PaintExploring the use of paint as both medium and subject matter
Beldam Gallery 15th February – 23rd March 2010
Patrick Altes Christopher Bond Ruth Caig Anne Charnock Catherine Charnock Maria Colom Fiona Curran Heather McReynolds Raksha Patel Ilona Szalay John Trigg Jane Walker Andrew Whamond
Patrick Altes
Patrick Altes‘ work deals with the passage of time and cycles leading towards renewal. Themes of life and death, rebirth and transformation characterise his work, but in essence the physicality of paint is Altes’ subject matter. The possibility for paint to embody the idea of passage and journey as a transition enables him to explore the practice of painting and to define his own relationship with this medium.
Altes uses acrylic and household paint as medium, but also water, inks, and unrefined pigments from different sources such as clay, sand and spices. This use of paint in combination with other elements primarily serves the purpose of developing a language of marks, traces and primal signs, which exist in their own right. They also create a correspondence between artist and surface to which the viewer can lend meaning. Altes’ comments: “painting becomes a way of achieving a sense of understanding about myself”.
www.patrick-altes.com
Christopher Bond
Christopher Bond produces work that uses text as a familiarised and visual language with a strong emphasis on colour and visual lyricism. Predominantly working in painting, sculpture and drawing, his work has a critical, self-aware agenda offering both an affirmative and humorously irreverent position towards culture, society and art making itself.
His work Hey Painters refers to and satirically questions the culture of painting. By both questioning and accepting painting, his work creates a positive double blind; on one hand subscribing to painting as medium, and on the other speculating on the medium itself. The piece is based on the format and aesthetic of hippodrome and variety act posters produced in the early 20th Century, and speaks directly to the many and varied stereotypes of painters in popular culture.
Christopher studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design for his undergraduate degree and went on to Chelsea College of Art and Design to complete his Masters degree, both in Fine Art.
Ruth Caig
Ruth’s work embraces concerns traditionally associated with painting, such as colour, form, composition, surface, and the materiality of paint. However, she challenges the framework within which these relationships are explored. Instead of restricting her investigation to the surface of a single canvas, multiples and three dimensional surfaces themselves become the compositional elements, and the ‘location’ in the broader sense becomes the frame for the work. With Liquid Candy, cubes and funnels create the structure for the work and are the vehicle used to further explore the nature of paint. Ruth’s practice is defined by play and chance, yet structure and calculated predictions decide the eventual outcome.
Ruth has lived and worked in London since graduating from Wimbledon School of Art in 2006. She is currently working on the ‘Market Estate Project’ which will transform a pre-demolition housing estate in Camden into an ‘artist’s playground ‘before it is destroyed in March 2010.
Anne Charnock
Anne Charnock’s text paintings- part of her Uncertainty Series - reveal the conflicting thoughts she experiences during her art-making. She questions her decision to paint, and questions whether paint is the best medium to convey her ideas. Words and phrases on the surface of her works are crossed out in a process that mimics the “track changes” function in word processing programs – a feature that shows the current and previous versions of a document.
The viewer trips through the sentences in these paintings and, in doing so, they relive and experience Charnock’s uncertainty when making the work. The plasticity of the paint helps to obscure the words, making it more difficult to untangle the sentences. “ With each new painting ” says Charnock, “I make a minor, incremental change in my painting process to suggest my hesitant frame of mind.” Anne Charnock completed her MA in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. She had an earlier career in journalism and has exhibited widely both in the UK and overseas.
Catherine Charnock
Catherine Charnock describes the focus of her practice as the act of painting itself. The materials and techniques used, and the process of creating the work are constantly being re-evaluated and tested. Catherine is interested in the issues painters face when they select a particular process; the tension between representation and painterly abstraction, the relationship between depth and surface, and the desire to be ‘true to materials’, exploiting the paint’s physicality.
Catherine's practice is experimental and her use of specific techniques varies from work to work. Some works are painted ‘wet in wet’, almost at one sitting, whereas other works are built up layer by layer over a long period of time. Drawing plays a major role in Catherine's practice - both as a tool for exploring ideas and as part of the painting process.
Most of Catherine’s work depicts landscape: her work is often an emotional response to something in the landscape. At other times the ‘subject’ is simply a vehicle through which to explore painterly issues, colour relationships, or technique and process. Maria Colom
 Maria Colom's practise explores art as a social experience. She creates psychological works which normally start from her own feelings and that evolves to create imagined narratives to make us feel and become participants in what is going on within the work and within ourselves.
The buckets – an installation of five circular paintings that float on the surface of a bucket of water- involves the viewer by offering a story where everyday objects surprise. They also represent an isolated child, the isolate child within us all, in our sometimes cold and hostile society. Yet there is beauty, warmth and nostalgia offered within each bucket.
Born in Majorca, Spain, Maria recently completed a BA in Painting at City and Guilds of London Art School. She has exhibited internationally since 2004. Her works are held in a variety of private and public collections, including the Spanish Rugby Foundation.
Fiona Curran
Fiona Curran’s paintings, collages and installations conjure up imagined spaces that play with notions of the real and the unrea l, utopia and dystopia. Exploring the remnants of the sublime in contemporary visual culture, her works engage with a recurring utopian impulse, formal idealism and sense of escapism that re-registers in a palette borrowed from the computer screen and advertising.
The titles of the works often give a further clue to their origin in the push-pull between promise and disillusion, referencing song lyrics, novels and films that speak a language of loss and longing, of fragmentation and ambiguity, where all is not quite as it should be in the bright and beautiful image-world we inhabit.
Fiona read Philosophy at the University of Manchester before completing a BA and an MA at the Manchester School of Art where she now holds a Senior Lecturer post.
Heather McReynolds
Heather McReynolds work explores elements of surprise, unsystematic use of perspective, floating and flattening space, and the visual ambiguities that result. She feels that “ Uncertainty makes a painting more interesting, a kind of inherent contradiction or an unexpected viewpoint can sometimes be found in my work.”
She uses a variety of preparations and layering to make the surfaces rich and complex, sometimes taking previous failed paintings as a starting point. She often works subtractively; wiping, scraping and sanding away are as important to the process as adding and layering paint. Although her approach is intuitive, thinking through the material and following the logic of the paint are important to her. The final work is often arrived at through careful consideration of each stage in the process, and multiple re-workings.
www.re-title.com/artists/heather-mcreynolds.asp
Raksha Patel
Raksha Patel’s practice examines the substance of paint and its qualities through film and video installation. She explores themes of temporality and change in relation to the human mind and body. Her film Mind Stuff looks at the passing of mental states, using colours that refer to Western and Eastern symbolism. The film explores the nature of liquid paint; how it moves when mixed with water and the solid weight of the pigments that remain.
Like the movement of far away galaxies swirling in space, the mixing and merging of matter in Mind Stuff comes together and forms new colours, before being drawn away by an invisible magnetic pull. The constant flow and flux of colours passing by reflect the behaviour patterns and thought processes that occur in the consciousness. The work takes its title from ‘The Mind Stuff Theory’; a belief that everything in the universe consists of particles and these particles are constantly evolving. “ Ever changing and transient is the nature of thoughts arising in the human mind; this film describes this condition using water and paint.”
Raksha graduated from the Masters programme in Fine Art at the Slade School in 1998, she lives and works in London.
www.axisweb.org/artist/rakshapatel Ilona Szalay
Ilona Szalay’s paintings trace a path through a world of conflict and power play. Her work explores themes of hierarchy, power and status, and the associated emblems of uniforms, medals, domestic props and familial roles. Her paintings contain an undercurrent of menace, and are imbued with the presence of something inevitable which is handed down or passed on. The subtle melancholic tone of her work lends an ambiguous and uncertain interpretation to the various relationships between the personas depicted.
Different narratives or preoccupations can be teased out of certain works as some pieces are more potentially playful in tone and others more dark and severe. The 'characters' which emerge might be conceived to be connected to each other through a linear reading of Ilona’s work. For others they hold a looser association, connected by their exploration of dominance, submission, violence, protection, vulnerability and beauty.
John Trigg
Painter and sculptor John Trigg‘s series of works combine to form an intense installation, where surface, colour and texture vary across two planes of tightly hung, intimate works.
The use of a range of painting tools in John’s practice is significant; be it a pen, knife, saw, brush, stick, rag, or some other type of mark-maker personally refined to fit the purpose. The configurations and marks that these tools produce, right down to the faintest scratch, combine to convey a subtle sense of his subject matter- shape and structure gradually taking on form through 'reworking' the canvas over an extended period of time. He says of this process; “Materials and processes sit at the heart of expression. They become the structure and physical poetry through which an image can exist - its visual language.” John lives and works in Penzance, Cornwall. His work can be found in private collections in Belgium, France and the UK and the Arts Council Collection, London.
Jane Walker
Jane Walker’s practice explores the chemical nature of paint. Her paintings are an opportunity for her to investigate colour as a chemical interaction and depict pigment in a state of change. Her work is water based and the movement of water on paper allows her to produce a visual trace of the journey of a pigment solution.
She often selects two colours to work with that are quite close in hue but have a different chemical make up so they react with other colours in diverse ways.
The grid-like construction of her work reads like a series of chemical experiments. The pieces have been assembled randomly, or by numbers on the back of the pieces of paper, rather than through aesthetic selection. Jane uses very thin Japanese paper rather than traditional painting paper. The binder in the watercolours and inks is as strong as the paper in places, and the cut edges of the paper create barriers that block the flow of the wet paint. The buildings that feature in Jane’s work are based on images of early 20th century colonial architecture, referring to a time when western painting developed from its contact with the ‘east’, and a new knowledge and awareness of colour was initiated.
Jane has recently been artist in residence at the fibre department of Salford University. She hopes inform her practice with deeper knowledge of fibre and surface technology.
Andrew Whamond
Andrew Whamond’s work seeks to isolate a particular aspect of what it is to be human, the condition of being mortal, and to intensify that perceived state or emotion through the process of painting. He intertwines elements of personal history into a symbolic language often using the body as subject matter.
He seeks to communicate and empathise with both viewer and subject in as meaningful a way as possible. Every work is a representational painting of an emotionally resonant abstract subject visualised using an experienced situation. “All my work is existential in nature, that is, that the exhibited paintings seek to represent in visual terms an incident that I have experienced and especially the sensations and emotions which the subject has prompted.”
His selection for Paint includes works with vivid hues where areas of thicker paint are contrasted typically with darker colours delineating the central subject.
BELDAM GALLERY www.brunel.ac.uk/beldamgallery BRUNEL UNIVERSITY, WILFRED BROWN BUILDING, KINGSTON LANE, UXBRIDGE, MIDDLESEX, UB8 3PH
Tel: 01895 266074 Email: artscentre@brunel.ac.uk Mon- Fri 10.00 - 5.00. Bank Holidays Closed. Free Entry.
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