Kate Beck
Untitled, 2010 (installation view)
poured oil, enamel and powdered graphite on aluminum
89 x 184 inches
As American Artist Kate Beck’s first solo show in New York City opens at the Pelavin Gallery, this text, based on three years of conversations with the artist, offers a glimpse of the genesis of the work.
The Pelavin Gallery Press Release states that : “In this new body of work, Beck continues her engagement with repetitive tonal rendering as a means of interaction between light and shadow, human thought and consciousness, and the dynamic architectonics of space.”
Kate Beck
Kate Beck is on a journey. Her paintings are about everything and about nothing. She rejects categorisation; labels, words: “It is a challenge being in the middle of nowhere and making pictures about nothing… And a freedom. There is nothing in this world that can escape interpretation. The whole premise of my own work is that no two people see or experience the same thing in the same way. They bring to it their experiences and their pasts and what they see is set within the context of the time and the place.”
Her current situation, living on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, creates within her an inescapable fascination with the light between the sea and the sky, which is paralleled in her work by her interest in the way that light is refracted. Kate’s own past has coloured her present. As a child she lived within a richly imaginative world of stories. She wrote and drew on a chalk board at her Grandmother’s house and on fine days she chalked grids and boxes on the driveway into which she added tables and chairs and then moved into her invented house and played there. Now she draws on paper, an excessively precious surface for her, “I obsess about the vulnerability of the paper”. She marks the paper using a rule and a succession of soft graphite pencils, which need constant attention. She works quickly whipping her arm along the edge of the rule in repetitive process. Each work is autonomous, she does not work in series or groups but often likes to group a similar set of work together. Interestingly she talks of shapes rather than lines, it is the form that begins to appear through the making of the lines which interests her, rather than the individual lines: “I make one line then two more. Then I start responding to lines in big shapes”. The rhythm creates a fluidity of movement, which takes her to a place where she listens to what the marks and the materials are telling her and follows their lead. Her paintings, which follow a similarly process-based approach, are poured. Again she allows the direction and flow of the first pour, the most important one, to take the lead and the painting flows from that. “Wide pours evolved as a process. It has become my process. It is how I can access the surface.” She finds that there is much more trial and error, more leeway with the paintings. Recently she has been experimenting with different materials, aluminum as a support and vinyl in place of oil paint. A risky business since she has a secure knowledge of how oil paint responds, but the challenge of using a paint that has more body, rich sensual colours and a velvety surface attracts her. Her journey into a new medium offers as much excitement as watching the movement of the poured paint down the surface of the aluminum.
Untitled, 2010
poured oil, enamel and powdered graphite on aluminum
34 x 55.5 inches
Untitled, 2010
Graphite of paper on aluminum
12 x 12 inches
Structure is an important element of her work; in common with many other artists she pursues the structure of discipline opposed with freedom and searches for a balance between the two. The grid, which has a long history back to her earliest chalk drawings, is similarly important and part of the reason that she admires the work of Agnes Martin. She responds to the challenge of going deep within the surface of Martin’s paintings to access the humanity in her work. In her own work she considers that the human element is much nearer the surface, much easier to access, and this pleases her. Brice Marden is another influence. Visiting an exhibition of his notebooks, she found that these visual journals had such intensity that their impact has stayed with her and of his Cold Mountain drawings; she remarks that it is “not just the quality of the line, but where he dared to go with it”. However it is Gerhard Richter who has had a really profound influence upon her and her work. She first came across a few works by him in the nineties but then a retrospective at the Hirshorn Museum in Washington DC in 2000 just blew her away. She was amazed and seduced by the deconstruction of the photographic image in his work. She started using smeared oil paint, which she saw as “embracing the concept of time on the surface”, and much of her current work stems from that formative experience. Beck’s work is very formal in approach, concerned with shape, colour and shape again. She identifies, closely with the theories expressed by Theo van Doesburg in his 1920 Manifesto on Concrete Art but does not allow them to invade her work, rather she absorbs and reinterprets them so that they have a presence like a memory which can be recalled when required. She acknowledges that at an earlier point in her career she was making a real distinction between painting and drawing, the drawings having much more freedom and fluidity. Now however her practice has become one, both separate disciplines interchangeable, with the colours produced by the graphite as elemental and essential as the linear mark-making of the poured paint.
Untitled, 2010
poured oil, metallic enamel and powdered graphite on linen
60 x 60 inches
Kate Beck’s show Conditions of Existence at the Pelavin Gallery, New York opens on October 28th
© Fiona Robinson 2010
Susan Preston
Susan Preston
Drawing is central to Susan Preston’s practice as a painter. She remembers watching her father, “I would watch him for as long as he would draw and beg him to do more and try to do it myself”. She identifies three distinct types of drawing which she uses in her work: observational drawing in response to something seen; developmental drawings extrapolating from the observation, “more like painting”; and planning drawing, “trying things out, seeing relationships”. In her sketchbooks she will have “maybe ten pages of the same kind of thing, pushing them, seeing where they can go.” These are the important ones, those which exist as finished work. “They have their own integrity”.
Preston acknowledges that painting is a much more complex process. She works in oils on canvas and describes the process of painting as “serious play”. She asks herself, “What would happen if I put these two yellows together, one on top of the other and move them around”? She mixes her greens and pinks hardly ever using them out of a tube. “I like to play with several different reds and several different blues”. She has a predilection for blue and creates rich surfaces suffused with luscious colour. She focuses on making her paintings work formally. She says that a lot of it “just happens” but that “you have to create the circumstances where it can”.
She has always drawn and collected the detritus of everyday life. Beach-combing, she picks up “things that have been knocked about by the sea”. These discarded objects lying abandoned in her studio become triggers for her paintings. It is often the history revealed by surfaces that interests her most. On a trip to Kuala Lumpur she picked up a cloth rose that had been left under a tree. It inspired a whole series of drawings. “It evoked something; it spoke in some way.” In two other, small paintings, for which the starting point was a piece of crimson ribbon wrapped around a present, she played around with the juxtaposition of the reds. The scarlet of the ribbon and the crimson of the ground into which she has introduced touches of cerulean blue.
In the Summer of 2008 Preston was the first ‘Artist In Residence’ at Rabley Contemporary Drawing Centre near Marlborough, UK. She took as her starting point the redundant farm buildings that had originally been used as an intensive pig-rearing unit in the 1960s. These emotionally and politically charged icons of late 20th century architecture were transformed into destabilised open structures in a collection of work, Farm Structure, Forms and Surfaces which was exhibited in the Gallery at Rabley in April 2009.
She is currently working on a large painting, a commission, about a jetty which leads out into the sea from the small island of Rawa, off the S. E. coast of Malaysia. The jetty itself, a bridge made of poles moving out into the sea, has rotted away and has been replaced, but it exists as the catalyst which allows Preston to explore her perennial concerns. She continues to search for that area of a painting which forms a horizontal break between the area above and the area below. At first glance her work often appears to be about geometry, architecture, or the point at which sea meets land, but these are vehicles through which she explores the divisions within the canvas. It is often the space around the object that engages her interest. The repetitive losing and retrieving of forms in layers of paint becomes a search for the ambiguous territory between presence and absence. She aims to reduce the individual components in a piece of work to its most abbreviated element ‘whilst making the surface full of events’. She aims to reach that moment of recognition in a painting when the object used as her starting point has been reduced so much that it no longer seems to be there but it still has a presence.
This is an extended version of the text which was originally published in Fifty Wessex Artists by Fiona Robinson. Evolver Press, 2006.
© Fiona Robinson 2010
Toni Davey
Toni Davey
Toni Davey is coming full circle now, proof of the inescapability, for an artist of their personal voice, their perennial concerns and their visual handwriting. Early on she had a passion for filling in the squares, very precisely, on any grided paper she could lay her hands on, then, following sculpture studies at Hornsey and then Chelsea Colleges of Art, she worked as an architectural model maker and now she is collaborating with architects, currently working on a nine metre long etched drawing on glass for a building in Salisbury. Early photographs of her post-college show her standing in front of a large woven wooden structure; the concern with light, grids and sequencing already very evident. She now works with paper. “It seems to fall naturally into my chosen way of working, whilst also revealing its own qualities that both surprise and thrill me with their unforeseen outcomes”.
Starting with grids on paper, Davey translates her meditative processes into sequences of infinitesimal changes, creating a narrative. She cuts and scores paper then pushes the cut edge out in a developing sequence which leads from less to more light, producing a moving wave of light and shadow across and through the surface. Within her practice; “The idea of ‘form being manipulated by light’ is replaced by ‘light being manipulated by form’ as it makes its journey through the broken plane.” The work is subtle and controlled, infinitely variable, and once the paper is pushed out, very fragile. The quality and colour of the paper she uses is crucial. After endless trials discarding many, often high quality papers, she now uses a mid-weight cartridge which has exactly the right qualities of weight and colour to achieve the cuts and folds that reflect the light in the most effective way. Recently she has started to make use of a precision laser, a computer programmed cutting machine, which has opened up new possibilities both in terms of scale and intricacy. Faint singe marks where the laser burns as it cuts the paper has introduced a further element of colour, creating a softness at the edges that distinguishes these from the stark whiteness of the hand cut pieces. “I experimented with controlled ways of burning marks onto paper before I made any connection with how the laser cuts. Now I want to explore this further, bringing together the different elements of what is drawn, folded, handcut, burnt and laser cut.”
Davey’s fascination with bending and folding manifests itself in her sketchbooks revealing the influence on her work of Noshi, the Japanese art of ceremonial wrapping. Folding page after page in a progression of tiny changes in the position of the fold on each page, results in magical sculptural objects. “Wonderful natural things happen and the flat plane of the paper comes to life.” The sequence of folds develops a swell that rises and falls in a crescendo suggesting not only the underlying relationship with Japanese design but also a reference to the stylised waves in prints by Japanese artists Hokusai and Hiroshige. She cites Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp as an early influence but the artist she refers to again and again, is Agnes Martin, “she blows me away”; and it is clear that Martin’s grid paintings and precise methods resonate strongly with her work. To simply say that mathematical precision is inherent in Toni Davey’s work is to ignore the exquisite beauty and fostered unpredictability within it. Her pieces represent an ongoing enquiry into infinite possibility.
Toni Davey and Andy Davey are currently showing as Guest Artists with The Recessionists at Pylle Emporium and Gallery, Unit 3/4 Stockwood Business Park, Pylle, Shepton Mallet, BA4 6TA.
Tel 01749 833783
Exhibition runs from 1 – 28 June 2010. Open Mon. – Sat. 10am – 5pm.
wwwrecessionists.co.uk
www.pylleemporiumandgallery.co.uk
Kirsten Cooke
51
Photographs by Kirsten Cooke
When Kirsten Cooke’s parents died, her mother first and then her father not long afterwards; she was faced with the task of clearing the residues of forty-nine years of family life. She set about recording significant and insignificant objects which held emotional memories of her past.
An empty house holds the warmth of those who once lived there, gradually cooling as their presence becomes more distant with time. Treasured objects they caressed, cups they drank from, light switches that they touched a million times. The sound of children, words spoken in different languages, silence. Although this was once Cooke’s home, when she left it many years ago it reverted to being the home of her parents, a place where she became a visitor. Re-possessing it, she found the main body of the house left untouched and clearing away the intimate objects of her parents’ life she becomes a voyeur. The scant evidence of her childhood presence was accentuated by an abandoned wooden rocking horse in an empty attic.
Cooke’s photographs capture the dangerous silence, which echoes deafeningly through empty spaces, engendering unbidden memories. The empty room invaded by a shaft of sunlight which highlights the darkly-patterned sixties wallpaper and below the stains on a carpet now revealed by the absence of furniture. Plastic cupfuls of dead flies rock gently on their hooks, out of sight, whilst fine bone china and matching chintz are on show in the bedroom. Each room evokes its own memories.
This poignant exhibition and accompanying book flag up the universal theme of what is hidden behind the façade of any life.
Rook Lane Chapel, Frome, Somerset. BA11 1DN.
Tel.01373 468040
www.rooklanearts.org.uk mailbox@rooklanearts.org.uk
Open daily 10am – 4pm
