mistakes. Green seems to tell us that we are not only the sum of the individual moments of our lives, but the product of the new aspects that each of them acquire at every new moment. This new idea of time affects the artist, who represents simultaneously different times of the same scene, introducing in this way a time variable. Not surprisingly, his drawings show the feelings and thoughts that we experience with the passing of moments. In his work, the total image radiates over time.
!For Green it is meaningless to reproduce reality as we see it because it is not in that form that we know it.
Our consciousness revises the visual image of the object that we know - what we see is only a starting point that will then be transformed by our consciousness, repeatedly, over time.
! !The viewer is involved in a sort of disarticulation of the chronological order of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, contaminated simultaneously by past and present; he reads and he feels the present time, although filtering
it through the past. The causal-chronological succession order shatters, generating a continuous transition between past and present. In this way Green’s work relates to the Cubist’s multiple perspective that includes the dimension of time: once a work took possession of the space, now it reigns over time.
Green breaks reality down in its many faces to then reconstruct it by placing them back, side by side, in his compositions; a way to return to the eyes and restore reality in its essence. As in Analytical Cubism, in the two-dimensionality of the drawing, we see the reality as a whole as it happens in our consciousness by observing it from all sides possible.
In works such as Rainham Marshes, in order to get an overall view, there is the confluence in a single image of a plurality of moments of perception, which directly corresponds to the plurality points of view. The total view of the horizon does not just give us information about the various aspects of its volume in space but, as it is the result of our knowledge through memory, it gives us, above all, information on the duration of its permanence of it in our consciousness.
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Alexandra Park, Winter-Spring, 2013
Ink on Paper 163.5cm x 314.7cm
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Alexandra Park, Summer, 2013
Ink on Paper 148.5cm x 210cm
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Alexandra Park, Autumn, 2013
Ink on Paper 127.5cm x 168.7cm
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St Bartholomew-The-Great 2013
Ink on Paper 119.2cm x 298cm
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St Stephen Walbrok, 2012
Ink on Paper 168cm x 168cm
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All Hallows-On-The-Wall, 2013
Ink on Paper 59.5cm x 61cm
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St Mary Woolnoth, 2013
Ink on Paper 71.5cm x 66cm
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Liverpool Street, 2011
Ink on Paper 87cm x 87cm
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Rainham Marshes, 2009
Ink on Paper 105cm x 354cm
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BIOGRAPHY! Exhibitions! 2013! Royal Courts of Justice, Rolls Building, Fetter Lane, The Ballroom Drawings! Sunday Times Watercolour Exhibition, Mall Galleries! St Stephen Walbrook, London, A Large Drawing of St Stephen Walbrook! Department of Coffee and Social Affairs, Leather Lane, Throw Those Curtains! JMW Turner’s House, Twickenham, Artists of the Pageant! 2012! New English Art Club Open Exhibition, Mall Galleries! Sunday Times Watercolour Exhibition, Mall Galleries! Piers Feetham Gallery, Fulham, Drawn to the Line! Prince’s Drawing School, Big Drawings, 6 Foot and Over! Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, Mall Galleries! White Wall Space, Leigh-on-sea, riverrama! 2011! The London Group Open Exhibition, The Cello Factory! Bankside Gallery, London Lives! Buckingham Palace, Prince’s Drawing School 10th Anniversary Ball! 2010! Piers Feetham Gallery, Fulham, Thames! HMS President, Blackfriars, A Panoramic Drawing of the King’s Reach! 2009-8! Menier Gallery, Six of the Prince’s! The Foundry, Old Street! Windsor Castle, Prince’s Drawing School Patron’s Dinner! Prince’s Drawing School, Drawing Year Exhibition!
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Collections! Royal Courts of Justice! Hermes Collection, Paris! Forbes Collection, Chateau de Balleroy, Normandy! Royal Collection, Duchess of Cornwall! Lord and Lady Bacon, Raveningham Hall, Norfolk! Paintings in Hospitals!
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Awards! 2012! Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, runner-up! 2008! Prince’s Drawing School, External Assessment Board Prize!
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Education! 2007-9! Prince’s Drawing School, Drawing Year, Artist in Residence! 2005-6! Byam Shaw School of Art, Central St Martins, MA Fine Art! 1999-2002! Norwich School of Art, BA Cultural Studies!
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ARTMOORHOUSE Moor House 120 London Wall London EC2Y 5ET T. +44 (0)7502211914 T. +44 (0)7919070335 WWW.ARTMOORHOUSE.COM INFO@ARTMOORHOUSE.COM TEAM@ARTMOORHOUSE.COM
CHRISTOPHER GREEN WWW.CHRISTOPHERGREEN.INFO MAIL@CHRISTOPHERGREEN.INFO CHRISGREEN101@YAHOO.CO.UK
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