The Road to Degree Show - 6

Plastered

My painting still sits in the foyer of the Ben Pimlott building, so close to its home and yet so far. I have spoken with the studio manager and he has said no to the idea of winching the painting up the side of the building.

I think that's a real shame - the publicity alone would have been worth the bother ;)

However we have decided to carry the painting up the external fire-escape stairs, we now have to wait for a windless day so it doesn't carry the porters off the top of a very high building. If you live in london and look up one day this week to find a bunch of art students handgliding overhead with a 3m canvas you will know that I gave up waiting.

In the meantime I have turned my energies to the task of prepping the exhibition space. Progress has been extremely encouraging.

A combined effort form the entire 5th Floor made light work of the initial clear out of the studios. Like a well oiled machine we took the spaces that had been so mercilessly abused by students over the last year and stripped them ready for transformation. Amongst the items removed during the clear out was a computer, a kid's scooter and fridge.

Studios cleared, it was time for the art crew to move in and begin dismantling the walls. Having done this last year let me tell you it is a fun graft - the walls are not treated with much respect and there is plenty of loud crashes, bangs and destruction.

Once that is done the build begins and this year the crew have really stuck in and done a good job. I already have all the walls erected in my space - in fact there is only one wall remaining on our floor to complete. After that it is entirely down to the students and their helpers to get the space looking gallery-ready!

And we have been stuck in all day today.

First we have to repair the walls of our space as they have been built using the same walls that the studios were built with - yes, the same walls that have first been abused by students and then razed to the ground by the crew. Repairing them involves filling the holes with a filler and then sanding them to smooth until you have a nice flat wall ready for a lick of paint. The consequences of these activities is a haze of plaster dust which manages to cover everything, hair, clothes, paintings, ceilings - even your underwear.

As I write this I do so from beneath a coating of the stuff. I must say that I love the effect it has on hair - thickening it and making it very stylable. In my experience there has yet to be a hair product that can match plaster dust for stylability and hold.

Anyway the plastering is mostly done and I came to a stop this evening just in time to see the sun set majestically over London (shown above). Tomorrow I have teaching in the morning but come the afternoon I shall be back in the plaster cloud. Maybe if we get another fantastic sunset tomorrow I shall throw caution (and my painting) to the wind and you will catch the sight of me freewheeling high in the sky, bound for the sun.

The Road to Degree Show - 5

The Not-so-final Trial

Arse.

Over the last few days the art department has turned into a machine of procedure. Deadlines have been triggering event after event:

get all final materials needed
solve any problems within your exhibition space
pack down the studios
empty the studios
move your work from your studio to your exhibition space

I was operating to schedule. Sure - the paintings are not finished yet and there is a fair bit of work to be done on them and sure - that means I will have to work doubly fast on the build so I can get them up in their places and finish them. That's fine. Its close but its fine. And everything else has been going as planned.

Well, almost everything else.

I spent a busy week in a combination of frantic but impassioned painting and diamond clear organising as I took away the excess from my studio bit by bit. As a result, today - our final day in our studios - could be spent putting some finishing touches to the areas of the paintings I was working on and then cleaning my painting materials ready for use in the last phase of the plan. I had timed it so well. I was packed down and ready to go ahead of schedule and all that was left was to move my paintings from my studio, across the campus, to the exhibition space.

I had contacted my two helpers who arrived promptly (they were both great and I am optimistic about the three of us making short work of the labour ahead) and with good efficiency we wrapped up the paintings in bin liners and prepared to get them in transit.

Now I knew this was going to be difficult because my biggest painting is 3m x 2.2m and you rarely find a door large enough to accommodate that size. However, I had thought ahead and planned a route through the largest portals available and sure enough we quickly had the paintings on the trolley and on their way to the exhibition room.

The transit went without too many hitches, all obstacles being easily overcome, and we finally made it to the Ben Pimlott building where we would catch the elevator up to the 5th floor - my exhibition space.

I knew we had too many paintings to get into the lift in one go so up went my helpers with the all but the biggest painting and I waited down in the foyer for the final leg of the journey.

The lift returned with my helpers and we prepared to move the big painting in. Now, you know this is the last step and so far nothing has gone wrong so you can probably guess what is to come.

Yes dear reader, we could not get the damn painting into the lift.

We must have tried more angles than pythagarous, twisitng it, leaning it, diagonalising it - but the laws of geometry were against us and finally we had to conceed defeat. The problem is is that the lift is the only real option we have of getting the painting up there. We can't take it through the staircase because even though the staircase is more than big enough to accommodate my dear painting the doorway to the staircase is smaller than the doorway o the lift.

I have retired to my room to sleep on the problem and I can do magic so I believe I will find a way of getting that painting up 5 flights of stairs even if it means stepping out onto the balcony of the building and hauling it up with a rope.

This is my art 'heart of darkness' but I'll be damned if I succumb to Kurtz. Even if I have to bend space and time (or more likely bend my painting) that thing is going up there!!! Stay tuned...

The Road to Degree Show - 4

The Shamanic Principle

"Only psychos and shamans create their own reality"
— Terence McKenna

In my dissertation I spent several thousand words discussing how the shamanic traditions in the Putamayo took fact and fiction and constructed its own reality from it. I wrote that dissertation because that was the area I was exploring in my paintings.

Specifically: I was looking at how a landscape could be painted in such a way that it confounded the viewer's ability to locate it in reality and therefore encouraged the viewer to adopt and accept a new reality. The painting could not be too realistic, nor could it be too abstract but it had to occupy that liminal space between fluid and solid. Furthermore my exploration of this lay in the use of paint - brush mark vs. smooth, colour vs. black and white, accident vs. control, surface (of the painting) vs. content of the image etc. Namely I tried to take the tensions available in the medium of paint and use them accordingly.

I believe the shamanic space I have sought to create finds its closest pop-culture comparison in the ideas of Terrence McKenna and his description of a psychedelic world. If you are not familiar with McKenna's work then I suggest you familiarise yourself with it because it is one of the fundamental building blocks of our contemporary world whether people realise it or not.

As my pieces for the degree show have been developing I decided this weekend to push the boat out and conduct a shamanic ritual before setting to work on the paintings. The aim was to throw my mind pretty far into a psychedelic perspective, furthermore I wanted to unhinge it from the systems of control and safety that I have subconsciously constructed over the span of my life.

If this is all getting a little new-agey for you hang in there. Open your mind ;). If you are finding it a bit pretentious - give me a break! I am supposed to be a boho art student.

I settled on the shortest route to achieving this state (I am sure most of you can predict where this is going) and decided to smoke some drugs. I used a herbal high blend (legally purchased over the counter) which I obtained in one of Brighton's many fine establishments. I smoked it from Ozymandis which is my crystal skull pipe (pictured above - generously gifted to me from Steve) and subsequently settled back to enjoy a subtle shift of my perspective.

In my experience the herbal highs one may purchase can be strong but tend to be very mellow. I am not sure whether this particular blend differs or whether my intention to remove some pretty deep-rooted blocks in my consciousness affected my experience, but the stuff knocked my entire mind sideways. No chilled out reflections on life for me, no, instead I get Dr Who style lacuna spots followed by rapid mind progressions and disembodiments.

I have always stated that one of my common experiences in my short and brief history of drug use has been that my perception of time changes to only include the present, the past and future becoming unavailable to me. This makes speaking in sentences very difficult as I can remember neither what I have just said nor what I was intending to say and this time was no different except in so much as it was intensified. I therefore humbly apologise to any one I spoke to that night as I imagine I talked a load of utter gibberish. In fact I distinctly remember deciding with the sober part of my brain (who remains present during these experiences but takes a kind of back seat-Woody Allen style commentary role) to talk as little as possible as I could not gaurantee any quality control over the words that came out of my mouth.

Anyway, I could go on for ever (as many have before me) about the details of my experience but I imagine for my readers that it would induce disgust for those with no experience of drug taking and boredom for those well versed in it. So suffice to say it had the desired effect and I consequently engaged in a very productive couple of days painting.

As an end note to this particular chapter I would say that I do not believe drugs to be necessary to an experience of the psychedelic and having done the ritual I do not intend to use them again in the production of my paintings for the degree show. They have served their purpose and I can return to my everyday perceptions (which are psychedelic enough as it is) having recieved a few system upgrades. At the end of the day my greatest hope is not that my paintings convey a drug taking experience but that they operate independently of that fact and bring to the viewer their own reality. Looking at my paintings as they currently stand the prognosis seems favorable - fingers crossed.

The Road to Degree Show - 3

Just back from a private view party at the New Gallery - one of the many rather defunct spaces that doesn't really know how to maximise its real estate opportunities so it does stuff like being an art gallery.

Fair enough - I do not begrudge anything that offers its walls for the encouragement of young, new art. It was a shame that the majority of the work on display was a pile of poo. Again I have nothing essentially against young artists experimenting and pushing their work out there - more power to them! But so much of what was seen on the walls of the gallery/bar/club/venue/cafe was sketchbook at best and at worst just plain bland.

Unfortunately so many of these small student gallery exhibitions go this way - you would be forgiven for asking why bother going at all? Well the secret lies in attending the exhibition specifically during the private view. In doing so it becomes not about the art on the walls (or floor or other geometric space appropriated for installation) but the private viewees.

Typically an art student private view will attract more art students. Self expression will move from the literal art canvas to the figurative canvas of the body as young people arrive at the gallery in whatever outfit or appearance is most ultimately them. We will ignore the fact that many of these looks are reproduced over and over amongst the crowd and instead applaud the individuality of the 80's glam, the casual boho, the moody poet. My personal favourite is the ecclectic trash look which basically involves taking every element of appearance from skin to shoe and trying to make it as trashy as possible.

As for my own choice of outfit - well I go for the 'tropical Ken' look or rather the kooky-older-guy-who-feels-out-of-his-element look. Am I an individual?!?

Parties are great at revealing our inner minds to ourselves. My mind is currently asking whether I have anything relevant to say in a world that, despite being not much younger, feels like lightyears away. And with degree show just around the corner what better time than now to answer that question.

So despite my cynicism and critical eye turned towards tonights private view party I say to all those who I left there chatting away with their cocktails to find your voice and care not a bit whether it is individual enough - find it and use it to shout, sing, protest, debate, praise and laugh. And may it be heard by all.

The Road to Degree Show - 2

As promised here are some images from my labours - the first giving you a sense of the scale and the second being a detail of some of the recent work done on it.

Which of course means that I have started filling my panoramic vista of white canvas with colour. In fact any colour I could get my hands on.

I figured the best way to deal with white expanses was to make them no longer white and since I was playing psychedelic music quite loudly at the time I grabbed every vibrant pulsating colour I could and threw it onto the canvas. White gone. Job done.

Or not.

Because now, instead of an expanse of intimidating white I have this seething mass of confusion in colour - great if I am playing acid jazz but not so good for my degree show. I am sure I could come up with some overly intellectual reason for it and impress anyone who looked at it with complex philosophies and concepts but it wouldn't get away from the fact that it looks like someone vomitted a rainbow onto my painting.

Therefore I find myself wrestling with this spectrum to turn into something less of a disneyland murder scene. I know there are some of you out there that may be thinking - a dinseyland murder scene? Sounds interesting. - well you can stop. I refer to it in the way that the murder scene would look after you had got rid of the bodies, environment and objects and were just left with some pore washer woman scrubbing away at watery colours.

The detail above is my attempt to reign in the chaos of colour into something coherent. I will post more as they develop.

Tomorrow I have a tutorial with my course tutor and it will be interesting to see what she thinks.

As a final note I will ask, does anyone remember those glasses you could get in the 80's that made all the lights have a spectrum sparkle around them?

The Road to Degree Show - 1

So this is it.

On May the 19th the Goldsmiths Art Practice 3rd years have to clear out their studio spaces to make way for the building of the gallery that will house their degree show.

What this means in reality is that we have 16 days left to complete whatever breathtaking works of art we will be displaying. Not a time for coasting I think you will agree. At this point you might imagine that we hall have a pretty good idea of what we will be displaying, and proabaly have progressed significantly along the process of creating these works.

This is certainly true for some, and for those students we reserve the title of 'Smug Bastard' - for the rest of us it is time for panic.

You see, over the last 3 years the art course has poked and probed our process, concepts and execution with a constant stream of critique. It is the practice of an ethos that has reduced my friends (myself included) into gibbering wrecks of incoherent art-trollop and as such we arrive at this final term, this final push, not as confident artificers of beauty but as morons with brushes.

It is in this state that I find myself gaping at the 3 x 2.2m canvas I have built and stretched and asking myself, "What the hell was I thinking?!?"

I have painted biggish canvases before, maybe 1.5 x 2 at the most, and they are a lot of white space to fill. However next to my current blank canvas they look like postage stamps and my brushes all suddenly seemed to be right size to paint miniatures.

Leaned up against the wall (it doesn't fit in my studio) it towers above my head. I have to reach upwards to paint the top third of it - when I primed it and spent so long with my arms raised high above my head that I had pains throughout my body for 3 days after. Sun salutations did not prepare me for this. At each step of making this behemoth I have found myself struggling with the physical size of it but instead of thinking, "Hold on Rick, maybe you are being over-ambitious here - it wouldn't be the first time.." I have ploughed ahead regardless. Now I find myself with 16 days left to paint this beast and its little brother (which comes in a minisized 1.9 x 2.2 m).

Actually not quite 16 days as I am in Manchester over this coming weekend and I have childcare duties the weekend after. Maybe more like 12 days.

12 days. 12 DAYS!! Aaaaargh!

The truly tragic part of this is that I actually enjoy being in this state. I get off on the rush of the last minute - I love the adrenalaine shot you get from it. It doesn't phaze me that I could be sitting calmly chatting to someone and then in the next instant scream and start to chew my own elbow. Mostly I've got the elbow chewing under control.

So, hi ho, its off to work I go. Thankfully I have plan B - which is basically to throw a load of pretty colours on it in some incomprehensible arcane marks and hope the viewing public will be so lost when trying to read it that they will assume it is brilliant beyond their ken.

Stay tuned to see if I manage to create a miracle or a pile of poo. Either way its going be pulled out of my arse.