Rosalind Barker

The National Gallery Study Day with Colin Wiggins

   Colin Wiggins by Frank Auerbach.

This study day comprised of a full day’s travel through centuries of artwork and history of the NG building. We engaged with an overwhelming breadth of knowledge,offered to us in an anecdotal and amusing lecture/performance. Mr Wiggins  has a wonderful self effacing  rapour under which is a phenomenal intellectual mastery of the NG collection. A true ‘National treasure’ and we should all be saving not to purchase a painting  but to have his brain, humour and knowledge preserved for the Nation! Nothing phased him as we circumnavigated gaggles of small children perched in front of his next designated painting and a full fire evacuation into Trafalgar Square. He changed picture destination with good humour and gathered an appreciative crowd of visitors to our group.

We started in the Sainsbury Wing with a masterclass in how to fake architectural perspective. The columns having been designed to frame and enhance the altarpiece to imitate it’s original setting and viewer perspective. The interior architecture of the Sainsbury wing was designed around specific paintings.

Cima da Conegliano ‘The incredulity of St Thomas’     c1502-4

I was surprised by the tricks and illusions that many of the artists employed.Looking at ‘Christ washing the Disciples feet’ by Tintoretto we all dutifully stood directly in front of the rather flat painting. We were then asked to move  sideways and back, replicating the position the poorer members of the congregation would have been located in the church.The painting sprung into life as we all assumed the correct perspective view. We were reminded that none of these religious paintings were intended for galleries but were mainly site specific with location and light dictating the painting

 

 

 

 

 

The National Gallery Project

I came away with a head full of discussions about perspective, illusion, how the viewer’s eye is directed round the painting and frames. I remembered a ridiculous conversation I  had in Knowle Park while walking the dogs . I was wondering if dogs understood perspective when they saw the deer, or did they think there were hundreds of mice sized life forms that had an intriguing smell?

Gaston Bachelard in ‘The poetics of space’ discusses ‘miniature’. Men ‘look the size of flies’ and how odour creates an entire environment in the world of the imagination.

 

 

 

The purpose of our study day was to introduce us to the collections at the National Gallery as  a catalyst  to create new work.

I spent several hours considering paintings by Pietro Longhi, Rubens, Hogarth, Garofalo. I considered adding and subtracting objects to certain genre paintings, dressing nudes or giving ornate jewellery to peasants.

I kept cycling back to the small ( 64.2 x 45.5 cms) Quinten Massy ‘An old woman’ such tender mark making in oil on wood to replicate the tissue paper skin of her breasts and each embroidery stitch in her hat. Her hat appealed to my love of drawing lace. What really drew me to her were her bitten dirty finger nails and her arthritic hands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I researched the painting and discovered her costume was nearly a centuary out of fashion. That the rosebud she is holding is a symbol of love or engagement. That this is a diptych and a ‘An old man’ was shown along side her at the National gallery in 2008. Held in a private collection this was also painted in 1513.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

Egil’s bones Viking skull  featuring Paget’s disease

A medical research project was conducted in 2008 and the opinion of Michael Baum Prof of Surgery at University Collage London was a  diagnosis of  osteitis deformans (Pagets Disease)  which features bone malformation. Paget’s disease disrupts the normal cycle of bone renewal and repair,  resulting in bone being replaced at a faster rate than usual. This leads to enlarged bones that are weak and brittle, weakened and deformed. The UK has the highest incidence in the world.

Also see Ref Paget’s disease in a painting by Quinten Metsys (Massys) British Medical Journal Dec 23rd 1989  by J Dequeker  p1579-81

Although at the time of this article it was thought Massey copied Leonardo Da Vinci, it was later proved that Leonardos Grotesque was a copy from the Massey painting.

My fascination with hands

Those dirty bitten nails and purposeless hands really attracted my attention.

There is a lot of pointing goes on in the National Gallery collection paintings! Sketches of hands moving with a purpose, hers are rather  lost as if she didn’t know quite what to do with them and felt unhappy about delicately trying to hold the rose.

I started to think about life size drawn hands trying to hold something, being placed on either side of a gallery then add a connecting line. A line of ? drawn, 3D, paper, wire, thread, string. What can you make a line with that has unusual properties, what about a non stable media like a rubber band? Hands intent on focusing on accomplishing an achievement.

I then decided to play using my hands on an A4 flatbed scanner, hoping it would pick up my old tissue paper skin to replicate hers . They were too close to add a line of any consequence. I moved onto an A3 colour scanner.

 

 

The colour scanner gave a Caravaggio  like quality to the image, further enhanced by leaving the scanner lid up to create an impression of a black velvet backdrop. I spent several hours scanning my hands as I realised that the line could replicate the multiple illusions and tricks used in the National Gallery paintings  and be an invisible line, to draw the viewer in. I hoped that the initial impression is that they appear to be holding a taught ultra fine line of minuscule proportion, like a hair. In reality on closer inspection the straight line is an illusion.

Illusion in Nature and Art RL Gregory and E.H Gombrich discusses how ‘only when the falsehood is manifest do we call it an illusion ‘ P35

I did not photoshop or alter the images. I then booked a tutorial with Nelson Crespo to print the image life size (A3) on different quality photographic papers,and selected a satin paper for the final prints.

These thoughts were also influenced by me reading Tim Ingold’s  ‘Lines:A brief history’  and Juhani Pallasmaa : ‘The Thinking Hand’

The work is to be titled  ‘A Fine line’ and presented in an open archive box, referencing the works on paper held in the collections of the Gallery. I intend the work to be shown on a low matt black plinth so the viewer has to look down, recreating how the images were captured on the scanner. To hang this work on a wall introduces the familiarity of photography to the viewer and they are likely to make the false assumption that ‘A Fine Line’ is a photograph.

 

The National Gallery project Exhibition 28th March 2014

                            

We had visited the Drawing Room as a group to familiarise ourselves with the layout , limitations and potential and in order to negotiate any clashes in favoured locations for our work. One wall is covered in mirrors creating both challenge and opportunities of display.

My selected method of display was a deliberate choice that had considered limited flexibility  and awkward location in the gallery space, plus ease and speed of delivering and installing my piece.

Start of the installation day , small space packed with ,furniture,  bags, people and art. Tanya curated the exhibition, creating unexpected conversations between disparate works until the space appeared light , elegant and approachable for the viewing public. All the group were encouraged to contribute to the final decisions made.

                             

The mirrors were a complex factor incorporated into several of the works.I decided to present my work ‘A Fine Line’ as a mirror image replicating the gallery space by using the printed images 7 and 8. The matt black plinth did not ultimately work installed in the Drawing Room. The work looked elegant presented on a white table above an open plans chest that acknowledged my use of an archive box to display the piece. It had an interesting conversation with Shaun’s adjacent  work.

.  

The Drawing Room at The National Gallery restored to it’s normal appearance 30 minutes after the exhibition closed!

                        

‘Just for the Day’ at Wimbledon UAL

             

        

       

      

Michael Landy ‘Saints Alive’ 1.11.2013 Student study day and visit to the exhibition.

Jenny Sliwka Curator ‘The forgotten Stories’ Apt title as she gave us an express reprise of all the saints Michael Landy had selected and their source both as story and how they had been portrayed in the National Gallery ‘s painting collection. This was a surprising amount of information on Saints and their belief systems that ultimately led to their demise that was both familiar but rather sadly forgotten, unregistered in the depths of my memory.

Points that resonated

That the bulk of these images read as ‘paintings’ in the gallery collection are in fact fragmented parts of much bigger alter pieces. These are ‘Frankenstein’ amalgamations of sometimes diverse paintings by the whim if wealthy collectors. These images would have been viewed by the original viewers within the bigger landscape of a church interior and were created as a small focus for devotion.

Think about mixing parts of works to create a cohesive but also discordant whole.

Martyrs became ‘cult’ figures creating a huge demand for body parts and clothing fragments. This in turn stimulated a prolific increase in the production of iconography.

‘The Golden Legend’ is a 13^th Cent book of all the saints’ lives.

 Gill Perry ‘Playing with Michael Landy’

Prof Perry gave us a broader insight into how this body of work fitted with previous Kinetic work. ‘Credit card destroying machine’ shown at Frieze in 2011.

Landy’s admiration for Jean Tinguely and their joint show ‘Joyous Machines’at Tate Liverpool.2004,  a reminder that I saw ‘Semi-detached’ in the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain and “Scrapheap Services’ 1996 at Tate Modern. Where Landy uses tiny paper people to represent the disposal of undesirable elements of society, continuing his critique of the mechanisms of capitalism and consumerism, which led to 3 years of work culminating in  ‘Breakdown’ in 2001. I still have my small paper person that survived ‘scrapheap services’ by escaping on the bottom of my boot!

 Michael Landy in discussion Colin Wiggins

Landy appears quite bemused by The National Galleries choice of him for the residency. I found Landy’s body language defensive; he is shy and appeared quite pink at times. Why am I always surprised that even ‘famous’ artists can appear flustered by public appraisal and discussion of their work? Does that make me feel any more confident about my apprehension and avoidance of discussing my work in public?

It is always fascinating to hear the retrospective evolution of a 2-year project discussed.  This folio represents a contemporaneous account of how things will evolve in my practice and thought processes over the 2 years of my MA Drawing but it will only be in retrospect that I will be able to see the trail that will formulate my practice in 2015.

He discussed as a method of finding his way in, looking and daydreaming that then evolved to drawing copies. He stressed these drawings should not be given any special status such as interpretations or personal responses, they were always fragments never the whole painting.

The final kinetic sculptures standing 10-12 feet high could be reviewed as heretical and he questioned if he was anarchic in response to the reverence of the ‘National’ gallery.

 

 

The images of the sculptures and their actuality are surprising. Their scale and sound invoke all the horrors of martyrdom and as they lurch around fighting their restraints that hold them to the gallery floor the viewer has an insight into the nearness and ever-present specter of their own death.

The walls of high-resolution reproductions of collaged bits of saints on coils of metal conjured up in my mind the early animations of Terry Gilliam in Monty Python. 

 

 

The appearance of the actual kinetic sculptures, especially Multi-Saint reaffirmed this.

 

The video following the two-year evolution of the project was insightful. It reinforced my thoughts about the strange nature of artists who seek to be challenged to pursue leaps of creativity under extreme pressure. Is the attraction the intellectual, creative or financial challenge?

 

In my case it is the intellectual/creative challenge hampered by the financial as the affordability, governs the outcome of my proposed concept. Landy must have had financial reward and funding provided. I wanted to ask if the work remains the property of the artist or the National Gallery, Ron Muicks work has been widely exhibited since his residency so that implies I have answered my own question! 

 My love of linear drawing leaves ‘Nourishment’ the life size etchings of weeds found in the street by the artist as my conceptual and resolved presentational favorite. Landy “They are marvelous optimistic things you find in inner London” The work while expressly different to all his ‘mechanical/machine’ dominated installations still links strongly to his themes of investigating the marginalized and overlooked. The aspect that resonates with me is their growing in the midst of a hostile, urban landscape their adaptable tiny lives prospering in crevices and little bits of soil. Studying on the MA I can book an appointment to visit them in the Tate archive