Simon Cutts, 'late starlings startled by traffic resettle', 2003

'late starlings startled by traffic resettle'
Simon Cutts (b.1944)
Edition unknown
220 x 810

2003

£175 (including framing)

2013.016

I saw this last year at Shandy Hall, Coxwold in the exhibition ‘Printed in Norfolk, Coracle Publications 1989-2012’. I’m surprised to find that I took a photo of it in the show. 

This is the last of them. None were available at the time. I tried to buy it without Simon knowing from the curator/owner who rejoices in the name of Patrick Wildgust! This last one was framed flat for the show. It was lovely to see Simon and Erica Van Horn there too and I’m grateful to Simon for remembering that I wanted it and for his encouragement with a project. 

I thought my request to buy it had been forgotten until the other day.

It arrived here only the day before yesterday.

I think they were all supposed to be supplied as a scroll/roll with all the handling that this implies but I prefer it like this. 

Looking at it fresh out of the parcel post it’s just as exciting as I remember and it’s going to look superb in the house when I find a long thin place to put it.

It’s so carefully considered, the two lines offset over each other in similar colours of dark grey and blue.

On one level it’s the visual language of cancelled print. It reminds me of the kind of devices that banks use to send you a secret pin number so that they can’t be seen by villains (Villains who might hold the envelope up to the sky but who are obviously too pusillanimous to simply open the envelope and read it.) or those irritating online security texts, ‘CAPTCHA’, that are randomly distorted but which can still be read by human beings, though not by machines.

The form of the printed words conjure up a literal image of birds from the figure and ground relationship of the letters on the paper prompted, no doubt, by the sense of the words in much the same way as the randomised blots of the Rorschach test acts on the suggestible mind.

If this were such a test I would see a group of starlings lined up in silhouette on an overhead cable, their wings rustling, flexing and popping with the sound a bag makes when it is shaken out.

This line, this short string of words shackled together by their own rhythm, depicts of a flock of birds in the late season gathering before they submit to the collective discipline of flight in an air-bourne shoal where changes of direction appears to be steered by some invisible bond of mutual consent.

Its lyrical feel is intense but unusually for Simon there is also something of an urban feel to it too which reminds me of my first encounter with this line.

I had been appointed by what was then Cleveland Arts in 2002 to organise a competitive process to commission an artist to create a major commission for Marchday PLC who then owned Centre North East in the centre of Middlesbrough. I asked Simon to propose a work for it and he sent me a small orange book with this line in it and a description of how it might appear 10 to 13 floors up on the principal façade in neon lettering that would be illuminated, only when the wind blew, by the operation of a turbine.

It was to be an ‘Aeolian Neon’, his words.

Simon felt it would be right for a townscape environment and that it would work in Middlesbrough.

It was a perfect proposal. It wasn’t chosen though and in an attempt to interest others in the work I sent the book to another commissioner who managed to lose it! 

One such ‘Aeolian Neon’ exists in a private collection in Northumberland.

The commission went to Ron Haselden who created a superb work (also lyrical) simply called ‘Rose’.

For the duration of the commission Rose made a terrific impact. 

I recall once seeing it from the crest of Bowes Moor.

I have a substantial archive of great public art proposals that didn’t happen and Simon’s aeolian neon is one of the best of them. It still galls me that an opportunity to commission other great works (albeit well-mannered ones) from Bill Culbert and Simon Patterson nearby were also lost.

These failures, failures to commission the best work, have been instrumental in my growing disaffection for competitive appointment processes.

It’s a mistake to ‘tender’ for public art, tendering exists solely as a device for mitigating risk the best strategies for managing this kind of risk involve judgement, reputational liability and personal responsibility.

I went through that whole regeneration boom and the resources which went with it seeking to apply, but failing to implement this increasingly strident mantra that rattles round my head… ‘If it were my money would I spend it on this?’

As for Simon’s proposal I’d have had a confidence sapping worry. Not about the work or the context but about the mechanical engineering and the realistic term (approximately six years) for which the operations of an installation like this could be warrantied. 

The proposal felt more like an event (a great one nonetheless) than a permanent proposition to me.


Links
Printed in Norfolk Website
Coracle
Simon Cutts (Dumbarton Oaks)

Benedict Drew, 'The Persuaders', 2012

'The Persuaders'

Benedict Drew (b. 1977)

Achival Pigment Print on Metalurgy 200gsm.

edition 12/50

440 x 440

2012

£120 (including framing)

2013.015

Benedict Drew rhymes with ‘bad review’ which brings me to Adrian Searle’s scathing mention of ‘The Persuaders’ when he wrote up the Circa Projects commissioned project at Newcastle’s 2012 AV Festival.

The Persuaders was an installation of dizzying, ambient nastyness at the Stephenson works in Newcastle. The centrepiece was a film that said ‘Breath in’ ‘Breathe out’. 

The Persuaders had a spectacularly incomprehensible text with it which ended with the words ‘a complaint about the world will be lodged’. Actually like Searle, I had a bit of a ‘wtf’ moment in there too. However, unlike Searle who I saw running out of the installation, like the white rabbit with a judgement to form, the shit flyer with the text on it to help guide his thoughts, a copy deadline and a train to catch… I had time on my side.

When I came out, I saw this multiple on the wall and I thought ‘that’s cool’ so I bought it.

Sometimes there really is no more than that to it.

Anyway Drew finds himself better reviewed in Art Monthly and is named as a ‘future great’ in this month’s Art Review so he rhymes with ‘good review’ too.

It hangs (at the moment) next to the Rayburn which keeps it rather too warm and has a sort of a mashed potato/puff of smoke/letraset/smiley vibe going on.

Context is everything and the context here at home is ‘Kitchen’.

They have some good multiples at Circa Projects. I particularly like Eric Bainbridge’s sausage photo which would also be very ‘kitchen’ I’d buy that too but I know it would inspire a ‘wtf’ moment in my wife and unlike my ‘wtf’ moments which induce a sort of digressive reverie, Lynn’s ‘wtf’ moments are normally accompanied by a scowl of a fortnight’s duration and a list of 200 zillion other things that the money would be better spent on like a new kitchen, Caribbean beach holiday, new and improved husband, etc.

Links

Adrian Searle (AV2012 Festival)

Circa Projects

Art Review, Future Greats

Benedict Drew

Kenneth Rowntree, 'Flora Geometrica', 1988

'Flora Geometrica' 

Kenneth Rowntree (1915 1997)

P.V.A. (Stencil) on Board

650 x 560

1988

£800.00
2013.014

Cat 30 ‘Paintings, drawings and constructions by Kenneth Rowntree : Queens Hall 5th anniversary : a celebration. 1988

Cat 87 in Kenneth Rowntree, 1992 Davies Memorial Gallery touring to National Museum of Wales, Royal Festival Hall.

This painting was a gift to me from my father.  It was purchased by him from Abbot Hall’s late showing of the retrospective organised by Michael Nixon at Oriel 31. I don’t have a copy of the invoice but I think the painting was purchased for either £650 or £800 pounds. When he closed his office in Kendal in 2005 he gave the painting to me and it has hung in our dining room ever since. Today it is well set off by the younger son's industrial supply of 'Terror Eyes' bubble gum. I absolutely love it, the painting, not the gum. There is a circularity to this because it was in fact me who sold the painting to my father. If I’d had the money I could have bought it myself! 

It was bought unframed and I arranged for it to be framed by Alan Harvey up near Banks, his invoice for that is dated 12 Jan 1995. 

It’s a full description ‘Gray painted pine box with straight slip and 2mm glazing. Work floated off ¼” from back and margins as discussed, original backboard with title and signature retained…’ Alan’s choice of gray, made up for the purpose, is perfect.

I remember the occasion clearly because of the other work Alan had in to frame and which I spent ages looking at.

But I digress.

‘Flora Geometrica’ was quite simply the best recent painting in show and I think probably the best overall.

John Milner who eventually succeeded Rowntree as Professor at the Department of Fine Art at Newcastle University (whilst I was an undergraduate there) and who is Rowntree’s biographer has written about the painting on two occasions that I know of.  Firstly when the paint was still wet in 1988 when Rowntree showed at the 5^th Anniversary of the Queens Hall in Hexham. Milner made ‘Flora Geometrica’ both the title and subject of his introduction to the show and secondly in his introduction to the Oriel 31 1992 retrospective in which he reworked and refined his earlier text.

Rowntree was given another retrospective at the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University in late 2003, 6 years after his death, on the occasion of the publication of John Milner’s biography in the which the painting is also referenced.

When I learned of the plans for the show I contacted the gallery and offered to arrange the loan of the painting but didn’t even get a reply which just goes to show what impossible tossers gallery people can be.

This is an extract from the Oriel 31 catalogue:

‘While Rowntree is a shrewd and enthusiastic observer of individual human traits, whether expressed through portraits, still-lifes or constructions, he is also a painter with ambition and ability of another order. He addresses his art to the achievements of other painters and takes his place within a dialogue that concerns the conventions of painting itself. His of art is related to that of Picasso, Braque, Ravilious, Nicholson, Pasmore and Nolan.  There is nothing local about this aspect of his work which relies upon an engaged knowledge of many twentieth century artistic achievements both in Britain and abroad. He has adopted shifting positions in relation to artistic landmarks of the period.

This dialogue with other painters is not local in its language but concerns the grammar and syntax of everything he does.  It is an examination of how painting works and what it can achieve, studied inevitably in the light of what others have made possible before him and in the light of his own long experience as a painter. In this dialogue the same sharp wit and shrewd eye are much in evidence. In this way Cubist painting has offered many possibilities through multiple viewpoints, collage, new systems of perspective and lettering. But other dialogues have occurred which have been just as rich. The gestural brush mark and the formal vocabulary of design have all played their part. Beneath all of this, like a rich vein of precious metal, there exists in Rowntree an inventive and devoted contributor to the unique achievements of British landscape painting.

Buro landschaft is German for open-plan office design. In Rowntree’s version it is its literal meaning of ‘office landscape’ that provokes his imagination into a rehearsal of the shining surface textures of office interiors that approaches but does not quite reach an air of mockery. In the two paintings of 1970 Based upon the theorem off Pythagoras, presented here in the format familiar from school geometry books, Rowntree takes on the traditions of mathematics in art but reverses the usual procedures.  Many painters have discovered a geometry in the still-life objects before them, but Rowntree is the first to make a theorem itself serve as a still-life. Colour, shading and the play of light in such depth and substance to its structure that it could make a vase of flowers . 

Flora Geometrica is a triumph in this respect.  It tilts and turns its silvered crosses is as if geometry were a garden in which the painter could select and pick the choicest flowers to put them in a vase for the pure pleasure of seeing them there.  The crosses are like flowers.  The converse is also true for flowers have the exploding visual impact of his silver crosses. 

The viewer is directly engaged in interpreting the metamorphosis that Rowntree presents.  As a result the experience of his paintings is like a visual dialogue, as rich, witty and enlightening as intelligent conversation.  This conversation is full of invitations, intrigues, surprises and revelations; it has its own poetry which can transform the objects and images he employs.  But the ultimate metamorphosis that he achieves is to transform the visual vocabulary of his viewers by making poetry from the mundane, intimate and yet spectacular visual world that surrounds them.’

John Milner, 24 April 1992. 


Links
Tate Gallery, Kenneth Rowntree

Richard Calvorcoresi's Obituary

Kenneth Rowntree by John Milner

Paintings in Public Collections by Kenneth Rowntree