Blackpaint 484 – Pablo, The Borderlands, and the Backs Again…

Picasso –  Love, Sex and Art, BBC4

Recounted in the usual breathless manner, a very cursory overview of PP’s serial womanising, the women (with the exception of Francoise Gilot) apparently prepared to put up with all sorts; two of them, Jacqueline Roque and Marie – Therese Walter, killing themselves after his death.  Tragic, and interesting, but as far as the painting goes, of marginal importance, I think.  Where the programme was good was the early years; they showed painting after painting that I assumed were by different artists – they were all Picasso.  Google Picasso’s early paintings and see what I mean – I’m not going to show any next to mine…  Oh all right, this is…

 

“Blue Nude” (1902); another stupendous back to join Kitaj’s Smoking Woman and Ginger’s in Swingtime (see previous Blackpaints).

 The Suspended Step of the Stork, Angelopoulos, 1991

The last in my boxed set of Angelopoulos, this one also features Marcello Mastroianni, although he doesn’t get to make love to a woman one third his age, as he did in the Beekeeper – and as Picasso did, in the instance of Marie-Therese.  The story concerns a border town in Greece, populated by a shifting mix of multi-ethnic transients and refugees (Kurds, Albanians and Romanians are mentioned).  Mastroianni is a prominent Greek politician who has walked out of his life and gone AWOL for an unknown reason – he makes a living as a telephone engineer along the border, a lineman for the county.

It struck me that there are those who love or feel comfortable or stimulated in exactly those surroundings; shifting peoples, many languages, everyone on the move, passing through, accommodating to each other for the time being, bringing new things – and others who feel lost, or uncomfortable, or afraid even, in such a climate.  This film made this tangible to me, although it’s a pretty banal reflection, I suppose – never be afraid to be superficial.

There is a good example of the Angelopoulos “stop time” scene in this film; a man in a dance hall, a young woman, they catch each other’s eye and stare and stare, transfixed, while the music continues..  Where have I seen it before? Bela Tarr? No, it’s West Side Story of course, Tony and Maria at the dance…   And the end of the film, a line of telephone linemen at the top of their poles, stretching along the border/river into the distance.

Sprout Exhibition

Short blog today – and a day late – because I’ve spent most of last week in the gallery.  If you didn’t come, hard lines, it’s over now.  Below are the pictures I sold.

Here are the ones I sold

 

Model’s Back (obviously)

 

Rearview Mirror 

 

Water Engine 1

 

Chinook 

Back to normal next week.

Blackpaint

01.03.15

 

 

Blackpaint 483 – War in Spain, the Auctioneer and the Dancing Chicken

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

This gallery must be visited as a matter of urgency because there’s such a lot of really good paintings in it.  Go on Tuesday, when it’s half price.  What’s it got?  Well…

• Terry Frost “Lorca” prints – a roomful.
• Several fantastic, quite late, Ivon Hitchens, less..well,  oblong than usual and highly colourful;

• A sort of St.Ives room, with Heron, John Wells, Barnes-Graham, a nice John Tunnard (actually, he was elsewhere) and a great Ben Nicholson (see below);

• There’s also a Ben panto horse in brown fields and some nice Winifred portraits;
• Bomberg, two Rondas I think, and a corner of his disciples, Dorothy Mead, Crenfield etc.;
• Then there’s a bunch of self-portraits by various, the most striking of which were by William Gear, the lines of which resembled burnt briars or maybe barbed wire (fascinating to learn he was connected to CoBrA) and the one below by Peter Coker, with a black outline on a narrow canvas in a corner;

• A room of Kitaj, of whom more later.
• Then there is the main gallery, with some lovely big pictures – Michael Andrews dark coastal painting with figures; a Bacon, two figures who look to be wrestling..possibly..; a great Keith Vaughan; a Colin Self pop art group with one of those women with bright lipstick – bit like Pauline Boty, I thought – and a Peter Blake with an uncharacteristically(?) rough, blurry finish, very effective.  A couple of paintings of domestic scenes by Victor Willing, Paula Rego’s late husband, which have that distorted, slightly monstrous quality of her work.
• Finally,  there’s Spain; a special exhibition relating to the British role in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.  Great photo of the poet John Cornford and of Felicia Browne, the first British volunteer killed in the war, with a couple of her sketches – and very good they are too.  Banners of the British Battalion – 15th, was it? – with the battle names on it: Brunete, the Gandesa, Belchite, Teruel, the Ebro; lump in the throat time.

Felicia Browne

John Cornford and Ray Peters

Figures in a Landscape, Alexandropoulos

Two children, a girl of about twelve and her kid brother, run away from their Greek home to try to reach Germany, mostly by rail, sometimes by hitchhiking.  The Travelling Players show up on the way, having wandered in from another film.  There’s a scene in which they escape from a police station when it starts snowing – all the adults wander outside and freeze in a trance, looking up at the falling flakes.  So whimsical, you think – then the girl is raped in the back of a lorry by the driver, thankfully not on screen.  They press on and eventually arrive at the border; a shot sounds as they cross the river.  They run through the thick mist to embrace a tree on a hilltop – symbol of the father?  Are they dead?  End.

Stroszek, Werner Herzog

The great Bruno S. again (from Kaspar Hauser).  Three “vulnerable” Germans go to the USA to escape from their tormentors.  I think it’s a comedy, but there’s some sickening brutality towards Eva, the prostitute, in the early part of the film.  It must be seen, however, if only for the fastest auctioneer in the universe – he must be! – and for the dancing chicken and the fire truck rabbit.  Also a beautiful electric guitar instrumental version of “The Last Thing on my Mind”, which accompanies the driving scenes.  Don’t know who it is.

RB Kitaj

Got a cheapo catalogue of the above in the Pallant House, including two fantastic pictures; “The Rise of Fascism” and “the Architects” (see below).

 

 Marlene Dumas

Visited this again and found that the red faced-woman wasn’t in it (see last blog) – I’d seen it somewhere else.  Just as good – no, better – on second visit; look out for the Japanese Boy, the full-length portrait of Helena and the head of the dead young man, killed in the Chechnyan incident – or was it the Moscow theatre siege?  Beautifully painted, anyway.

Sprout Gallery, Moyser Road, Tooting SW16

If you are in London next week, visit the Sprout Gallery  and avail yourself of the opportunity to buy my paintings, and those of my partner, 11.00am – 6,00pm, any day but Monday.  Not the one below, however; it’s still wet.

 

 

 

Blue Crouch

Blackpaint

22.02.15

Blackpaint 379 – Respect, Abe; Straight Lines, Kurt.

Lincoln

It IS sentimental and over-respectful; too many adoring gazes from black servants, soldiers quoting the Gettysburg Address, heart-rending “freedom chords” at strategic points, telling you how to feel, as Adam Mars-Jones puts it.  Daniel Day-Lewis is brilliant and does “disappear into the role” (Kirsty Wark, I think) and it’s fun to play spot the actor in the supporting cast; there’s Shane out of “The Shield”, Layne out of MadMen playing Ulysses Grant – sorry, spoiler there – and that elderly, white-locked bloke who has been in everything since forever, playing Preston.  Tommy Lee Jones is great and Sally Field as irritating as ever.

Back in 1981, I visited Mormon HQ in Salt Lake City.  They had a series of life – size dioramas portraying the history of the Mormon religion. At times, “Lincoln” reminded me of this, especially towards the end.  However, one shouldn’t be too critical – it’s hard to see how Spielberg could avoid paying his respects, given Lincoln’s stature and the issues involved.  I suppose if someone over here did Churchill in WW2 it would be as respectful – or maybe not?  One last, obvious comparison: The West Wing.

Schwitters at Tate Britain

I can’t think of an exhibition I have seen in the last few years which had a higher ratio of successes to duds than this one.  The fabric and paper collages, though many were tiny, were great, for the most part.  Age helped, maybe, in that most were slightly browned and faded, softening the colours to pastel; fragments of words and numbers, for some reason, work well – maybe because they provide a sort of ready-made motif.  Easy to overdo, though, and he rarely overdoes.  I didn’t like the ones where he used cutouts of people; I thought that he strayed into surrealist, Max Ernst territory when he did this; one or two were almost like Stezaker.

Generally, Schwitters is best when he sticks to straight lines, unless he’s sticking a round object straight on; the ones with curves or painted circles I thought were less successful.  That goes, in fact, for the paintings in general.  There are some unremarkable portraits,  a couple of dodgy seascapes, some quite bad feathery abstract efforts and an especially bad “Madonna and Child”, like a wave with two rings on the crests.  often, the colours are too garish.

I loved the sound poetry – half recited, half sung, with the “words” on the wall.  Still, for me, the best of the large collages is the one that was in the “Migrations” exhibition a while ago – “Picture with Spatial Growths – Picture with Two Small Dogs”.  That great, convex sweep from top left to just right of centre at the bottom, on the area of black – from a distance, it looks like a painting.  Highly recommended; I’m definitely going again, soon.

Turner

Before the Schwitters, I took a walk through the Turner galleries; there are two new seascapes that caught my eye immediately – “Rough Seas” and “Rough Seas with Wreckage”.  Both very “abstract”, especially the first; superficially, from a distance, with your eyes half-closed, it looks Twombly-ish.

Sprout Gallery

Readers in UK and Europe might want to drop in to the above gallery in Moyser Road, Tooting, London SW16 6SE to see (maybe to buy) my paintings, or those of my partner, between Tuesday 5th and Sat 16th Feb, 11.00am – 5.00pm.  For those in the Americas, Middle and Far East and Australasia, I realise the journey may be a little too much but you never know…

Blackpaint

1.02.13