Before I return to my notes on 'composition in White (Painting) I've decide to post my latest painting in my 'Idle Hands Series', No:2. As with yesterdays piece the pose for this is based on a recent sketch which I'm also adding to my #artistsupportpledge. Although The painting that I have completed today is based on a previous study when if came to do the painting I decided to change the angle of the pose slightly whilst I was working on it to give the painting a more dynamic feel, but of course that's the nature of a study, it's essentially a trial run for a completed piece so one shouldn't be afraid to make changes to correct of improve things.

The nature of poses for this series is something that I have been giving a lot of though, in theory there is only so much you can do with an empty hand. And it does of course have to be empty, if the hand work active, hilding a paint brush for instance it would undermine the whole concept of the paintings, the hands must be passive. With this in mind I am considering 'borrowing' poses from historical paintings. I have a couple in mind already, but I'm not for to reveal anything just yet.

Of course if you are interested in either or both of these pieces they are being added to my #artistsupportpledge with immediate effect, please contact me either through this website of direct message me through Facebook:

Above are both the original charcoal study and the final painting for this first piece, 'Idle Hands No:2', both of which I am adding to my #artistsupportpledge catalogue.

Above left:

'Idle Hands Study No:2' graphite on paper, 29.5 x 42 cm, 2019, Antony Clarkson, £65 plus shipping.

Above right:

'Idle Hands No:2', acrylic on paper, 29.5 x 42 cm, 2019, Antony Clarkson, £200 plus shipping.

These two pieces may be purchased together for a discounted price of £240 plus shipping.

I'm taking a short break from my retrospective analysis of 'Composition in White (Painting)' today to introduce my new Self Isolation Residency painting project; 'Idle Hands'. Over the last few weeks I have posted a couple of items about drawing hands and what good practice it is for artists to...well, keep their hand in! Sorry! The most recent of these posts was less than a week ago on 26th May, Day 58. In this particular post I started to postulate that the drawings of my hand were in fact a form of self portrait, which obviously relates to 'Desiderata', but I also theorised about how my hand may relate to self isolation in an other way, that being as an object which I brought into this 'closed' environment with me.

Over the last few days I have been thinking more and more about these ideas while working on more sketches and paintings. As I have worked I have been in a position the consider exactly what I an doing with my hands; my right hand is obviously very busy drawing and painting, but I am keeping my my left hand as still as possible to observe the pose while I work. This 'stillness' rapidly began to create resonances in my mind as to the whole nature of self isolation, perhaps in an even stronger way that 'Desiderata' did. In theory my left hand is totally passive, even idle, as so many people find themselves during this period. My left hand, my 'Idle Hand' becomes a metaphor for the hoards of people furloughed from there work during this period, whilst if could be argued that my right hand is the people working from home. I'm thinking that this project has much further to go in its development both in terms of my drawing and paintings but also perhaps in terms of my theorising.

Above are both the original charcoal study and the final painting for this first piece, 'Idle Hands No:1', both of which I am adding to my #artistsupportpledge catalogue.

Above left:

'Idle Hands, S
Study No:1' charcoal on paper, 29.5 x 41 cm, 2019, Antony Clarkson, £65 plus shipping.

Above right:

'Idle Hands No:1', acrylic on paper, 29.5 x 42 cm, 2019, Antony Clarkson, £200 plus shipping.

These two pieces may be purchased together for a discounted price of £240 plus shipping.

What is canvas, what is paint? I closed yesterdays post be referencing another of my situation-specific installations; ‘Tension’. In doing so I made comparisons between it and ‘Composition in White (Painting), even though Tension not only involves no paint, but it also involves no canvas. So is Tension a painting, is that what I’m trying to say here? No of course it isn’t, the closest it could be considered is an ‘object’, historically something it is neither one thing nor the other, not painting, not sculpture. This however is not what interests me most about the piece and its references to both ‘Composition in White (Painting)’ and also my spatial paintings. I’m less interested in exploring the differences in these pieces and more interested in exploring the similarities.

I say this because as I use this platform to explore my work further, I find that I am gaining a greater and greater opportunity to both analyses and perhaps even understand both my own work and my motives in making it. I set out on my career as a painter with no intention of deviating from that course. I knew that I was more than capable of making significant sculptural and installation pieces it was just that I wasn’t interested in doing so. However, as I now reflect upon my career more and more, I begin to realise that I was perhaps less concerned with the idea of making paintings and more concerned with the idea of just making. The really fascinating part of this process for me is how installation pieces like ‘Composition in White (Painting)’ and ‘Tension’ grew to be something very different although they still have their roots firmly planted in the history of painting as I noted yesterday. It is almost as though there was a subconscious need in me to explore more that mere painting would allow.
 
 And so it seems inevitable that I would find my way into this larger field of practice through the one that I already knew the most, that painting should be my key to sculpture and installation seems now both poetic and rational at the same time. Perhaps my spatial painting 'Waterfall' helps to illustrate how this move happened in the end.

So last night I began to talk about my first installation piece in China, 'Composition in White (Painting)' particularly in regards to its name and in reference to painting. Tonight I would like to expand on those thoughts to perhaps use this piece to think a little more about painting in general. The thing that I would like to state before I go any further is that painting is not an image, or at least it doesn't have to be one. A painting is a surface onto which 'paint' has been applied to create an illusion. It does not technically have to be an illusion that has 'depth', although it almost always is. So are there any other factors that define whether an 'object is a painting or not?

If you ask a million painters that question you will probably get a million different answers and they all will relate to that painters usage of the medium. To me part of this definition of a painting relates very heavily to the materials involved, their usage and their interaction. Of course the materials involved in making a painting also vary widely from painter to painter and also from era to era; go back a couple of hundred years and most paintings would be done on wooden panels, go back even further and the paint would be applied to wet plaster. But I am, on the whole what might be though of as a modern/traditional oil painter in that I apply oil paint with brushes and knives onto a canvas with is kept in tension on a wooden stretcher. This narrative is therefore a big part of how I define a painting, so lets go through that story again and see how it possibly relates to both 'Composition in White (Painting)' but also to another piece of my installation work that I've mentioned previously; 'Tension'.

Our story of a painting therefore begins with a stretcher, for me this is usually made of wood but not always. All the stretcher really is is a means by which a flexible canvas can be made, for want of a better word, rigid. For most paintings this is usually a rectangular wooden form that the canvas is tacked, or more commonly these days stapled, to. So where are the the stretchers in 'Composition in White (Painting)' and in 'Tension'? Well they are there but in both of these cases there are only two stretcher bars attached to the canvas because the 'situation specific' nature of the space that is part of each of these installations  acts as the third and forth sides. Look again at the photo above, the canvas, and it is a form of canvas in this case, is attached to a wooden baton which I fixed to the top lintel of each of the 6 windows in the space, the other end of each canvas was then attached to another wooden baton which was then used to 'stretch' canvas across the space to a predetermined line on the floor where it was again fixed, As I say the third and forth sides of the stretchers are present in that they are formed by the structure of the gallery and are common to each 'painting'.

Although at first glance 'Tension' (below) may not seem to have anything in common with a painting I'm sure that by now the family resemblance is starting to become clear. In this case I did not need to add any stretchers to the space, they were already present in the form of the architectural columns which run down either side of the space. In this case all I had to be was stretch the canvas...the cling film.

Tonight I would like to begin a post that I might well return to tomorrow or in a couple of days. I'm thinking about doing this because it was a very important piece of installation for me and I would really like to have the opportunity to explore it, it's heritage and it's influence on other pieces of my work in perhaps more depth that I have with other pieces so part in this blog. The piece is called 'Composition in White (Painting)' and it was created exclusively for the 501 Art Space Gallery in Chongqing China whilst I was their artist in residence on the summer of 2011. I applied for the residency at 501 whilst I was still taking part in the residency at Cow House Studios in Ireland; this was a very important developmental time for my work and I was fortunate to be selected for a number for excellent artist residencies from  2010 - 2013 which gave me the time and space to explore a variety of ideas inherent in my work.

Although this is a piece of installation and it actually involves be paint in its composition I chose to entitle the piece 'Composition in White (Painting)'. This reference to 'painting' in the title of the piece is where I have decided to begin to talk about it in my post this evening. When I studied for my BA at Manchester School of Art the title of the course that I completed was Fine Art (Painting); to differentiate it from Fine Art (Sculpture) and Fine Art (Printing) which were the other 2 portions of the Fine Art Course that students could study. In theory, although I was part of the school of 'Painting' I was also part of the wider School of Fine Art, which should have meant that there was a certain amount of 'flexibility' in the boundaries of the work we made as students and how it 'should' be received by our Lecturers. It has to be said that this attitude did not really exist in practice in the same way that it did in theory and the 3 separate schools tended on the whole to remain aloof and rigid. I say this as though this was a problem and that it adversely affected my work, but in actuality that wasn't true. 

In the second half of my first year of study I became preoccupied with the idea of creating what might be considered to be an 'immersive' painting which would totally surround the observer, to put them at the centre of it. This was the beginning of my 'spatial paintings' which you can probably see (below) also had an influence of this piece. Whilst I was working on this painting I was fortunate enough to catch the interest of Prof. Keith Brown who was at that time Head of the Sculpture Department at Manchester School of Art, he and I spent a great deal of time considering the 'painting' I was making and its alternative relationships to Painting, Sculpture and to another potential area referred to as 'objecthood'. I remember Keith coming into my studio and seeing the piece for the first time and knowing I was a painter making the comment, "you know what you've got there don't you? That's a sculpture" said with his tongue embedded firmly in his cheek! But in this way I made the connections between painting and sculpture which helped to develop my onward thinking,

All of these thoughts were part of my thinking process as I stretched the six 'canvases' for 'Composition in White (Painting)' and so the painting reference exists within the piece.

I do consider myself to be very lucky in lots of ways as far as our current situation is concerned. Don't get me wrong, in many ways, although the west coast of Scotland is a wonderful place to be, I am far from happy being stuck here when I have to be separated from my partner who has had to stay in the States as a key worker. But we are both making the best of our current circumstances. As you can see for me this means a time when I make new work and also reflect on my work that has gone before. I have, or am, working on many new projects mainlt connected to the current situation of on long term projects that I haven't had the proper time to pursue previously. Over the last couple of weeks something has started to emerge through my work in quite an unexpected bu organic way.

A few days ago I posted some images of some hand drawings that I have been doing and talked about what great exercise they are to keep your drawing skills fresh, particularly at time like this when its perhaps harder to find different things to draw from day to day. Although I am currently working on a very different drawing project i have continued to work on these very free drawings, predominately of my left hand, to keep my skills fresh and free. Over the last day or so as I've been doing this I have started to think that they have a strong relationship to the self portrait that I began this self-isolation residency with and that perhaps this is something that I should start to explore more as a significant project for these times. After all this means that my left hand, as something that I brought into this lockdown situation with me, is a viable candidate as another subject of self portrait for me. But probably not in the form of a single image, for this project I may have to delve more deeply and consider how  my hand, particularity my left hand represents how lockdown is effecting me.

I feel another work in progress starting here, but that is just the nature of the beast!

I'm adding another piece to my #artistsupportpledge collection this evening, it's an older piece that was exhibited as part of the 'Manu Exhibition' in the Finnish Academy of Fine Art's Gallery in Helsinki in 2010 along side my installation, 'Floorplan'.

All of the work that I made for this exhibition had elements in common; they were all basically 2 dimensional pieces and that all had transit from Finland to the UK and back to Finland in their history.  'Floorplan' came about through my consideration of a document sent to me from Finland during my research into the gallery space for the exhibition; it had traveled to me and I wanted to take it back encapsulated in the work that I intended to present within the gallery.  This ideas of transit from Finland to the UK and then back to Finland became central to my thinking in regards to this piece and it also connected to this drawings (above). During my time preparing for this exhibition I had started to experiment with making drawings using carpenters profile gauges, I loved the linear, vertical nature of the lines that I could get from this technique and they immediately made me think of buildings. I began to experiment with cityscapes of Manchester, in fact the view used in this piece is just around the corner from where my Manchester studio was at that time.

As I was working on one of these profiles I realised that they were made in Finland, this of course completed the circle for these pieces; the profile gauges were made in Finland, shipped to the UK where I bought them. I made drawings of Manchester with them in Manchester and then to them back to Finland for the exhibition in Helsinki.

The piece that I am putting up for sale tonight as part of my #artistsupportpledge is one of the original pieces made for the exhibition in Finland: 'Manchester Profile: The Cathedral and Deansgate', drawing with carpenters profile gauge, 2010, Antony Clarkson, 33 x 27cm framed, £200 plus shipping.

Today I'm going to return to another piece of work which I created whilst on the Cow House Studios Artist Residency in 2011. Last tile I talked about this time period it was in reference to my experimental Installation piece 'Difference and Repetition'; today I would like to consider a very closely related piece made at approximately the same time, 'Self Portrait with Jenga'.

Actually this piece also has echos of 'Sculpture and Plinth' as well, they certainly have a strong family relationship in their looks, dimensions, phenomenology, and composition. As I've talked about previously many of these pieces come into being through the process of 'play'; in many ways 'Self Portrait with Jenga' my be one of the best examples of this process if for no better reason that it integrates a 'game' into its structure. When Cow House Studios isn't playing host to its artists in residence it provides 'art education for children, teens and adults; facilities for colleges, schools and artist-led groups', certainly when I did the residency there in 2011 the main part of this community was teens and young adults. This meant that aside from the plethora of art teaching materials that I had to play with there were also an amount of recreational materials including a set of giant outdoor Jenga blocks. As a sculptor engaged in the area of play nothing could be more perfect.

And so I inevitably began to play with this set of Jenga as a child would do with building blocks, I say that but this child has a mathematical bent which tends to lead their playtimes  into what could be considered an area of perfectionism bordering upon the obsessive. I soon began to develop structures and patterns within my play, lines of symmetry that were reminiscent in my early experiments of stone architecture and leading on in their final incarnation to what I can only describe as 'physiological' architecture. This was realised in the final form of the piece when I began to experiment with patterns that were reminiscent of the curvatures of the vertebral column. As this pattern began to develop I was both fascinated by is natural perfection and by its personal relevance; I myself have a congenital back deformation known as  spina bifida occulta which at times gives me great pain just to remind me that I have it but I am thankful to say nothing worse.

This personal link to the structure that I was now forming assured me that I had the right perspective on this piece in that it was developing the nature of a self portrait, but as a set of Jenga comes with a limited amount of pieces this defines the maximum dimensions of the piece that I could create in this way. These varieties of restrictions of scale within a piece of sculpture are where the nature of the plinth was conceived. To be viewed correctly, and in this case I felt that it was essential that this piece as a self portrait reflected an anthropomorphic scale of my own, in the region of 6 feet tall, I wanted to raise the piece to be considered both at eye level but also to be reminiscent of the spatiality of my spine. As this was a piece created from 'found objects' and this case, wooden objects, I wanted to have a plinth that  had a similar feel to the piece, not a part of it as such, as in 'Sculpture and Plinth', but to have that same feel as the sculpture itself;the echos of 'sculpture and Plinth' actually abound through this piece, as both pieces rely on their components being balance rather than fixed together. As it happened I was already resting the based of my own spine on the exact plinth I required.

Today has been a busy day in the studio, but not really in the way I would prefer it to be. As is probably evident I have 2 studios at the moment and I have spent most of the last year working in the one in the States so being forced to come back here was a bit of a shock to the system. I've really aligned myself to working in the other space so transitioning to working back here has not been easy. I decided that what I probably needed to do was to spent some time getting to know my space again by rearranging and resetting how it functions. I've spent most of today doing this but it means I've only spent a little while making actual work, although I have spent all the rest of the time thinking about my work. Probably because of this reflective time I realised that perhaps I should expand more on some of my 'critical theory' on here to, why I do what I do? Today is actually a good day to do this because I think that I will begin with a manifesto I wrote several years ago rather than write something new tonight when I have little time to think, but the basic premise is this valid. I will put this today for consideration and then I will follow up on it's ideas and perhaps my more current thinking over the next few days and weeks.

'Questions and Paradoxes, Enigmas and Wonders; excerpts from 'The Manifesto of a 'Global Village'-Idiot'.

What is art? Why am I an artist? I'll answer the second question first, as I think I know the answer to it; whereas it's harder to be sure about the first. I am an artist because I feel the need to make art. But surly this creates a paradox, if I'm not sure what art is why do I feel the compulsion to make it and how do I know when I have made it? So back to the first question, what is art? To most of society, art, certainly contemporary art is something of an enigma. Much of my work involves a self-reflective analysis of art and its relationship with society, as I feel that is where the real significance of art lies. Through this process no idea is considered too big or small, too banal or outlandish. Indeed I sometimes think that the job of the artist is really to recognise a piece of art work rather than to make one.

It is said that being an artist is the only job that nobody ever asked you to do. That somehow suggests that art is an extra, an indulgent, not one of life's necessities. I was recently asked to comment on the idea of 'indulgence' in art for a magazine article. The writer's thinking was about the kind materials that artists use, for me the idea had stronger connotations. The very idea of being an artist is an indulgence. Here I am doing something, apparently, more for myself than for anybody else; I proved that because nobody asked me to do it. But society accepts it; it, doesn't seem to consider art as an extra. Society is happy to indulge artists; it even seems to need them. So what does society get out of the deal? The answer is that with this indulgence comes a responsibility. Society expects us to ask the kinds of questions and do the kinds of things that it would like to ask and do, but is too timid to. We have to create the kind of things that make people ask questions and yes, even wonder. So society needs the artist, but as it doesn't full understand or trust them, so it keeps them on the fringes of society, like the shaman of old. In a world described as a “global village” artists are the 'global village' - idiots.

I'm guessing that most of you know the significance of today's date? The 22nd May 2017 was the date of the Manchester Arena bombing which claimed the lives of 22 'Mancunian's'. At this time my main studio was based in Mirabel Studios in Manchester, literally across the road from Manchester Arena, in fact my studio window overlooked the 'artists' entrance to the building. I had been in the studio most of the day but as it was a Monday I had left to teach a life drawing lesson. It was on the way home from that lesson that I heard the appalling news. Today, 3 years later I am locked-down in a different studio proximate to a different city and even in a different country. but Manchester will always be my city. And so today as this piece of history is so dominating my mind and memory I have decided to do something that I haven't had much time for during this residency which is to make a one-day piece of art.

As part of today's post I want to note how certain themes and ideas tend to circulate in the mind of an artist and how ideas from one piece of work can resurface at an appropriate moment in another piece of work. I've mentioned in previous blog posts about how the worker bee is the symbol of the people of Manchester; this isn't a new thing, the bee has actually been a heraldic emblem of the city for over 150 years. It stands for the ethic of hard work of both the city and its people and that Manchester has always been a 'hive' of activity. You might remember that I mentioned exhibiting my sculpture, 'Mary's Table' (bottom image) as part of the 'Workhouse' Exhibition at Manchester's Hive Building which was an exploration of the idea of hard work. The hexagonal form of the pencils was used to deliberately echo the comb of the bee hive. This morning as I sat and reflected on what Manchester means to me and all the things that I accomplished in the city, the idea of the hive and the honey comb came into my mind rather than the usual idea of the bee itself, this drove my thinking for the rest of the day.

I 'played' with systems of hexagons in my sketchbook and as my ideas started to correlate I tore pages out of my sketchbook to start making maquettes (above left). These maquettes were created by folding the paper in a similar way that children do when they make paper dolls; this also stimulated a memory of another piece, indeed another paper-cut, that I made and exhibited in a Manchester Art Gallery. 'Paper Scissors Rock' (above centre) was created to be part of the 'Scholar's Rock Exhibition' at CFCCA, then the Chinese Arts Centre in 2010. That piece involved folding newspaper and cutting it with scissors to create the ROCK. This I decided was an appropriate method to employ once again for today's piece' although the larger size and weight of the paper involved with today's piece demanded the use of a very sharp blade as opposed to scissors, (above right).

And so Manchester runs through my mind today and through my work, the soul and spirit of Manchester will always be with me even when I am not there' in the words of the poet Tony Walsh, aka, 'Longfella', 'This is the place'.