P A I N T : T H E S E E N , T H E U N S E E N A N D T H E I M A G I N E D . C O N T E M P O R A R Y E U R O P E A N PA I N T I N G
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P O R T R A I T S 54
M E S S U M S W I LT S H I R E
Henry Lamb RA (1883-1960)
P A I N T
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P A I N T
THE SEEN, THE UNSEEN AND THE IMAGINED C O N T E M P O R A R Y E U R O P E A N PA I N T I N G 2 February – 3 March 2019 Preview and panel discussion: Friday 1 February 2019 Chris Gilvan-Cartwright, Heike Kelter and Raphael Barratt chaired by Rachel Campbell Johnston, art critic for the Times.
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PA I N T : T H E S E E N , T H E U N S E E N A N D T H E I M A G I N E D The notion of Magic Realism first emerged after World War One and was used to describe the mystery
Artists:
that belies the rational, natural world around us in painting and literature. After the harrowing losses of the war, it reflected a desire for escapism and a belief in a better world beyond this one; factors that
Raphael Barratt
might explain why magic realist paintings are enjoying such a comeback, now.
Minyoung Choi
For the last fifty or sixty years, much Western contemporary art has reflected our scientific advances
Nancy Delouis
and celebrated mass production, industrially manufactured materials and technology and mirrored not
Isabelle Dutoit
only our increasing distance from our environment but also our human selves. This art made out of steel, concrete, plastic and other prefabricated materials, rather than a simple brush and paint or rock
Zohar Fraiman
and chisel, has tended towards minimalism, philosophical debate and art theory, rather than fantasy,
Chris Gilvan-Cartwright
spirituality or religion.
Rene Gonzalez
Now however, artists are increasingly using painting again as a means of visualisation – much as it was
Heike Kelter
used by ancient civilisations. Painting is a conduit once more for dream-like sequences; many of the artists in the show like Rosa Loy and Eva Schwab, emanate from Germany where the first generation
Corinne von Lebusa
of Magic Realist painters like Otto Dix and George Grosz came from before the genre re-emerged in America in the 1940s. They feature elemental aspects of the natural world; wood fires for instance in
Rosa Loy
the works of Minyoung Choi or Rosa Loy, or darkness both physically and psychically in the works of
Jessie Makinson
Corinne von Lebusa or Alex Tennigkeit.
Justine Otto
Chris Gilvan-Cartwright, who doubles as comedic performance artist ‘The Baron Gilvan’ and trained at
Tuesday Riddell
Central St Martins in London and in Cracow, is inspired by Flemish 16th century religious painters like Joachim Patinir in his sequence of works based on the Pietà. Raphael Barratt reimagines the red and
Eva Schwab
ochre rocks and branches in the backgrounds of paintings by Mantegna as the focus of her works.
Bettina Sellman
It is perhaps the works of René Gonzalez that most clearly illustrates this new move towards neo-
Alex Tennigkeit
spiritualism in his paintings of dark, cathedral-like forests including those around Fonthill Abbey and
Rose Wylie
Wardour Castle – an historically spiritually significant area of the English countryside of which the
a Messums Wiltshire barn, built by the Abbess of Shaftesbury in the 13th century, is part.
‘Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see,’ said the American painter Philip Guston and we hope the best thing about this exhibition is not what you necessarily see – but what you sense. By Catherine Milner Curatorial Director, Messums Wiltshire
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THERE’S MAGIC IN THE AIR
There’s magic in the air, because, in the cut-and-paste world of our postmodern era in which all
spaces in her images of deserted football pitches under floodlights. Heike Kelte carries this evocation
meanings dissolve into a constantly shifting play, the only truth is that there is no longer a simple truth
of emptiness further in geometrical abstracts which carve illusory spaces out of the flatness.
any more. Everything depends on a person’s point of view...which means anything could happen. It certainly seems to in this show at Messums Wiltshire.
Yet, for all their differences, these painters are on the same fundamental quest. Like alchemists they take the base matter of their pigments, their colours created (at least traditionally) quite literally from earth
PAINT: The seen, the unseen and the imagined brings 17 artists together from across our global,
and stone, from crushed beetles and ground shells, and seek, by some all but mystical imaginative
contemporary culture. They come from Britain, from Israel, from Canada and South Korea. But there
process, to transubstantiate it into the gold of artistic vision. The ordinary is made odd. The mundane
is a strong bent to Germany and specifically Berlin which, thanks to its winning combination of free-
becomes magical. The world around us is revealed to the viewer in a new way.
spirited culture and cheap studio space, established itself in the wake of the 1989 collapse of its wall, as a radical artistic hub.
Look at Rose Wylie’s Jack Goes Swimming, for instance. A broad-backed bather in flesh-coloured trunks runs, flip-kneed and splay-footed towards a blue sea the expanses of which are scrawled with
The artists range in age from the octogenarian Rose Wylie who, having spent the most part of her
graffiti. Wylie’s pictures always start with an image – any image – that seizes her attention. Then they are
career unrecognised, living quietly in Kent and raising her family while she painted pictures that nobody
built up, like collages, from a mixture of private memories and shared experiences, photos ripped from
seemed much to notice, suddenly found herself being feted in her eighties as the hottest new talent
newspapers, film stills from movies, labels on bottles or posters seen in the street. All are dashed down
on the scene, to the 24-year old Raphael Barratt, a gifted young student just emerging from the Royal
on the canvas with an unruly energy that preserves the initial impact of what she hoped to convey.
Drawing School.
Everything that we see, she suggests, arrives freighted with meaning. Nothing is unworthy of notice in
The pictures, stylistically, are also very different. These painters find influences all over art history. Chris
our world.
Gilvan-Cartwright, for instance, offers a series of tiny thickly-worked panels in which he allows paint its
Pause by Raphael Barratt’s Dark Wood. You can’t help but think of Dante - “In the middle of the journey
own life. Applied wet-on-wet, clogging and twisting, snarling and dripping, his medium is encouraged
of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost.” It is down an indirect path
to think for itself. Playing with Surrealist techniques of automatism (a way of making art which bypasses
that Barratt guides us. Looking at the work of the Renaissance masters, she picks out some easily
conscious thought and so accesses the intuitive, the imaginative, the instinctive in all their mad richness)
overlooked element – the line created by the out-flung arm of a saint, for instance – and discovers in it
the painter adopts an alter ego - Baron Gilvan - for whom he serves, he suggests, as a conduit, tasked
an echo of the branch of a tree stretching pale and slender into the air’s stillness. Eliding the two, her
with capturing the flow of ideas which riff on the medieval paintings of Northern Europe with their caves
works hovering in a hinterland between abstraction and the figurative, she makes atmosphere (rather
and their mountains, their hermits and holy men.
than anything more literally physical) her subject.
Nancy Delouis, in contrast, withdraws into the quietly unobtrusive realms of Pierre Bonnard. She
This is the elusive yet ineluctably vivid world of the imagination that each of these artists sets out
paints intimate domestic scenes in bright colour, flooding their tranquil interiors with soft light. Rene
to conjure. Their worlds feel in some ways as universal as myth: and yet myths as recast from a
Gonzalez puts a hallucinogenic slant upon Romanticised mysteries in fairy tale landscapes that look
fundamentally idiosyncratic slant. Those who like art to serve a clear purpose, to engage directly with
like the stage-sets for fragments of narratives whose ongoing stories we will never find out. Rosa Loy is
social or political commentary, might feel they are sliding too far into the realms of fantasy. But remember
inspired by the uneasy fantasies of Balthus who painted prepubescent Lolitas lounging about with their
the words of Andre Breton, spokesman for the Surrealism which runs like a powerful undercurrent
knickers on show. Minyoung Choi remembers the anomic emptiness of Edward Hopper’s haunting
through this show: “the imaginary is what tends to become real”. Rachel Campbell Johnston Art Critic for The Times
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Raphael Barratt
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L A N D P H I L O S OPHICAL PROCESS W H E N PA I N T I N G ? The physical and philosophical processes of making art are, in many respects, synonymous. In my work, the physical act of observing, drawing and painting facilitates a psychological arena in which ideas and relationships form and reform.
Born Location Currently Education
1994 Kent, UK London and Kent, UK Camberwell College of Art and Royal Drawing School, London
A fundamental part of my process, equal to drawing, is the act of walking and looking. I often return to the familiar paths and wooded hills of the fruit farm and surrounding countryside where I spent my childhood in Kent. The physical cradle of this landscape holds deep psychological resonances for me. As Paul Nash once said “There are places, just as there are people and objects…whose relationship of parts creates a mystery.” A finished painting can grow from multiple small drawings, oil sketches and studies in watercolour and gouache. In these I organise and compose colour relationships, visual structures and distilled abstractions. Once I have found these relationships I begin working on a large drawing using oils and oil pastel on raw paper. A simultaneous and equally important element of my work comes from continually looking at and analysing paintings by the great artists of history. My distinct interest at present lies with the strange clarity and powerfully atmospheric qualities of early Renaissance painting. Through this dual approach to looking I find that one thing makes sense of the other. The outstretched limb of a Saint painted in 1448 helps me make visual sense of a pale tree stretching out into the still air of a field in 2018. This is, for me, one of the greatest privileges of exploring painting; the ability of a visual language to transcend time.
Wreckage, 2017 Oil pastel on paper 152 x 122cm
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Raphael Barratt
Landscape Portrait, 2017 Oil pastel and oil paint on paper 152 x 122cm
Other Echos, 2017 Oil pastel on paper 152 x 122cm
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Dark Wood, 2018 Oil pastel on paper 34 x 25.5cm
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Minyoung Choi
WHAT IS Y OUR P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PA IN TIN G? My work heavily relies on my own imagination and memory. I make quick drawings and watercolours, which usually lead to large scale paintings. I don’t do many preparatory sketches. If I do, I just do it for myself to warm up because I know that
Born Location Lives Education
1989 Seoul, South Korea London, UK MFA Painting, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London
my drawings and paintings never come out the same. The way I start painting varies depending on the subject matter, the surface and the scale of the canvas. For example, when I painted ‘Campfire’ I did it quite straightforwardly without having under-layers of paint on the canvas. I just start with one thing that I want to paint and expand the idea while I paint responding spontaneously to what already is there. ‘School Playground’ had some layers of paint already and the final image was done in one go. Some small paintings are completed in one day but many of my larger paintings are done over a few weeks or months often having multiple layers underneath. I like when my painting looks fresh and I do paint wet on wet quite a lot.
W H AT I S Y O U R P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ESS IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? I always have the subject matter in my mind and I find the way into the painting while I proceed with my work. Although I had some initial intentions about the way I start painting, I let them change and be modified in the process of painting. It is better to find what my painting needs. If I happen to achieve accidental brush marks and textures that I think work better, I don’t try to force the painting to do something else. In terms of finishing the painting, I just work until it feels right. It is really crucial to know when to stop and also important to know how much further I should take it. For me, I need to have a strong connection with what I am painting. They are very personal feelings and they help me to continue to work without getting lost. When I am painting animals I imagine what they are feeling and when I am working on figures I also think about their characteristics. When I paint places I indulge in my memories of being in similar places I have visited before or I really try to imagine how it would feel like to be there. I like to have these back-stories and narratives for myself, which does not necessarily force one single meaning on the viewers.
Campfire, 2018 Oil on linen 50 x 40cm
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Minyoung Choi
School Playground, 2018 Oil on linen 35 x 40cm
Campfire 2, 2018 Oil on linen 50 x 40cm
School Playground 2, 2018 Oil on linen 20.8 x 25.3cm
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Nancy Delouis
WHAT IS Y OUR P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PA IN TIN G? When it comes to completing a painting, time is a luxury I now grant myself.
Born Location Lives
1941 Limoges, France Limoges, France
The more I move forward with my work, the more intensity I put into it. In a still life, what I find most appealing is colour harmonies, and the intimacy suggested by the objects themselves. I try to let my fantasy go way beyond any kind of logic to give my imagination free rein.
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? Most of my work I paint fairly quickly, but then again, I take a lot of time to think them through... At first, starting a painting was more exhilarating for me than actually finishing it. Whereas now any work is only complete for me when it has caught my own eye and held it. My style remains deeply rooted in local traditions, especially ancient French enamels, which move me very deeply. Painted enamels only show an image, while in ancient enamels, there is a purity of the spirit that permeates them. I paint areas with strong outlines, interspersed with passages of patterned impasto, which recall Japanese textiles, prints and cloisonnĂŠ, and are inspired by the work of Bonnard and Vuillard.
Oranges at Vieux Flacons, 2015 Oil on canvas 81 x 65cm
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Nancy Delouis
La FenĂŞtre Ouvert sur la Jardin, 1999 Oil on canvas 114 x 146cm
Le Kimono Jaune, 2015 Oil on canvas 92 x 65cm
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Isabelle Dutoit
WHAT IS Y OUR P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PA IN TIN G? I start with a gesso ground, then I add colors in an abstract way to decide which kind of color feeling I want to express. Usually I do this with acrylics. After this decision I follow up with oil paint. Playing with the ground, I try to find the figure
Born Location Currently Education
1975 Gross-Gerau, Germany Leipzig, Germany Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Masterclass of Arno Rink
in the abstract colour layers - like a caveman doing his or her animal drawing on the surface of the stonewall. Then, I paint all the details in a classical, layering technique.
W H AT I S Y O U R P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ESS IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? I am a realist painter with an experimental aspect. In this way, I work with my subject: animals and hybrid creatures or human fragments. When I started working on painting in the early 2000’s, I used a picture of myself as a staffage into a painted environment: My idea was, if I leave the room infront of the painting, my painted self could move into the painted reality. The figures I paint now are staffages of myself in another way. I use them as an example of the connection between us - the humans - and nature. The viewer has the possibility to put oneself in the position of the painted creature. The first paintings of mankind were animals or human fragments. This subject is timeless and changes its meanings over time. When I paint animals today, I find more of an ecological meaning, without forgetting the myths and perceptions beyond the words.
Fledermaus Bat, 2017 Oil on canvas 40 x 30cm
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Zohar Fraiman
WHAT IS Y OUR P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PA IN TIN G? My work is a mixture of research and obsession. Sometimes transforming this research into a painting can go really wrong or really right. I try to make paintings that reflect ideas in my head, but at the same time there is a lot of weird experimenting going on while trying to make this happen. One of my last paintings
Born Location Currently Education
1987 Jerusalem, Israel Berlin, Germany Meisterschülerin Fine Arts, University of Arts Berlin by Professor Burkhard Held
involved the hand gestures of two figures with leopard fur coats and plenty of jewelry. Although I really tried to make an interesting visual experience, it simply didn’t work. I painted over them (and oh yes I was kind of sad while doing so) but then the new layers that appeared on top became way more interesting. Sometimes just fucking it up makes the next step in your work much better. It’s important to have really focused ideas and at the same time it’s significant to screw it all up.
W H AT I S Y O U R P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ESS IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? It might not seem apparent at first glance, but many of my recent paintings have a strong visual influence from cartoon series, pop culture and music. My current body of work consists of constructing a visual experience with many layers in one painting. These many layers are a way of showing that reality has various stories and perspectives all happening simultaneously. Things don’t always make sense, but the moment you let go of reason it actually all comes together. My most recent work is a large-scale electronic altarpiece. This work is an altar that opens and closes its panels electronically in reaction to sensors placed in the space where it is exhibited. One cannot open the altarpiece simply by standing in front of it, but must make an indirect action that triggers these sensors. The friction that results from the interaction of a visitor in the space intends to give off a sense of surprise or confusion. This work can make you feel you are just one component of a much larger, perhaps unknowable, constellation of things and forces.
Maria Joanna, 2017 Oil on canvas 70 x 60cm
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Chris Gilvan-Cartwright
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PAINTING? Applying the paint through automatism by drawing rabid-like with charcoal on sized canvas then painting directly wet-into-wet using what is at hand: spray paint, rags, fingers, oils and acrylics. Lifting, twisting and turning the canvas pouring paint so it runs and bleeds into tangled forms and ephemera until images reveal a cliff edge or a space
Born Location Currently Education
1966 Dorking, Surrey UK East Sussex, UK University of Brighton MA and Turps Art School, Studio Painting Programme
ready to receive figuration. I’m always searching for something divine within the bathos and decrepit absurdity.
W H AT I S Y O U R P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ESS IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? Originally conceived as a conduit for my own creativity, The Baron is the governor of all of my works, the character through which it all must flow, raw, unflinching, and utterly sincere, a compact of all that is magnificent. The Baron is concerned with only the intensity of life itself, and the beauty of the ideal. In my studio all I need to ask is ‘What sort of paintings will The Baron make today?’ It’s enough to get going.
Opening doors and pulling strings, 2018 Oil on canvas 52 x 67cm £1400 ex VAT
For me painting operates as a hermetic portal between an instinctive inner and outer reality as if operating as a pineal body. I grew up in the crazy world of theatre and my Dad is an opera singer based in Germany. Drawing inspiration from the notion of the fantastical, fairy tales, stage sets, and the dynamics of the imagination I create invented narratives involving corporeal figures falling, fallen or about to fall apart, often being cared for, held or attended by close figures. Characters in the paintings are in a state of reverie or catatonic breakdown referencing holy men or hermits drawn from northern European medieval paintings. In the tradition of Romanticism they are in transformation; occupying preternatural landscapes they become preoccupied in the process of finding selfrealisation and enlightenment.
Flashing no colour, 2018 Oil/charcoal on canvas 75 x 110cm
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Chris Gilvan-Cartwright
Sticking with you baby, 2018 Oil on board 10.5 x 12cm
Making delight, 2018 Oil on board 10.5 x 12cm
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When you stand again, 2018 Oil on board 10.5 x 12cm
Vision flowing, 2018 Oil on board 10.5 x 12cm
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Rene Gonzalez
WHAT IS Y OUR P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PA IN TIN G? My process varies somewhat, but often involves a research process where I look for photos of people and spaces as well as images of art, film, theatre and other things depending on the subject I’m working on. I then work out my compositions in collages, sketches and through Photoshop editing. The canvases go through a few stages of
Born Location Currently Education
1983 Montreal, Canada London, UK BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting, City & Guilds of London Art School
preparation to create background textures with “controlled accidents” and this process is repeated throughout later stages of the painting, giving different finishing textures to certain elements in the compositions, trying to strike a balance between the expressive and the controlled. Because of this process I start my paintings with big brushes and broad stokes, slowly reducing brush sizes as I go along, until I’m detailing elements with a minute brush detailing the tiniest foliage or facial expression.
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? My work is driven by ideas I am passionate about and wish to share or communicate, and it tends to revolve around the concept of “the magical” as a helpful psychological tool in a science driven society. I tend to construct little stories that I write down, inspired by personal experience or stories I find compelling as examples of my themes, and I eventually break down the stories into “scenes” that will become the different paintings I make.
Somewhere Waiting, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 75 x 100 cm
A Resonance, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 90 x 100 cm
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Rene Gonzalez
Rene Gonzalez Crossroad at Journey’s End, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 80 x 100cm
Rene Gonzalez Jardins des plantes, 2018 Acrylic on raw canvas 90 x 90cm
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Heike Kelter
WHAT IS Y OUR P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PA IN TIN G? The physical process deals with how and what the painting will be. At the beginning I will turn around notions and sources, which all reflect back to a place, its light and space and the physical experience of a visited location. This I call “The
Born Location Currently Education
1964 Münster, Germany Berlin, Germany MA degree Hochschule der Künste, Berlin
Placement”. Once a Placement is decided, I rationalise this emotion and execution by development of compositional elements with a refined specific colour palette. Through studies and drawings, also in pastels and paint, templates are worked up, and form, angles, colour and balance, all play their role in refining a Placement Idea until it becomes an essence. The Placement has now become a Pure Notation. The final decision and the plan always have to have an element of flexibility built into them - perhaps the lucky accident - and I am always open to the changes that happen. Sometimes a painting has to be adjusted, others are refined and completed. The actual act of painting is through thin layers of glazing that build up defined colour of counterpoised parts over a consistent even surface.
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? A philosophical approach in my work is to achieve a transfiguration from making retinal references (image-based) to that of a retained reflection. It is to compress into a new form the experience, emotion and knowledge of a place, into a new being. The deliberate simplification of presentation is to enforce the clarity and density of the idea. It is to add mass and to compress the idea. This process acts as a “white hole” to focus and interpret the idea of “being” as much as possible. It enables me to see anew, in contemplation the presence of the “Placement” in light, air, space and from the original experience comes a pure singular note. This note signifies the whole through refined and controlled elements, strong geometry and a subtle colour-range. Judgment of my painting should be done through refinement and not through reduction. Working on my painting drives me forward. This personal practice is a manner of experience and being - as an extra form of existence.
FHA, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 50cm
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Heike Kelter
Jubilee, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 50 x 70cm
Parade, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 50cm
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Corinne von Lebusa
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PAINTING? The image / image carrier, the material and technique are ways of expressing myself. The picture language / imaginary language I develop is the one which is closest to my character. The technique I use is developed as a mixture of drawing, watercolour (aquarell) on
Born Location Currently Education
1978 Herzberg, Germany Leipzig, Germany Painting at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig with Professor Neo Rauch
cardboard (finnpappe). In exhibitions I present my works as an installation or staging. In this way the stories and messages connect amongst each other and act with one another. The spectator has the choice, like a voyeur, to step into parallel existing realities. The installations connect the space as a whole.
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? I am always inspired by what interests me in the moment in any way, of which I cannot let go or which stimulates me. My subjects are longings, desires, my own experiences or imaginings in which I reflect the relations between the genders. What is created is a private cosmos in which emotional situations and processes of the soul are a main role and an act. Bedtime Sweet, 2017 Mixed media 40 x 30cm
Schatten, 2017 Mixed media 40 x 30cm
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Rosa Loy
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PAINTING? In the morning I use my bicycle to take the 10 km to my work place, cleaning my mind on the journey. I take the stairs up three levels to my studio, so that by body is perfectly prepared for working: not too little, not too much.
Born Location Currently Education
1958 Zwickau, Germany Leipzig, Germany Master studies in the class of Professor Rolf Münzner
I turn off my monkey-mind and have a nice cup of tea, emptying my brain. I stand in front of the canvas and wait to catch inspiration.
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? I take care of the present, not looking backwards and not looking to the future. I stay in time and remain open to what’s happening now in this moment, being curious about everything and anything that is new. My sources are from my own experiences, perceptions and fantasies, or mythologies, fairy tales and the history of art. With all of this is raw material that can become part of the artwork in the process of the image’s becoming or production. Perlen, 2009 Oil on canvas 97 x 78cm
Der leere Schrank, 2014 Oil on canvas 40 x 30cm
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Rosa Loy
Der linke Fuß, 2015 Oil on canvas 56 x 45.5cm
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Helenes Kunststück, 2014 Oil on canvas 40 x 30cm
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Jessie Makinson
WHAT IS Y OUR P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PA IN TIN G? When painting, I start by making an under drawing in pigment in an intuitive pattern all over the surface. This informs the painting, and allows the narratives to be found in the act of making.
Born Location Currently Education
1985 Camberwell, London, UK London, UK Edinburgh College of Art and Turps Banana Studio Program, London
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? I draw inspiration from speculative fiction and the occult, combining intuition, gesture and colour to create scenes of sexuality and lurking menace. My approach to painting is to see what happens and trust myself.
Blue blush me, 2017 Watercolour on paper 24 x 32cm
Foreign Spy, 2017 Watercolour on paper 24 x 32cm
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Justine Otto
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PAINTING? During the process of painting I have to do quite some physical activities. I need the close view of the work as much as the view from a distance - about eight meters away - to make sure that everything fits the way I intended it. Sometimes I even take a glimpse through a mirror at the artwork.
Born Location Currently Education
1975 Gross-Gerau, Germany Leipzig, Germany Academy of Visual Arts (Hochschule fĂźr Grafik und Buchkunst), Leipzig, Germany, Masterclass of Arno Rink
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? In earlier times I was much more involved in figurative painting but now I enjoy to work along the border between abstract and figurative painting. What gives a painting a permanent source of energy? Where does that happen? For me it is not about the descriptive presentation I am interested in, but the pure painting process. People who look at the artwork will have their own associations.
Conquo, 2016 Oil on wood 50 x 40cm
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Tuesday Riddell
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PAINTING? I usually begin a painting by studying my botanical art and 17th century still life and landscape painting books as well as spending time in my garden picking plants and scenarios to work with, from there I make compositional sketches which will be plotted onto canvas or board whilst allowing other forms to appear naturally during the process.
Born Location Currently Education
1992 Newcastle upon Tyne London, UK BA in Fine Art painting, City & Guilds of London Art School. The Painter Stainer Decorative Surface Fellowship.
,UK
lose full stop
I like to start quite loosely and for the development to be intuitive allowing myself to play around with the paint before layering up the images with a small brush with controlled details, trying to maintain a balance of the earlier loose marks.
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E RM S OF PA I N T I N G ? It’s important to me to explore ways of creating an enchanting, surreal atmosphere, my ideas are usually inspired by imagery I remember from childhood stories and movies, I think this helps build the uncanny feel of my paintings to study the psychological and transformative nature of the environment.
Night time, 2018 Acrylic, oil and gloss on canvas 30 x 30cm
Pond, 2018 Acrylic, oil and gloss on board 40 x 40cm
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Bettina Sellman
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PAINTING? When painting starts flowing, the body indicates this by being in a certain state of relaxed alertness. There are ways to support the body in doing this - sort of like entering the house through the back door - but no guarantee‌
Born Location Currently Education
1971 Munich, Germany Berlin, Germany Hunter College, New York City, USA (Master of Fine Arts)
W H AT I S Y O U R P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ESS IN TERMS OF PA I N T I N G ? Being the original genre, painting is suited to talk about the relationship between the artificiality of technically produced images and the human body. Painting casts light on the fact that every gaze is filtered. There cannot be an absolute gaze or recognition. This is the case also with abstraction. Painting is done by a human being - the complex machine - but at the same time it leaves the human realm behind: machine, program, concepts. Painting means not to be part of a program. It follows different rules. Other than that Bettina Sellmann just paints whatever the hell she likes.
Untitled 1, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 50cm
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PAINT
Eva Schwab
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PAINTING? For two decades, I have been working with the archive of the past and the possibility to create new combinations in the present. By repainting the objective witnesses of what has been - in order to bring them in line
Born Location Currently Education
1966 Frankfurt am Main, Germany Berlin, Germany Kunstakemie Düsseldorf, Fine Arts with Professor Markus Lüpertz
with the reality of my evolving memory - I try to form associations between things that appear to be unconnected... Photographs from my own family album, or those which could have fitted in my biography, are the source of my inquiry. This raises questions about the real content of memories in general and of photographs in particular. In the attempt to understand the documents of the past I create “afterimages” by transferring them onto a wax-saturated canvas or paper. Using Hot Wax as a medium creates a parchment-like transparency in which injuries and vulnerability become visible. This use of encaustic allows me to overwrite, or to conserve the essence like perfumers, even to dissolve the template up to its ground form. Oil on wax grounded canvases ensures the essential translucency of different layers interfering with each other.
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E R M S O F PA I N T I N G ? “As it is, when it was”, the title of one of my exhibitions, sums up, in the briefest possible way, the questions that preoccupied me and shaped my work for many years. What is the relationship between the present and autobiographical memory? To what extent are we able to detach our self-perception and our view of the world from the input of the past? And is this even pivotal to identity and self-presence, or is it rather the case that history and the present are woven together into a fabric that can be constantly augmented with new patterns- until it is handed out down to the next generation, who in turn will complete it? My paintings are the testimony of different generations and a very personal impetus morphs into a universal appeal. The familiar moves beyond the ethnic and political, becoming a historical whole - a historical body. The focus now is not only on what has been but on what lies ahead. To the world we know, I try to add a new or other world, one whose reality eludes photographic documentation. Now, old myths appear next to metaphors for abstract scientific concepts, mysterious forces and the euphoric belief in progress of a technologised civilisation. These apparitions are not set on stage or defined by linear time but rather by their simultaneity, which resurfaces in each individual, i.e. collective consciousness, sediments of experience, transplanted experiences, projections, scars and ornamentation.
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It’s good for you, 2016 Wax, oil on cotton 38 x 27cm
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PAINT
Alex Tennigkeit
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PAINTING? Sketches are at the beginning of the picture-making, which serve to define the core issue. The further image-finding process is accompanied by associative research and the search and production of necessary photographic material. It is important to
Born Location Currently Education
1976 Heilbronn, Germany Berlin, Germany Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste Karlsruhe, Germany
me to add diverging motifs to the core topic. At first glance, these motifs might repel each other, but on closer inspection new meaning-contexts emerge and well-known or familiar motifs receive the opportunity to be considered from a new perspective. By bringing together heterogeneous image content, I strive for pictorial transgression. When painting, I create individual pictorial logic. The single motifs should be made tangible through painting: I try to perpetuate what is transitory and to liven up the material. The protagonists of the image are interwoven with the surrounding space, which also defines them – one could compare this with a rug. In my often fetishistic penchant for physicality, the oil color is equivalent to skin, flesh, blood and bones.
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E R M S O F PA I N T I N G ? For me, the physical process of creating art is inseparably connected with the mental process. In my case the subjective motivated association is always linked to the idea of making “art”. And this mental process works for me only when I’m close to the artistic material. The painting process itself is driven by the evoked “intellectual cinema” and may be – philosophically speaking – a spiritual process. Allowing the depicted to have a rich spiritual potential, it is important to me to work out an emblematic character, as I’m seeing my creations as “effigies”. After all, I am concerned with exploring the limits of representation via the means of figuration. The very things that do not appear in nature should become pictorial reality.
Leaf of Life (for Ebba), 2018 Oil on panel 50 x 40cm
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PAINT
Rose Wylie
W H AT I S Y O U R P H Y S I C A L P R O C E S S W HEN PAINTING? It’s hands-on. I like to paint on un-stretched canvas stapled to the wall… this allows for flexibility, that is, choices of possible extension of size. Consequently I like these
Born Location Currently Education
1934 Kent, UK Kent, UK Royal College of Art, London
joins to show, and the threads of canvas and clogged paint on those joins to show as well… all this makes for more physicality or materiality in the painting over the pre-stretched work. And, as well, because the canvas, as I paint, hangs off staples, it usually grows slight-bunched-curvings along the unstapled bottom edge, which catch the traces (blobs) of falling paint from higher-up. And the paint is often thick, so there is also a physical edge rather than the appearance of one.
WHAT IS Y OUR P H I L O S O P H I C A L P R O C ES S IN T E R M S O F PA I N T I N G ?
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I think the painting should be an enclosed ’entity’. It should not depend upon or exist to illustrate some other idea… and the story is less important than what the painting is. I prefer that painting refers to things, people, objects or fragments in the visible world, so that the necessary transformation (as I see it) is apparent; and also how the ‘jump’ from ‘waxwork’, or abstraction, has been got to or wrong distortion avoided. Ideally, the work should hang equally onto aspects of: 1 the painter; 2 what is painted; 3 the conditions of the paint; and 4 the ideaology of the time.
Jack Goes Swimming (Jack), 2013 Oil on Canvas 207 x 168cm
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