Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Nazareth O

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As part of my family history research (as described in my previous post), I chanced upon a name which leapt from the pages of an old parish register: Nazareth.

Nazareth was the wife of my 8th great-uncle William Oakley (born in St. Thomas’ parish, Oxford in 1673), and as things stand, that is all I know. But the more I’ve thought about her and who she was, the more I’ve considered how long she’s been forgotten, completely lost among the brier of ancient words that make up entries in the register. It’s strange to think that that is all that remains of her life; a fragment – a name scratched in ink on the pages of a book.

Who was she? What did she look like? What did she do in her life?

I thought then of recent work I’ve made which, based on textile fragments, aims to articulate the idea of a lost and distant life, lived well beyond that which remains. Nazareth Oakley is an example of someone who has all but been forgotten, but who, in the fact of her name written and later read in a register, is, in some small way, remembered and snatched at the last from oblivion.

I’ve been working on new ideas for work and a new piece (following on from a painting called Raspberry, named after someone else long since forgotten) which I have decided to call Nazareth O. 

Although this is very much at the research stage, I think giving it a title will help with its development. I’m beginning to see these developing into small packets, where the map is folded and things placed within based upon the title.

Raspberry

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Continuing with my research, I’ve gone back a few years to some work I did on World War I, specifically an ‘observation’ made of a trench map and graphite paintings using that map as a basis for the work.

I’ve always liked the idea of using the map format as it articulates both the idea of place and of someone in that place. Combining it therefore with the recent work I’ve been doing on fabric tokens works well; the token describes an absence (and also, in some respect, a presence in that it’s a fragment of a lived life), while the map onto which it’s pinned articulates the space beyond that fragment. As I’ve written before:

“Every object in a museum, every relic (whether an object or building, or part of a building) is surrounded by space; that time and space from which they are now estranged. The fabric tokens in the Foundling Museum are likewise surrounded by space, into which the patterns seem to seep.”

The token, the seeping pattern and the map all combine therefore to articulate the ideas I’ve been working with over the years.

Using some folded paper, I made a sketch…

There is something about this pattern and the seeping image which somehow refers to childhood. Therefore I’ve decided to work this up into a bigger piece called ‘Raspberry’, named after a girl, Raspberry Hovel, who lived at the start of the 19th century  and who I discovered in my family history research.

This image also reminds me of mediaeval manuscripts  (the token being the drop-cap) and in some respects, the blankness surrounding the text is like the space I’ve described above. I’m always fascinated by annotations and marginalia in such works as they serve to bring us face to face with those who read those books hundreds of years ago. The seeping pattern becomes in a way a kind of marginalia.

Taking this further, I’m reminded of an installation I made in 2008/09 called ‘The Woods, Breathing.‘ This was based on my reading a book which Adam Czerniakow had read during the dark years of the Holocaust. A text work I made called ‘Heavy Water Sleep‘, based on that book, also lends itself perfectly to this form.

Patterns Seeping (II)

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Following on from a previous blog (‘Patterns Seeping‘) I’ve been working on a few preliminary sketches using some fabric I recently purchased. The idea of the work is to show how when one is looking at an object (or any relic of the past), the mind tries to take that object back into the spaces it once occupied many years – maybe centuries – ago, and thereby to make a connection with those who have long since died.

With these ‘tokens’ therefore, the idea is to extended the pattern into the space of the paper surrounding it whilst avoiding a simple recreation of the pattern within those spaces. These are, as I’ve said, very much the beginnings of a thought process, but I like the way they seem to be heading.

My Son’s Paintings

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As a proud father I love my son’s paintings. If they were but monochrome blobs – which they sometimes are – I would love them, but recently he’s created some which seem to me quite unusual, especially for one so young (he’s only 3). He has a very delicate touch when it comes to painting and drawing – indeed, some of what he produces reminds me of the work of Cy Twombly.

His paintings also show the same careful touch and can be very ‘precise’ such as those below.

In the paintings above, I love the way he’s carefully separated the colours, along with the angle of the brushstrokes and looking at them, I’m reminded of the paintings I made of shadows whilst sitting in the woods at Shotover a couple of months back.

More recently I have been making work about memory. As a separated father, I see my children twice a week. It’s never enough, and in the time I don’t see them, I’m always remembering things I’ve done with them, whether it’s looking at photographs or the creative things we’ve done together.

One such line of work is based on drawings I made with my son, where he would draw on a piece of paper and I would try and follow (hid idea) the lines he made, such as that below.

Taking this drawing as a starter, I’ve started to create a piece based on work I originally made in Australia about my transported ancestor, and then about the First World War

The aim is to trace these drawings to then create a stitched version, illustrating the idea that re-creating the past through memory will always be inexact, and that what occurred in an instant can never really be known again, no matter how hard one works. There is also something about absence in these works and the bond that exists between parent and child, something which is of key significance when looking at events such as the First World War. One is, after all, not only trying to recreate the past through the imagining of the Western Front, but also the ties which bound families together.

Chinese Landscape Painting

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I’ve never before considered myself a fan of Chinese art but there have been times (most recently in the British Museum) when I’ve been overawed by a particular work. I refer in particular to early (11th-14th century) landscapes which move the viewer in a way one doesn’t find in the Western landscape tradition until much later on. (Why did it take so long for landscape painting to develop in the West? And why was it such a key part of painting in the Far-East so early on?) Paintings such as that below (Mountain Village in Clearing Mist by Yu Jian – made all the more extraordinary when one considers it was painted around 800 years ago in the mid 13th century), transport the viewer to a time long gone; they reveal – much as with the 17th century Japanese haiku of Basho – a moment long since past; not so much through what they depict but how it is depicted.

If I’ve never been a fan of Chinese painting per se, I have always admired Chinese calligraphy, which is of course, in itself, a form of painting. One can see in the full view of Yu Jian’s painting below, the text on the left hand side.

One can see here how the landscape itself becomes a kind of text, arranged not in straight lines, but in accordance with the serpentine lines of mountain paths, the drifting patterns of mist and the directions of distant sounds carried on the wind.

With works like these, it’s almost as if you see the landscape before the painter himself. We first see the work as a whole (the landscape as a whole), but then, whilst picking through the gestures of the artist, evident enough in the brushstrokes, we see the landscape as it is – or was – revealed. Yu Jian’s painting is not a painting of what was experienced, but rather the experiencing of what was experienced.

There’s a quote I’ve often used from Christopher Tilley. In his book, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, he writes:

“The painter sees the trees and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects… The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to how a mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders for him something that would otherwise remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… the trees and mirror function as other.”

Like the trees, the mountains share that agency; they too ‘see’ the painter’ and it’s almost as if the painting becomes a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It’s not the mountain that is made visible on the paper, but the artist’s outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence.

War and The Pastoral Landscape

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I’ve been thinking these last few weeks about a new body of work based on the First World War. For a long time – as will be evident from my blog – I’ve been looking at ways of using the backdrops of numerous World War I postcards.

A quote from Paul Fussell has been especially helpful in this regard.

“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”

The images on the backdrops are these proposed moments.

As a contemporary artist living so long after the war, it is of course impossible for me to create works about the war itself. What I can do however is comment on my relationship to the war (and those affected by it) by creating scenes – pastoral scenes – which use as their starting point the backdrops of World War I postcards.

The pastoral will, therefore, be articulated through the language of war.

These pastoral images will, predominantly, be woodscapes based on places I have visited over the last few years including Hafodyrynys (where my great-great-uncle, Jonah Rogers (1892-1915) grew up), Verdun and the Somme. They might contain  – to quote Rilke – ‘…temple columns, ruins of castles’ as per the slightly less pastoral backdrops. They will be devoid of people; the soldiers absent as if they had melted into the backdrops – as if these pastoral scenes represent the Keening landscape of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

As I’ve written before: it is this absence which the trees express so silently, so eloquently. As Rilke so perfectly puts it:

‘Look, trees exist.
The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we
pass away like air traded for air and everything
conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps
half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope.’

The woods I paint will be based, as I’ve said, on those places I have visited as well as those idealised scenes in front of which the soldiers stand in the postcards. They will be – as Richard Hayman puts it – woods “poised between reality and imagination…” – shame and unspeakable hope.

Again as I’ve written before: After the war, the sense of emptiness must have been everywhere. Every insignificant moment – barely acknowledged before the war – now pregnant with a sense of incomprehensible loss. The world, outwardly the same, had shifted just a little, but it had taken the lives of millions to push it there.

There is in this text a sense of absence but also of movement, of continuation – however slight or small (something I want to record in my work). And there’s a link between this and a quote from William Wordsworth who wrote in his Guide to the District of the Lakes: we can only imagine ‘the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.’ I somehow want to turn this quote on its head and borrow from Rilke, who in his Duino Elegies describes the towering trees of tears. I want to paint scenes where there are no people, but in which their absence is recorded, primarily by the trees silently remembering.

“The painter sees the trees, the trees see the painter.”

Paul Nash Quote

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“Here in the back garden of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful – the mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze, while clots of bright dandelions, clover, thistles and twenty other plants flourish luxuriantly, brilliant growths of bright green against the pink earth. Nearly all the better trees have come out, and the birds sing all day in spite of shells and shrapnel…”

Heavy Water Sleep (Paintings) III

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I worked again tonight on the studies for Heavy Water Sleep, working in landscape elements such as trees and sky. The original text from which the words are taken, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ by Grey Owl, is set chiefly in the forests of Canada. And in the ‘secondary text’ which inspired the work in the first place, ‘The Diaries of Adam Czerniakow’  there is a moving passage in which, following a visit outside the Warsaw Ghetto to the woods of Otwock, he writes simply, ‘… the air, the woods, breathing.’ Trees then seem integral to the work and have indeed been a recurring them in much of my work, particularly work to do with the Holocaust and World War I.

I wanted then to use trees in these works and found myself using a stylised form which I’d scribbled one day in my notebook based on lines you find in Family Tree diagrams.

This symbolic tree was in part inspired by some work I did on the First World War in which I used the dividing lines on the backs of original wartime postcards to symbolise the bond between the anonymous individuals who died in the war and their families back at home. These ‘T’ shaped divides reminded me of photographs in which hastily dug graves were marked on battlefields with crude crucifixes. I therefore created landscapes (based on my visits to battlefield sites on what had been the Front) and used these T-shapes to represent graves.

Battle 2

From these T-shapes I derived the forms for the trees below.

Heavy Water Sleep

Heavy Water Sleep

The link between them and the Ts above is an obvious one – even more so when one considers the original inspiration for this work.

Heavy Water Sleep (Paintings) II

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I worked again last night on the ‘Heavy Water Sleep’ paintings, continuing to concentrate on the texture. For the first board below I used a white acrylic paint mixed with an acrylic modelling paste.

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The words are too chaotic in this one and the paint has dried very matt. I could add some gloss medium but it would make much more sense to use oil paint which I will for the final versions. I will add another layer to the painting above later.

Having completed this painting I worked again on the one I did yesterday.

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I like how the words are slightly more obscured now and much prefer their more ordered placement. The next thing I want to try is keeping the lines of the pages together rather than placing them in a random fashion.

Heavy Water Sleep (Paintings)

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I’ve started work on a new series of paintings based on the Heavy Water Sleep work I’ve been doing over the past few years. The idea is to create a series of paintings based on the idea of the words being a trail in a landscape (in turn derived from the idea that the book is a kind of map, leading me through the landscape of the past). The words from each page will be cut out with most painted over either wholly or in part. The words which make up the ‘poem’ of each page will be left, as per the image below.

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The above sketch shows how the words might be placed.

What I realised after completing this sketch is how important it is to create a sense of depth in the work. At the moment the words are raised upon the surface, whereas they need to appear ‘sunk’ into the paint layer like footprints in the snow. Furthermore, the picture plane needs to be much bigger to give a greater sense of space – of wilderness; after all, this work represents the idea of the past as a place.

I shall continue – fo the time being – working on this scale in order to get the textures right, then progress to a larger canvas.

I suppose the ‘feeling’ I want to achieve with these paintings is that of the lone traveller, following in the footsteps of someone long since gone, and the one landscape painter who comes to mind is Caspar David Friedrich, two of whose pictures are reproduced below:

Of course I’m not aspiring to create something that looks like these paintings, but something which instills within the viewer the same sense of space, solitude and wilderness – not forgetting a sense of time’s inevitable passing.

Reading Roads

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Introduction

In Wales in 2008 I walked a path along which my great grandfather had walked every day from his home to the mines in which he worked. He died in 1929 (as a consequence of his work) and all I knew of him, before my visit, were what he looked like (from two photographs) and things my grandmother had told me. But on that path I felt I found him on a much deeper level. The feel of the wind, the way the clouds moved, the sound of the trees and the line of the horizon were all things he would have experienced in much the same way. It was as if these elements had combined to ‘remember’ him to me.

Hafodyrynys and Surrounds

As a consequence of my walk, the line which linked us on my genealogical chart changed to become instead a path, for when I follow lines in my family tree from one ancestor to the next and find myself at the end, so that path in Wales had led to my being born. That path on which I walked for the very first time, was as much a part of who I was as my great grandfather: “places belong to our bodies and our bodies belong to these places.” [i]
Roads (paths, tracks and traces) have become an important part of my research and it was whilst reading Edward Thomas’ poem Roads that I found connections between what he had written and what I was thinking. I’ve reproduced the poem below, and where necessary added my thoughts.

Roads by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.
Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
The reference to stars (or a star) in this verse, reminds me of a quote (to which I often refer) from Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida, in which he writes:

“From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze – light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”

The star shoots its light and is gone and similarly we walk and are gone. But what is left behind is the road, a version of the light left by the disappeared star; a ‘delayed’ ray which allows us to ‘see’ those who went before us. I use the word ‘see’, but we ‘see’ with our bodies. We see the light from the star, but we feel the road. This in turn brings me to the idea of empathy as something which is tactile and kinaesthetic.  Roads and paths become ‘a sort of umbilical cord… a carnal medium, a skin I share’ with those who’ve walked that road or path before – precisely what I’d felt in Wales.

On this earth ’tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:

In the third verse we might interpret the lines as a description of the difference between the act of walking and the road itself. We walk in the moment – a moment which fades in an instant (‘so soon’) and yet, behind us a record of the sum of all those moments is lined up along the road behind us – one which endures for centuries. It’s the same difference as that between speaking and writing; one is fleeting, the other endures. Christopher Tilley writes that “…if writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium, a text which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or writing on the ground in the form of the path or track.” [ii] Paths and roads ‘record’ our movements, they are texts which we can read with our feet. 
The idea of the ‘moment’ is also discussed by artist Bill Viola who writes that:
“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights. [iii]
This ‘same moment’ is in many respects like the act of walking and the road rolled into one; it fades and yet endures at one and the same time. There is an echo of this idea in Camera Lucida when Barthes writes:
“In the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…” [iv]
I described earlier, how the path on which I walked in Wales was as much a part of me as my great grandfather; it was the first time I’d ever walked it and yet I was a part of it long before I was born. There is then a continuous moment running along all paths and roads, and it’s memory and to some extent birth and death that gives the impression of discrete parts. This ‘universal’ moment is the ‘nowness’ of the present and it was this ‘nowness’ which I experienced on that path in Wales and which I’ve since been exploring in my work as regards empathy.
“The feel of the wind, the way the clouds moved, the sound of the trees and the line of the horizon were all things he would have experienced in much the same way.”
The third verse in Thomas’ poem seems to me to allude to the idea of experiencing the moment:

The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.

The ‘we’ in the last line refers to us as individuals, whether ‘we’ were walking that path in 1915 or today in 2011; if ‘we’ weren’t there to see it, it wouldn’t be seen at all. 
In the fourth verse we read the following:

They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.

Before I look at this verse, I want to look at another quote; this time from the catalogue of a Paul Nash exhibition in which David Fraser Jenkins writes how Nash:
“…did not often show people in the landscape, even walking about in his lanes and paths, and as a result his pictures look deserted… Despite this absence, there is in his pictures a remarkable sense of drama, and it is this reaction between things – the trees or the buildings… that these pictures are about.” [v]
Looking at the fourth verse above, we can say that the ‘lack of the traveller’ alludes to the passing of that traveller, whether from the immediate scene, or perhaps life itself. Either way, all that’s left of what Sontag called ‘the missing being’ is the trace of the road on which they walked, the text written as they travelled. That traveller is now a dream, dreamt by the road and the elements by which it’s surrounded, a dream which I see expressed by David Fraser Jenkins as a ‘remarkable sense of drama’. The road might be lonely, but it’s never empty; the trees, the buildings, the feel of the wind and the way the clouds move all dream of the traveller – the missing being. There’s also a parallel to be found here in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where in the second elegy we read:
Look – trees exist.
The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we
pass away like air traded for air and everything
conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps
half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope. [vi]
This ‘silence’ alludes I think to what Jenkins describes as a ‘remarkable sense of drama’ and what I have called a ‘dream’. But how can we connect with these? In his book The Materiality of Stone,  Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes:
“The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects. [Martin] Dillon comments: “The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.” [vii]
Just as the trees function as what Dillon calls ‘Other’, so does everything else. It’s as if the shapes of disappeared travellers are somehow retained, like the people-shaped holes in the ash of Pompeii, which when filled with plaster, revealed the presence of people lost for almost 2000 years. Similarly, people-shaped holes exist along every road or path; gaps which can only be filled with our own bodies, by our own presence; by our experience of the nowness of the present.
In a definition of the Metaphysical poets, Georg Lukács described their common trait of ‘looking beyond the palpable’ whilst ‘attempting to erase one’s own image from the mirror in front so that it should reflect the not-now and not-here.’ [viii] For me, the road is the mirror which Lukács describes, and as I walk along it, I try to look beyond the palpable, to erase my own image so that the road reflects the not-­now and not-here. The palpable is the present (as opposed to the nowness of the past); the not-now and not-here is the nowness of that continuous moment in its entirety. To erase one’s image is to imagine one’s own non-existence, to see a part of that continuous moment when one did not exist, when that part was nonetheless now. It is about seeing the presentness of past events.  

From dawn’s twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.

The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.

Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.

Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion* tales
Is one of the true gods,

(*In the tale of Lludd and Lleuelys from the Mabinogion, you will find the following text: “Some time after that, Lludd had the island measured in length and breadth; the middle point was found to be in Oxford. There he had the earth dug up, and in that hole he put a vat full of the best mead that could be made, with a silk veil over the surface. He himself stood watch that night.” I discovered this passage whilst researching my Welsh ancestry, and being as I am from Oxford, found it rather appealing.)

Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,

And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter

At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer

Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

The line ‘Now all roads lead to France’ reminds us that those who fell and are buried in France (and indeed other countries) were men with lives beyond the theatre of war – that the theatre of war extends well beyond the boundaries of any trench map. To know them and to know the missing, we have to follow the roads from France back to the towns and villages where they lived, just as to know ourselves we should follow the roads and paths from our own hometowns to those of our ancestors. To walk those streets, paths and tracks, is to turn them back into ‘consanguineal lines’; to restore lost connections in forgotten family trees; to remind us that those who fought and died were each part of a family as well as a wider community of friends and acquaintances.
The road brings and takes away and the dead keep us company at every step ‘with their pattering’. Again this could refer to the idea of the moment as being both fleeting and enduring. The moment is like a looped recording which plays and records at the same time, creating a kind of palimpsest, where all that’s gone before is contained in a moment, like light, tens of thousands of years old seen in a single second.
The line ‘Crowding the solitude,’ echoes what I wrote earlier, that roads might be lonely, but they’re never empty. And finally in the last two lines, Thomas reminds us of our own mortality; where the multitudes that make the towns roar are themselves brief. 

i Christopher Tilley, 1994, A Phenomenology of Landscape, Oxford, England, Berg
ii Christopher Tilley, 2004, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Oxford, England, Berg
iii Bill Viola, 2005, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings 1973-1994, Thames & Hudson
iv Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage, 2000
v David Fraser Jenkins, 2010, Paul Nash – The Elements, London, Scala Publishers Ltd.
vi Rainer Maria Rilke, Tr. Martyn Crucefix, 2006, Duino Elegies, London, Enitharmon Press
vii Christopher Tilley, 2004, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Oxford, England, Berg
viii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets

The rue Notre-Dame des Champs, Paris by Walter Sickert

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The photograph below is a rather poor reproduction of a painting hanging in The Ashmolean museum, Oxford. It is perhaps, my favourite painting in the museum. Painted by Walter Sickert (1860-1942), it’s one which I have stood before for some considerable time, not least quite recently in order to write the following.

In my previous entry, regarding Cy Twombly’s Panorama, I discussed, albeit briefly, how it was quite impossible to fully appreciate a painting through a reproduction. Of course that much is obvious, but I wanted to write about this particular work to see just how differently I perceived it compared with the work by Cy Twombly, which, as I say, I’ve only ever seen in a book.

As can be seen from the photograph, one of the things I noticed straight away about this painting was the light reflecting off its surface. Not really anything to do with the painting perhaps, but, nonetheless it forced me to move, to find an angle where I wouldn’t be dazzled, and by doing so, I discovered something about the painting itself. What’s important here, is the fact that a painting isn’t just a surface on which paint is applied (although the appreciation of surface and texture can only be attained when faced with the real thing). Instead, a painting is as much about the space around it. Of course, Walter Sickert would have no idea that his painting would one day grace a wall in the Ashmolean museum, dazzled by the lights. But he would have walked whilst painting it, or rather moved before the easel. He would have stood in front, to the left, to the right, and this movement in the act of painting is, I believe, important in the act of viewing and appreciating the result.

So what do we see in this work? Well, it’s a road in Paris (the rue Notre-Dame des Champs), one on which the painter John Singer Sargent had a studio. Given the muted palette and bruised sky, the picture shows a scene from about that time of day when the night begins removing all the colours from the world, when the last light in the sky, makes all manner of colours that seem to last for just a few seconds. It’s a wet end to a day that’s more than likely seen nothing but rain. The concertinaed facades of the shops with their heavy paint dragged down the surface, the downward strokes of the windows in the buildings opposite and the vague forms from which the scene’s almost entirely comprised, all suggest the fading light and drenched air of an autumn or winter evening.

There are puddles in the street which soak up the sickly light of the cafe like a man with a sponge mopping up blood after a brawl. The road is somewhat sickly and the light of the cafe offers us a refuge from whatever is coming just around the corner. Two or three figures stand just ahead. Are they moving? Are they walking towards us? Away? It’s hard to tell. But a feeling of isolation, pervading the picture, is I believe augmented by their presence.

As I moved before the painting, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, the colours seemed to shift. The bluey-violet sky shimmered above the drowned buildings, and the reflections in the road revealed new colours the more I looked. Looking at the painting in the flesh, I felt – compared with looking at the reproduction above – that my eyes had to move in order to cross from one side to the other. In a reproduction, the spaces are of course greatly reduced and everything can be seen or grabbed in an instant. In the flesh (and this painting is very much about the physicality of the world) you look as you might when standing somewhere in town.  You look with more than just your eyes; you experience the painting with your body; one that stands alone before the canvas.

Returning for the moment to the glare of the lights, I found that when I looked at the painting from the right hand side, the glare subsided, and that all that remained were just a few specs where the paint was raised above the rest of the surface. Furthermore, from this position, the painting seemed to open up, as if the concertinaed lines of the shop facades were being pulled, expanding like bellows. Here, the street seemed to pull me on. Standing directly in front, it almost seems about to collapse upon itself.

I’m not trying to suggest that this is all deliberate on the part of the artist, but to emphasise the fact that the act of looking at a painting is a physical experience. Sickert would have known this street, he would have recalled what it was like to stand there. He would have moved before the canvas as he painted, and, as a viewer, the way I stand and move before the canvas reflects that. It is, in the end, the only way to get to know art.

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Panorama by Cy Twombly – Part 1

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The first painting I have chosen is Cy Twombly’s 1955 painting Panorama.

The first thing to say about discussing a work of art which one has only seen in a book, is that any view is going to be extremely restricted. To be fully appreciated, art (whether paintings, installations, sculpture and so on) needs to be experienced. The impact of a painting can be felt as much with the body as the eyes, and a reproduction found in a book will only reveal a fraction of its ‘story’. (I never cease to be amazed  – and indeed, depressed – at how people when standing before a painting in a gallery will choose to view it through the screen of their camera, rather than look directly). This difference between experiencing a painting and seeing it in a book is itself an interesting area to research, and one I’ll be looking at over the coming months. Nevertheless, reproductions can still tell us a great deal, so with this in mind I shall begin with the painting shown above.    
I have always been drawn to a certain kind of aesthetic, one which you’ll often find in places of decay, where time has taken hold of a building and chewed upon it like a dog with a bone. The aesthetic of time or the passage of time is beautiful in its relentlessness; from crumbling walls and cracked plaster, to buckled paint layers and the weary look of old books and photographs. It’s something which, for whatever reason, captivates me, whether I’m there amongst the glorious ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum; walking down a hot and dusty street in Siracusa; looking at a long abandoned tomb in Montparnasse or standing in my old school, just before its scheduled demolition. Indeed, it was in my old school that I photographed the window sills, scratched with the names of bored pupils from the 1970s, and it wasn’t so much the names that interested me, rather, the look of those names; an aesthetic which we find in Cy Twombly’s Panorama, painted in 1955.
Before Demolition

I can anticipate what many might say when confronted with a painting such as this. ‘I could do that’ is a usual retort, or even worse, ‘a child could do better.’ Which is of course not the point. Whenever someone says ‘I could do that,’ I always point out that they haven’t, and that, in all likelihood, they’d have no reason to try. ‘I could’ in this instance, is just another way of saying ‘I haven’t’. And while I’m not going to extol its virtues as a great work of art, a work of art this painting is and one which, for whatever reason I’m particularly drawn to.
But why? What is it about this piece that I find so engaging?
Without wishing to sound too shallow, first and foremost it’s the look of the painting which appeals. Looks matter for me in art, but that’s not to say art should be beautiful (nothing could be further from the truth); but it needs to be engaging. In order to hold the attention of the viewer, in order to attract them in the first place, you need to trigger something within them. To use a rather crude analogy, it’s rather like the cover of a book and the subsequent opening line. Get it right and your story with its deep themes and intricate plots may well get the chance to be revealed. Get it wrong and no matter how perfect the rest of the book, the potential reader will never get to know. As I’ve said, this is a crude analogy, and I don’t wish to dwell on the idea of a painting being analogous to a book; but nonetheless artists have something to say and how they say it matters. Of course there are no rules governing taste, and what one person likes another will dislike, or even hate.
In the case of Panorama, it’s a painting I’ve come to love.
Looking at this painting (a detail is shown above) is like looking at a wall upon which people have scratched words and names, which then over time have lost their shape and meaning. The scratches are words or signifiers reduced to a new kind of text yet to be deciphered. Not that as a viewer I’m trying to make sense of all the lines or even groups of lines. This isn’t a game of ‘pick-up-sticks,’ where individual elements are teased out from the apparent chaos.

Sicily

Something which in a moment was possessed with meaning, means nothing now, and all those moments, layered one on top of the other, create as a result, a palimpsest of ambiguous symbols signifying a strange kind of nothingness; a presence which at the same time is also an absence. People come and people go, and in some respects, this painting is for me a work about time – about the simultaneity of what I’ve just described: presence and absence.

Of course we know that this is the work of one man, but even so, there is a sense of a multitude of meanings. If it’s not a collection of thoughts, then it’s a mass of independent actions; a multitude of presents, wrapped up in a simultaneous slab of the past.
The shades of grey, smudges and rapid scrawls, also call to mind a blackboard, on which someone has poured out their thoughts in the hope of distilling them down into an equation – a simple truth. I’ve always loved the aesthetic of the blackboard (as well as mathematics); the half revealed texts and mathematical symbols, the swirling smudges of rubbings out, the dust and the physicality of thought. (I’m only glad we didn’t have whiteboards or even worse, smartboards when I was at school). This could be a painting about obfuscation, of concealment, where something has been scratched out and hidden from view. Or perhaps it’s the opposite, a painting that is looking, searching for that something which remains elusive?
We can follow lines, from one to the next in our own search, but we’re always held on the surface; we cannot penetrate the painting’s depth. And depth there must be, for the work could not have been made in an instant, but gradually over the course of time. It is then a panorama, viewed in a moment, and made of many thousands.

Totes Meer

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I was watching The Culture Show last night and during a piece on a Paul Nash exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery I was struck by the following painting, Totes Meer which can be seen below.

It shows a heap of German planes – those brought down over England, ready to be sorted so the metal could be salvaged. For Nash, it was a scene to inspire Patriotism, but what interested me – at least initisally – was the fact this scrap heap had been in Cowley, not far from where I once lived.

I am of course interested in the past, the wreckage of the past if you like, and how we can salvage parts to be reused in the present day, so therefore this painting has a great deal of interest for me; not only because of that but because of the scrapheap in Cowley.

Front and Back (2nd Mons)

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I started work on a new painting today based on the work I made as part of my Mine the Mountain exhibition. This piece, Front and Back (2nd Mons), uses the ‘T’ shaped divides on the backs of postcards which are then stencilled onto the canvas, already painted with a generic battlefield scene. I would really like to paint this on a large scale but we’ll see how this goes first.

Front and Back (2nd Mons)

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-18