What's all the excitement? Has education finally been cut altogether? That's the only reason I voted Tory.

I've been hibernating inside my flat until i get a studio space next week - two options , part of a old pub round the corner (casa) or  Lisa from curve has helped out finding some space in the building i had a studio last year. Sleeping, working and thinking in the same space has  been a fucking nightmare, especially when your reading Foucault.

When i was chatting to June Lornie from Liverpool Acadamey of Arts she said i should have painted the side of my canvas, which i thought was bloody awful advice and i told her i liked it raw. I have been thinking about the nature of canvas, stretchers, paint etc with my recent pieces. The raw quality is understandable to the flatness of a painting for what it is....flat and i think you need to accept that as a painter. Paint doesn't sit on the canvas until it works within multitudes of layers and constant re-evaluation.

The social/political space of galleries in Berlin is extremely different to the UK which was fascinating and landscapes can be a weird part of political imagery now.

A friend told me to read part of a chapter from a book by Malcom Gladwell What the dog saw about the myth of geniuses. The morality of actually working for what you passionately believe in, and finding a body of work that is progressive after a lifetime of studying it. It refers back to leaving this huge part out when talking, discussing or writing about certain writers, painters, directors, scientists etc.

Wolstenholme: http://www.wolstenholmecreativespace.blogspot.com/ BAM show for three weeks was impressive, the curating/ some of the performance pieces were fantastic.

Ideological failure

The idea of selling our work was discussed a little during the hanging - in my tutorial i was talking about the nature of producing a piece of work and therefore commodifying it to sell with it's long line of history in painting. That though sounds lengthly but it reminds me of a few points in time. Once where i met up with my cousin Nigel in Bath and he was applying to the Pollock-Krasner foundation, i thought he was unaware of how commerical his work is (this on my part being a massive mistake) so it was a surprise when in the pub we were discussing painting and he said that quite formally his work is commercial and it made me feel how aware artists can be. This also reminded me of when James Iveson said to me you've always got to be honest with yourself as a artist and what your work is really about. 


Though it also reminded me when i was in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin where we had the normal lucrative groupings in the gallery then we had to debate on something... but i was asking how much you become a commodity within a art school, not just outside the education system in larger institutions and what it means to take part in everything you can get hold of... but John said he thought it was a mistake to think your not a commodity. I think this applies to painters. Not in terms of agreeing to the commodification but making choices and decisions in a wider pool of experiences and practises and selling your work. The hardest thing about being a artist seems to be making decisions. 


I was reading about Michael Borremans again and looking at his drawings. He was talking about his work being ideological failure. This really hit with me because i've spent the last few years really studying how to use imagery that works for me and i suppose that is ideological to me. I've been looking at a lot of imagery through film and photography that deal with psychological and emotional conditions. Although i like the term condition on it's own. Nearly all my paintings have locatable spaces but mixes itself up with illusional figures, some story (mostly about pain) but the term ideological failure are both wonderfully contrasting ... it brings up questions about viewers, audience what your putting on the canvas, who's it for really...  and it changes the nature of imagery being for something in particular and perhaps even progresses the nature of imagery altogether by pushing it forward. I was talking about a lot of painters i like at the moment that use masses of collective imagery in their work - especially Matthais Wesicher and Neo Rauch... but they have a similar style/imagery like Dexter Dalwood, Jules de Balincourt, Inka Essenhigh... with similar consistencies which sometimes tend to be beaten to death in their paintings through the use of contextualisation rampant in the paintings. 

Cecily Brown takes a sensual stab at flesh though. When i was in Venice a week ago i went to the Scuola to see Tintoretto's work. The pieces in the stairway leading to the second floor were wonderful, more free than most of the paintings in there. It was good for me to look at flesh.... i missed looking at wonderful fleshy painters. 

So This Is Permanence and gay lawyers...

Students Rose Parish, Lucy Somers and Pip Preece will consider portraiture through the medium of painting in an innovative way. The face of the painter (if we are talking individually as well as relationally) can create an emotional, destructive and forceful piece of work that can always look back at us. We know painting is far from dead- in fact we know it is still one of the most widely practiced and philosophical contributions to an endless amount of artistic mediums that survive today.

I met Lisa Who last summer whilst I took on a studio down in Victoria Street whilst I was working at TATE for the Picasso exhibition. Her connection and knowledge surrounding the art world is quite vast, plus she is pretty down to earth. We all decided on using curve gallery (owned by Lisa and her partner Wayne) for a show. The show went pretty well (although i went half way through to go to the pub) – the fact it became three of us in such a small space worked out better and the curating was a great experience to handle not just with such a small group but also for myself. What I wanted more than anything was a strong painters show which will lead to more strong painter shows around Liverpool for the next few years hopefully. I do think it was missing.

I disagreed with the show having any connection with a module- although we are "marked" in a sense on the course. I found that extremely difficult to undertake after the show because I believe people were more concerned with that academic ideal of it, when in fact, it's really part of you as a artist and a larger experience with your practise. 

There is a sporadic sense of work around Liverpool at the moment and in the UK. You question how much work is really being produced and what it is about is really unpredictable (not a bad thing.) I was thinking about this constantly before Berlin because in order to create a painters show there always has to be work available and ready to hang whereas for the Liverpool academy of arts show you had young artists with found pieces, dialogue, text, film mostly quickly done. The most important thing is the constant re-evaluation and further understanding of what you are dealing with. 

In the nature of painting, you have a condemned amount of shows to ‘hangings on the wall’ . . . but I don’t condemn this to our show because I think the experience was needed early. So, back to thinking about shows I’d love to do open shows where paintings are placed directly in the floor (so you can walk/view from below) or travelling around large trucks on the side for a day or a couple of small pieces in a black cab.