Michael Horn

28th July 2015 By Peter Fowler

Every year, for the past decade and more, I have ‘retreated’ to north Norfolk in July to work in the studio of Michael Horn. His is not a well-known name in the artistic world nationally but, nevertheless, he paints deeply, increasingly exhibits to general acclaim, and has taught art throughout his professional life. Luckily for me, I fell under his spell at Mary Ward College, Queen Square, London, early in my attempts to paint, and while our relationship remains essentially that of ‘master’ and ‘pupil’ in artistic matters, we have become good friends and can paint happily for hours as colleagues at either end of his splendid studio to the strains of traditional jazz and classical music. This is why I have not attended to this site for ten days: I have been absorbed in Michael’s world of paint and good food – in the preparation of which he is also an artist.

027 We went to three different places to draw – something I am very weak at doing. We were rained off at all three but nevertheless acquired good material. One scene, involving of all things in rural north Norfolk, a small monumental arch and a grass-cut maze, I pursued from field sketch through five versions to finished studio painting.

In the studio, where perforce we spent most of the time because of the weather, I worked on another project the other way round by drawing in excruciating detail the view of the studio from my easel through five versions through to an exhibit-worthy abstract painting (subsequently over-painted; the image shown here is a detail of the third stage during painting, looking towards the studio door on the left and at one of Michael’s large paintings centre and on the right).

These are excellent exercises for me, though don’t tell Michael, since in the normal course of events I have neither the discipline nor time to do such. Anyway, I came away clutching some 15 or so ‘works’ in my folder but, far more importantly, a little wiser and possibly a little more accomplished in matters painterly. Thank you, Michael.

Finnish – but perhaps a start?

12th July 2015 By Peter Fowler

The break in writing posts is because I have been in Finland for a week. While primarily for fieldwork, the visit embraced arty things, notably an exhibition ‘Sibelius and Images of Finland’ by three masters of photography, Heikki Aho, Bjorn Soldan and Claire Aho, seen at both Helsinki airport and the Academic Bookstore in central Helsinki; and a visually striking retrospective exhibition at Espoo of the recently-late L-G Nordstrom, Finland’s outstanding Constructivist-Modernist painter.

Another large exhibition called ‘Magic of the North’ brought together at the Ateneum gallery, also in central Helsinki, leading artists of Norway and Finland who were painting either side of 1900. The whole was not exactly a celebration of joy or populous landscape; but the collective gloom illumined by trolls and scary creatures of the afforested night gave food for thought about the skill with which these painters conveyed darkness, stillness, eye-stretching forest, steely skies and water cold enough to make you shiver just by looking at their depiction of it.

View from the top of the lighthouse on Solskaer, the furthest and barest of the islands in the Helsinki archipelago on a fine but windy day (the wind was so strong that I did not dare lean out over the railing to cut the safety mesh out of the photograph). In contrast, below, is the steely grey of sea, sky and glaciated rock island near Helsinki city centre.

From my personal point of view, however, best was boating out and about the Helsinki archipelago by public ferries on July seas which always, except for the trip to Solskaer, looked almost as cold as that in the paintings. The objective was to collect material of my own, photographically and graphically, which might, just might, spark off a modest Finnish work or two which I also could try to make empty, cold and deeply meaningful.

Munch, you might say but would try not to, food for thought there too.

Perfection – but not my ‘Becker’

29th June 2015 By Peter Fowler

My ‘Becker Country’ is finished and is now drying – it has a month to do so before being exhibited. Its structure remains much as it was a month ago but, while it was ‘cooking’, it became a very different painting. The visit I mentioned to the area around the village of Wenhaston, although undramatic at the time, proved quietly inspirational in subsequently giving me two pointers as to how to lead the work towards an appropriate local finale: the weather-worn brick redness of the two main buildings at Old Hall Farm, where Becker lived for a while, and the realisation that most of the farmland is on sand.

I have a collection of various sands in the studio for precisely such an opportunity and so a suitably darkish yellow sand from an old quarry in the south of France, mixed with pigment from an adjacent source and some oil, now gives body and texture to the painting overall, with red peeping through. Whether it works or not is for others to judge, but that’s it as far as I’m concerned. Now to get on with the ‘Sizewells’.

Meanwhile, perfection on an extensive scale: I don’t normally rave about country houses and their parks, having acquired a rather jaded palate for the genre through perhaps over-frequent visits in National Trust days, but I found one I had not even heard of until recently, Houghton Hall, stunning. The Hall lies just off the A148 between King’s Lynn and Fakenham in northwest Norfolk. It was built in the 1720s by Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Not surprisingly, therefore, it has an architectural grandeur in familiar Palladian mode, with French twiddles and the like enlivening its exterior – I did not explore the interior – but it is the Versailles-like extent of parkland with avenues, vistas, ha-has, temples, gardens and modern artworks, the whole with not a leaf, not a blade of grass out of place, that I found almost overwhelming. Yet in this most massaged of man-made landscapes, obviously looked after with the utmost care, attention and sensitivity by, one would have thought, a small army of outdoor staff, in four hours there I found but one man working out in the landscape – and he was an electrician attending to the floodlighting of a tree.

In fact all the above was a bonus for I had actually been taken to Houghton to see the exhibition by James Turrell called ‘Lightscape’. This is breathtaking too. Indoors and over the landscape are not just installations to look at from outside but experiences to participate in; and you reel away, rubbing your eyes and wondering not only whether what you have just seen is ‘art’ or ‘illusion’ but also, more profoundly, whether ‘reality’ based on visual evidence is in any sense ‘real’. I don’t want to spoil the experience for any one who might go after reading this but I sat in one darkened room for 20 minutes during which I ‘saw’ the darkness slowly dissipate as a pre-sunrise light began to tint the screen from the left and grey clouds edged back to the right; yet the sunrise did not happen and the greyness moved back to the left to obliterate its traces. It was difficult, when told afterwards, to accept that nothing happens in that darkened room except in the mind of the expectant viewer.

And it is not just the darkness which belies – or reveals: lie facing upwards in daylight looking out through the aperture in the centre of Turrell’s ‘Skyspace’ dome and see a fragment of sky, now with the shape of the aperture providing a frame round it as with a painting or a fluorescent light installation. In ‘Skyspace’, neither the artist nor a technician are fiddling with the changing image, with what you are seeing, yet surely what you are seeing is ‘art’ in some sense? What is a painting? Why paint?

‘Lightscape’ exhibits till 24 October, 2015. Go.

‘Cooking’ ‘Becker Country’

10th June 2015 By Peter Fowler

Gardening a.m. and painting p.m. make an excellent pair: my herbs are in a much better state than a week ago and painting is progressing well too. ‘Sizewell A and B’ are now in position, the AEA will doubtless be relieved to know; the roughly 1 m sq ‘Becker Country’ may indeed be finished: it is now ‘cooking’.

‘Cooking’ in my painting parlance describes that phase in a painting’s evolution when it may be finished and is now just sitting there being looked at every day until the moment when, walking into the studio, one either knows for certain that it is finished or, more usually, sees that it isn’t but, with a bit of luck, knows what to do to move it forward. The title is lifted from David Thompson’s essay ‘Becker’, the Suffolk artist in his book of the same title (The Wildlife Art Gallery, Lavenham. 2002, p. 32): “There are a few square miles of coastal East Anglia which could well be called ‘Becker Country’. ” Though not very well-known, even in East Anglia, Harry Becker (1865-1928) was a gifted draughtsman and brilliant painter who created works melding acute and sympathetic observation with a vigorous, impressionistic style. He settled in and around Halesworth in east Suffolk and, either side of the First World War, drew and painted the ordinary in the daily lives of the local farm-workers, their families and their countryside. The world he depicted, indeed illuminated, the world of unremitting manual labour on the land, the world of horses as rural power-source, was highly unfashionable artistically but it is of course a world which has now totally disappeared. Becker is therefore of historical as well as artistic importance, an aspect of his work not fully explored in the Thompson book. He unknowingly anticipated the oral record of that horse-based world made a few miles down the road at Blaxhall a couple of decades later by George Ewart Evans.

Growing awareness of Becker’s significance in recent years has now been formalised in what is in effect an appreciation Society, Inspired by Becker (IBBS). One of its functions is to organise an annual exhibition, not of Becker’s work but of contemporary work inspired by his oeuvre. This year is the third such exhibition and, along with many other mainly local artists – and there’s a lot of artistic talent in East Suffolk! – I have been invited to submit up to three works. ‘Becker Country’ is one of them; the other two, much smaller, have also been painted specially for this occasion. One of them, ‘Quails’ eggs 1: crushed’, is exhibited in The Gallery, the first example on this web-page of a painting going straight from easel to Gallery. One merit of this e-medium is that I don’t have to wait for the painting to dry before it can be exhibited.

This note reminds me that I have not yet written anything about exhibiting: another story for another day.

Quails’ eggs

12th May 2015 By Peter Fowler

Finished the three paintings based on quails’ eggs: enough is enough, especially of eggs. Started painting two other works, one centred on a human figure which is very rare for me.

Almost surreal

5th May 2015 By Peter Fowler

I opened the newspaper the other day to be confronted by a splendid photograph of an all-to-familiar view: a close-up, looking south, of the Martello tower at the end of the sea-wall to the south of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. The reason for the photograph was the placing on the top of its seaward wall of a life-sized human figure sculpted by – yes. you’ve guessed – Anthony Gormley; the occasion was to commemorate the Landmark Trust which owns the tower.

063

I have gazed for hours over the last 6 months at exactly the same view. I happened to be at the tower – the destination of one of my favourite walks – one fine day late last year when, looking up towards its east-facing wall from the Aldeburgh side, I saw the upper part of the tower’s profile blackly intersecting with the lowering sun. The effect was quickly captured photographically and then sketched, though by then the sun had shifted slightly and the visual drama lessened.

Anyway, ever since then I have been trying, and failing, to capture on paper and canvas the clarity and immediacy of that first sighting. I think I can see now how to finish the main painting – and it wont be with a human figure poised on the top of the tower’s wall as if about to dive into the sea. May be I’ll include the result in The Gallery here idc.

039 Martello Tower, Aldeburgh

I have not in fact included this painting in The Gallery because it sold.

Incidentally, someone has already pointed out to me that I have not so far mentioned here anything about my painting or paintings; so it is perhaps timely to indicate en passant that I do paint most days. But more of that perhaps, also idc.