Art is difficult,” says the 66-year-old firmly. “It’s not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art – it’s very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it’s art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.
Anselm Kiefer reflects on his work before the opening of his biggest UK Show at the White Cube Gallery in London.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/dec/08/anselm-kiefer-art-white-cube
This is the latest in the Temporary Sculpture series. It is a response to a short stretch of coastline which has inspired my visual and literary practice. Here the stone which suggests a human profile was found and which stares out from the top of this mast. The base of the work is a direct reference to boat builders and the sea. It also suggests the cardinal points of the compass. The blackboard and monoprint collage offer entries into other worlds.
J.S. Bach - Cello Suite No. 1 - Prelude
Baroque.me (2011) by Alexander Chen. Video capture. baroque.me visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites. Using the math behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.
Grab and interact: baroque.me
More details at: blog.chenalexander.com/2011/baroque-bach-cello/
On a personal note regarding my own piano practice, l am working on Bach’s Prelude in C and the first of the Six Little Preludes from the Wilhelm Friedemann Bach Notebook.
Part of a series of erotic mono-prints produced in Glasgow during my extended stay earlier this year.
“Beckett will not hear of being interviewed, whether orally or in writing. I fear that on this he is not to be budged. He gives his work, his role stops there. He cannot talk about it. That is his attitude… . One must take him as he is.”
Repeatedly, Beckett insists that his writing speaks for itself:
“I know no more about this play than anyone who manages to read it attentively… . I do not know who Godot is. I do not even know if he exists. And I do not know if they believe he does, these two who are waiting for him.”
‘The Letters of Samuel Becket,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda
“One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/09/thought-of-the-day.html
Continuing to explore Memories of Childhood in single image digital photographs. Once again the girl and boy are inserted into Finnish settings: a beautiful sunset on the coast near Vahterpää and a domestic interior with Taava at Somero.
Water, whether it is the sea, rivers or canals has been an important reference point throughout my life: childhood seaside holidays at Bournemouth, the canals of Birmingham, the River Tyne in Newcastle, the Atlantic side of Barbados and the Baltic Coast near Vahterpää, Finland.
These single digital photographs are a continuation of the mono-print and collage works in the series Memories of Childhood which I started in Helsinki, Finland during the summer of 2009.
In Memories of Childhood Re-imagined, 2011 currently at the Queen’s Park Gallery, the paper cut-out doll of a boy and girl, which I discovered in a Helsinki craft shop were set against significant personal images of Barbados.
In this series l have returned the boy and girl to scenes in the Finnish nature which have become important to me.
This is an ongoing body of work which can be seen, in part, as continuing a dialogue between Barbados and Finland.
![Memories of Childhood Re-imagined, 2011, Queen’s Park Gallery, Barbados.
This triptych continues the “Memories of Childhood” series, which was begun during a visit to Helsinki, Finland during 2009. Please see older posting of 30 July 2010.
Those works combined mono-prints and collage and were inspired by Kinderszenen (“Scenes from Childhood”), Opus 15, by Robert Schumann, [which] is a set of thirteen pieces of music for piano written in 1838. In this work, Schumann provides us with his adult reminiscences of childhood.
This new triptych is a digital photographic collage.
There are some obvious linkages between “Memories of Childhood Re-imagined”, 2011 and “The Last Of ……….” 2011.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lis30nbPiF1qz5hdro1_r2_1280.png)
Memories of Childhood Re-imagined, 2011, Queen’s Park Gallery, Barbados.
This triptych continues the “Memories of Childhood” series, which was begun during a visit to Helsinki, Finland during 2009. Please see older posting of 30 July 2010.
Those works combined mono-prints and collage and were inspired by Kinderszenen (“Scenes from Childhood”), Opus 15, by Robert Schumann, [which] is a set of thirteen pieces of music for piano written in 1838. In this work, Schumann provides us with his adult reminiscences of childhood.
This new triptych is a digital photographic collage.
There are some obvious linkages between “Memories of Childhood Re-imagined”, 2011 and “The Last Of ……….” 2011.
Details of “The Last of ……….” 2011, Temporary Sculpture 2, Mixed Media.
“The concept of a “temporary” sculpture marks a return to the Hepworth (1976) installation at the Robert Self Gallery in Newcastle and the subsequent tableaus and three-dimensional works which followed and continued until moving to Barbados in 1979. ………..
………Although working in relief and three-dimensions have only produced a few works, they have often marked a significant development in my work. Te Amo (1983), the 1993 Advent Mask series, Materia Prima and Elements of 1999 are all such markers in my oeuvre. In 2008 Aus den sieben Tagen was a parallel work to Leaning Column [Temporary Sculpture 1] although it was completed earlier.” Excerpts from 2008 catalogue “Whittle in Context”.
Leaning Column, 2008 can be seen on the posting of 20 July 2010.
Photography, William St James Cummins
The Last of …………….. (temporary sculpture 2) 2011
I grew up in Birmingham, England and attended the Moseley Road School of Art from 11 to 18 years of age. We often frequented the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the painting “The Last of England” by Ford Maddox Brown made a significant impression.
“In 2011 reflecting on his own life with its farewells and departures, he created ‘Temporary Sculpture 2 “The Last of…..” ’.The temporary Sculpture is a sailing boat made of a wooden box which could be used for packing. On the sides are signifiers of something precious; grape earrings, coins or just bling? The copper nails through stainless steel washers conjur rivets used in shipbuilding together with coinage . The sailing boat is like a child’s boat as opposed to an actual model boat. The photographs/ sails reference images of North South. Animals are often part of relocations, as in Noah’s Ark; here they serve also as evoking childhood.
The paraphrenalia of relocation is very much in evidence. The two objects inside the box are symbols of Consett Bay – a ceramic cast of shoreline coral and a very raw unidentifiable biological mass. The bird’s nesting box at the top of the mast could also references home and family and the precariousness of it all?” Curator, Queen’s Park Gallery, Barbados.
From the exhibition ‘1.1.11 ETC’ at the Queen’s Park Gallery, Barbados.
Photography, William St James Cummins
Nick was born in Birmingham, England in 1953 and completed his Bachelor of Fine Art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1977 followed by a Fellowship in Painting at Sunderland Polytechnic in 1978.
