My Influences - Artists

Amy Sillman 

“Painting is a physical thinking process to continue an interior dialogue,” Amy Sillman states, “a way to engage in a kind of internal discourse, or sub-linguistic mumbling…”

 According to her Saatchi profile,

Her paint techniques mirror the convergence of unconscious thoughts: rock rendered with the chalky texture of rubbings, sunset as violent deep orange slashes, birds and flowers with cartoon folly. Amy Sillman paints with a sense of intuitive immediacy, attempting to purposefully broach the fragmented territory of affect, of embarrassment and awkwardness, conveying a sense of experimentation and discovery within her pensive gestures.

I was less taken by Sillman’s large pieces as above  than I was with her collage of red and black paintings below.

I am as yet unable to produce art in this loose and unstructured vein  like Amy Sillman, but I am intrigued by it. However, I am unable to project meaning on to it. It is not enough for me that art is a visual experience. For me art needs to be a conversation between the artist and the viewer and Sillman’s mumblings are too inarticulate for me. They produce a limited kind of mute admiration within me.

Adam Pendleton

The above works put Adam Pendleton in the same category as Amy Sillman for me. There is a powerful commanding presence of the black and white framed paintings. The fact that Pnedleton is black American may have something to do with the black and whiteness of his chosen medium. Hi practice flows between painting, photography, video and performance and his work centres on ‘an engagement with language and the re-contextualisation of history through appropriated imagery in order to create as Pendleton explains, ‘ a future where new historical narratives and meanings can exist’. What is interesting to me in both Sillman’s and Pendleton’s pieces is that each unit of art is fundamentally incomplete on its own but with its companions,  and in the context of the whole presentation, each unit makes a powerful statement along with the voices of the other units. I like the tighter style of Pendleton as compared with Sillman, and the fact that he frames the individual pieces means to me that  the work has an importance that demands attention. But the fact that the text and images are essentially conceptual means that I can walk past the piece without it having created enough in the way of conversation or meaning within me.

Tom Friedman

 Tom Friedman is another conceptual artist who uses multiple units to make a single statement.

However his work, to me is more accessible to meaning and interpretation. Tin the work below I am fascinated by his use of humour,  his choice of the symbol of a dot to convey everyday human life and meanings and his use of text to communicate his meanings. For example in the work below, he uses a circle of dots and titles this ‘Group therapy’; he uses a large centrally place dot and calls this, ’Close up’ and dots of many different sizes to depict ‘Diversity’. Once the viewer gets the hang of his meanings, s/he is left to interpret the remaining dot configurations on their own. I am also taken by the fact that he uses markers and ordinary notebook paper upon which to do his art, a rouse that I use in my  6 am Paintings to covey ordinariness.

Bob and Roberta Smith

 Bob and Roberta Smith (original name Patrick Brill) is an artist whose use of text and autobiography to describe and challenge the status quo is fascinating to me. Here again I see the power of  political art. His letter to Michael Gove   is an art piece without parallel. The way he intersperses large colourful works within a panorama of autobiographical text (See below) is an idea that I am taking forward in the 6 am pieces which will be flounced by more colourful pieces such as ‘Nimmi in three languages’

 Charlotte Prodger       The Turner Prize        Tate Britain             

26th September 2018 – 6th January 2019.

There were four finalists for the Turner prize in 2018. But the one that was outstanding to me was indeed the winner: Charlotte Prodger (Prodger 2018). Each of the four finalists produced moving images around often very political issues. What was singular to me in Prodger’s work was the combination of prosaic technology (she used her iPhone over a period of a year to capture all her images), autobiography (which details experiences of being queer in a straight world) and landscape (she films all her work in the highlands of Scotland) to create an intriguing piece of reasonable length (33 minutes) called ‘Bridgit’. While one never sees actual images of people in this work, Carly Whitefield, in an interview with Charlotte Prodger published in the catalogue of the exhibition, describes the work as ‘intimate, embodied and deeply personal’. The film is hard to explain but to me the most significant aspects of it are the clips related to being lesbian (‘Are you a boy or are you a girl?’) and to aspects of the interior of her own home as set in a Scottish landscape which is filmed from the window of a moving train.

Joan Jonas        The Tate Modern       14th March – 5th August 2018

In the same vein, the Tate Modern held an exhibition of the video and performance art of Joan Jonas who is acclaimed to be a pioneer over 5 decades in this field. Jonas addresses both the personal and the political detailing topics such as climate change and extinction in works such as Lines in the Sand and the Juniper Tree. I am again struck by the power of autobiography and politics in capturing audience attention. I realise via this exhibition that art is a two way process: as I portray my own inner realities in the context of my own outer realities I may create a resonance within the viewer and thereby my art will act as therapy (de Botton & Armstrong, 2017).

Modigliani    Tate Modern        23 November 2017 – 2 April 2018

View The Making of the Modigliani VR below.