Pointing Looking Moods

http://youtu.be/Nxi82Ne9yxQ

Here's a video of Thomas Nozkowski out walking and talking. He's a favorite painter of mine, or at least he's one who I keep an eye on, particularly as he paints quite abstract pictures, yet talks quite directly about the influence of real world experiences. See what you think!

Here's a painting by Arshile Gorky 'Untitled' 1944. It's not specifically a Virginia Landscape painting (where he actually titled the work like that), but it still contains elements of a landscape in it. It morphs into something more internal, reflecting a sate of mind, or subconscious goings on.

Here's a collection of film stills from 'The Insider' by Michael Mann. This is one of my favorite films, as it's cinematography really captures the mood of each scene, through framing, lighting and editing.  These aren't the best scenes, but the one at the top (at a Golf Club) has great use of empty space, voids and darkness and the threat that might lurk off camera. This might be diverging form the landscape theme, but how a director like Michael Mann works is something I try to feed off in the studio.

I will write more soon (and respond to your work!!), but for now I thought I'd put up some inspirations for my own work.

H

giant impressions: Hamish Mclain

“If you have a solo show, it’s like having a conversation with yourself.” It inevitably feels like this in Hamish’s work when you first talk to him and look at the work.  At the beginning of these dialogues about our work, it seemed really difficult to talk about landscape and painting separately as rich contexts for our practises.

There are absences, voids, and gaps between two key movements: abstraction and figuration but it also seems like that between the idea of a subject and a painting, still. Turn- Berlin held a similar show called Urban Voids and Absences. Artists were finding gaps between objects and architecture. Travelling from New York, Zurich…one artist came to Berlin to take a break and worked with architects taking over sites; “voids” (buildings) as they were replacing old ones.

The Ghats At Night

Hamish’s recent work takes you through a fragmented image where a question concerning abstraction- is now a movement embroiled in everything we design. So where do you take it? In The Road Ahead (2012) and Untitled (Column) 2012, he losses the fragmented imagination in the studio and these pieces become delicate, unimagined documents of his travels. The Ghats At Night (2011) was taken from his travels in Varanasi in India. This small piece straps itself onto a fibre optic road where he sometimes paints impressions of night as similarly in Peering into the Dark (2011.) A piece that he is working on at the moment, which doesn’t have a title, so he asked me to give it one I’ll go with Embrace the moment with the movement (2012) after Bonobo and Speech Debelle song Sun Will Rise, somehow fits in with his statement “Improvisation in jazz is an alternate form of expression that influences this activity.”

What about hierarchies in abstract painting? His idea of force is similar to Paul Nash’s emergence of myth, symbolism and imagination in British landscape. Hamish avoids hierarchies, canoeing between giant impressions of New Zealand, Vietnam, and India. These are globalised places where you have to move around, if you’re interested, even if you don’t have a choice.

 Untitled 

useful linkage:

http://www.abstraktion.org/

Abstract landscape and painting

This collaboration started out through a small twinge in both our practices: the concept of landscape. This has carried on over a period of weeks as dialogues. We are both moving in different directions, I have just graduated from university and have entered into a artist collective based in Liverpool and Hamish is moving to London to do a MA at Chelsea College of Art.