SUSAN CONNOLLY

SOTP: These interviews traditionally open with a question about the relevance of critical theory to the artist’s practice. To what extent do you connect studio work to this field- is it part of the formulation of work, or more a case of reflection after the work is made?

SC: The materials, theory, ideas and making do not always come together at the same time for me. Most of my studio work comes from time spent looking; considering and questioning much of what I see, read or experience in relation to making objects. I have an established painting process and I am very aware of my methods of working with the material(s) I have chosen to explore, mainly (physical) paint; it is then a process of how to rethink the discipline/ material without sacrificing the medium of paint.

I have spent long periods of time for example making paintings and destroying them simply to learn the limitations of the process I employ- no theory or ideas involved there. For a long time it was very important to me to understand how this stuff worked and during this period it was not about making actual art objects so much as questioning my own interpretation, understanding and use of the material of painting, controlling my natural urge to do more and knowing when to read the signs when something is working.

In relation to reflection, I am constantly reworking or considering how to push my practice forward and I find a really good way to do this is by analysing and accessing previous work to see what more can be achieved (if anything) by continuing certain lines of inquiry. Sometimes I achieve this visually and instinctively, but not always; other times it comes from places such as reading through theory or art history. These are areas I really value and continue to feel are very important within my studio working methods, an integral part of how I make and approach painting.

Susan Connolly/ Studio images/ November 2012

SOTP: What have been the recent showings of your work; have these been instrumental in bringing new or alternative departures in your practice?

SC:  Last year I was involved in a number of group shows but I don’t think any of the shows I have been involved in of late have brought new departures. I just think people/ curators are more open to the aspirations I have for my practice. For example when completing my MFA in 2002 I was working directly onto studio walls, but this process is not an easy sell if you’re showing in spaces which have a high turnover of exhibitions, as the installation of much of my work can take anything up to a week. The outcomes are completely unknown (because of the nature of the process and through the layering and peeling of the paint which can break) and then there is the clean up afterwards.

Susan Connolly/ ‘Unexpected Logic’/ acrylic and household paint and medium, wood support and canvas/ 300x190cm/ 2011

Last year I was invited to show in Red/Rua, an amazing white cube space in South Dublin. This seemed to be the perfect opportunity to think of these works in a more experimental way and thankfully they were up to letting me paint some of their walls slightly blue for the install. I also completed a much larger project last summer, ‘Unexpected Logic’ in VISUAL, Carlow, as part of Eigse Festival and with this work/ installation (my largest to date) I fully realised the importance of scale and site in the reading and experience of these works. The fragility and ephemerality of the work became more and more important, as did how I wanted it to be experienced/ viewed; in a way stripping (these) painting(s) of its self-evident familiarity, by creating a sense of the curious and the peculiar- which can also be read as painting with an identity crisis but always a visual wonder!

SOTP: There is a great plurality in contemporary painting today, ranging from various types of ‘realism’ through to renewed interests in geometrical painting, narrative figuration, gestural abstraction and also expanded practices that work outside of the frame. Where do you place yourself in all of this?

SC: I don’t know is the simple answer to this; I am interested in all aspects of painting/ art, and such labels can limit one’s own interpretation or possible engagement with art that is of value and work that can be of influence. I think it is a very exciting time to be thinking about painting, with all the rhetoric of ‘death’ within the medium proving sheer nonsense again and again. Theory is one way of painting assessing itself but there are many others with very different outcomes, pluralist you might say, but all good and adding to the continued development of painting as a discipline and not painting as a project.

SOTP: Within the expanded field, there seems to exist very indistinct boundaries between what might be considered painting, sculpture and installation. Are these boundaries, or borders, important to you?

SC: Yes these boundaries/ borders are very important to me in the sense that I am always questioning myself as to whether the work I am making is actually a painting. Most of my current research is looking at this, exploring the area of when a painting can no longer be called a painting- when is it just something else?  This could be when photography, installation, sculpture or video has been influenced by painting.

 Susan Connolly/ ‘Homeliography’/ DCR Guest Studio, The Hague, Holland/ 2009

One of the things that attracts me to paint is its limits and equally its limitlessness. I try to investigate these limits by setting boundaries for myself to work within; for example, I am currently only working with Process Colour Paint (a student once told me there was no need for any other tubes of paint, as with these three colours they could paint like Rembrandt) and I also tend to only use the source materials that are intrinsic to the making of a traditional canvas painting- wood, canvas, paint, staples/ tacks, ground. By doing this I reduce painting to its most essential elements, yet with limitless new possibilities.

Sometimes work that professes itself as painting is simply not painting and I am aware of this every time I make something in the studio; it is still very important to me to hold on to actual painting, but maybe I’ll get over this idea of medium specificity someday.

SOTP: Some recent works (that might be considered more akin to sculpture) you have entitled ‘still lives’. What was the motivation behind this?

SC: Ah, well I have been thinking about the term ‘still life’ and its relevance to historical painting and also the idea of capturing the gesture of an object through the layering of paint on a canvas. I was also wondering what it might be like to make an actual image of a real thing; with most of my work being monochromatic and leaning towards reductive, making a judgement call on what is ‘worthy’ of painting into an image is extremely difficult.

Susan Connolly/ ‘Still Life- Falling’/ acrylic paint, ceramic object, canvas/ 30x10cm/ 2010-11

Much of the painting I am attracted to is image-based and sometimes I battle within myself to see the worth of some of my own inquires. Therefore in this body of work I set out to make an image, or an illusion of an image. I was thinking about making randomly constructed objects from figurines (I have always been fascinated by the naffness and sentimentality people place on such mass produced objects) and collected and constructed a number of small sculptural ‘things’; this is when the painting began as I then proceeded to apply paint which I peeled away in layers, painting the object out of itself and giving it a new form through the painting process and the peeling and revealing. This was the first step within this ‘still life’ project. Some of the objects also became sculptural fragments from previous paintings. This is a recurring theme when making my work, all of which is predominantly intuitive and subjective.

Susan Connolly/ ‘Still Life- Fold’/ acrylic paint, medium, ceramic object/ 15x10cm/ 2010-11

When they were shown last year I installed them in a way that you could view them as flat surfaced paintings from a distance as well as three-dimensional spaces, stepping ‘inside’ or ‘around’ the painting. I am currently working on a number of actual paintings of the objects/ paintings; I’m not sure as to how this will work out, but as with much of my practice it comes from previous work or questions I have about how the work may operate if thought differently or constructed in a new way.

SOTP: What was the last visual encounter you had, with anything at all, that had an impact on your studio work?

SC: My visual encounters tend to come from rather unlikely places, for example I recently saw a small blue square painted on a massive hoarding sign which could only be viewed via a motorway roundabout. It intrigued me for weeks until finally I came back with my camera to discover it had been transformed into a Lidl advertising sign. Colour and its effect upon the urban and rural environment is something I’m drawn to and I have made paintings/ interventions which are directly related to this. The last visual encounter of this kind I had, which really has had an effect within my studio work, came from a project I was involved with earlier this year and was actually not really a visual encounter so much as an experience of watching people encountering a visual experience. The project, a collaboration between University College Dublin architecture department, Dublin City Council and the National College of Art and Design, involved developing interventions in and around the Grafton Street area of Dublin in response to the Council’s ongoing regeneration project. The challenge for me became about working through research and ideas in a visual way, while also making a work which would have a direct relationship to my own studio practice.

As an artist who mostly makes work for galleries, what I learned from this public gesture was the possibility of mass audiences encountering an artwork in the most unexpected way and the effect it can have. It has given me a whole new way to think about audience, the making of a temporary artwork and how to address the many issues which arise in relation to my own practice. Making work of this nature leads to considerations of how it fits within the expanded field of painting practice.

 

Susan Connolly/ ‘themonumentsdayoff’/ Stephen’s Green, Dublin/ various dimensions/ 2012

full information about the project can be found on

http://themonumentsdayoff.wordpress.com

SOTP: Which painters and paintings, now or from the recent or distant past, have influenced you?

SC: The things I find of influence are extremely varied and not always painting or painters. The Conceptual and Minimalist artists/ writers from the 1960s and 70s influence me. The work of people like Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Blinky Palmero, Ad Reinhardt and writers such as Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Robert Rauschenberg is someone whom I consistently find something new to think about within his vast oeuvre.

Susan Connolly/ ‘Everything and Nothing’/ acrylic and household paint, wood support and canvas/ 240x320cm/ The Cross Gallery, Dublin/ 2011

Other artists I am drawn to as of late are Ellsworth Kelly, James Turrell, Isa Genzken, Richard Tuttle, John Baldessari, Olafur Eliasson, Callum Innes, Merlin James, Karla Black, Rachel Harrison, Katharina Grosse, Mikala Dwyer (after recently seeing an excellent show earlier this year in the Project Arts Centre, Dublin) and Fergus Feehily.

SOTP: You have been involved in higher level art education for a number of years now. What has been your experience of this, both as a student and lecturer? Is it a good time to be at art college?

SC: Education, and the time and space to develop that is offered in Art School, is an amazing opportunity to anyone who is ready to commit themselves, so anytime is a good time to be at art school/ college- thankfully students do not exist or experience in the same way that lecturers do within the institutions/ colleges, so even though there are massive changes happening in relation to funding, fees and structure the one positive is that all of the art schools here in Ireland have some amazing lecturers who are completely committed to the idea of creative education and value the role of the arts/ artist within society.

I do worry though about students’ expectations when they finish art school; it is hard to know as a student the difficulties and challenges that lie ahead in pursuing a long-term career in the arts. Art school can be a bubble in this sense.

Another thing that has changed dramatically since my days in art school is the over- dependency on the Internet for information. It seems everyone can now view any show anywhere in the world and feel that they have experienced the artist’s/ work’s intention. Even though in my undergraduate days there was far less to see, the actual experience of seeing work cannot be understood fully through digital media. As a tool the Internet is great, it has made us all more globally aware, more international and less self-satisfied; but I do feel there is a danger of young students/ artists not really knowing about art history, about the time things take to resolve/ make and worse still about the physical experience of viewing artworks.

Susan Connolly was born in Dublin, studied at Limerick School of Art and Design (BA, 1994-1998) and the University of Ulster at Belfast (MFA, 2000-2002). She is currently based in Kildare.

Lecturing duties have included LSAD Painting Department (2002-2003) and  IADT Visual Art Practice (2006-2009), and she is currently employed by Waterford Institute of Technology in the Fine Art Department (since 2006 ). She is also currently studying on ACW (Art in the Contemporary World) at NCAD, Dublin.

Recent exhibitions include ‘Airport for Shadows’ at The Cross Gallery, Dublin, ‘Constellations’ at Visual, Carlow and ‘Connections’ at Red/Rua, Dublin.

Upcoming exhibitions include a 3-person show in Solstice Art Centre, Navan curated by Carissa Farrell, in late 2013.

www.susanconnolly.com

JEFFREY DENNIS

SOTP: SOTP is interested in how painters think about Critical Theory in relation to their practice. Or if indeed it is a driver of work at all. How would you describe the importance of theoretical discourse to your work?

JD: All paintings have a theoretical aspect: they result from a highly cultivated and artificial activity, one which is also physical and dependent on a familiarity with the world of sensations. A colleague habitually refers to artists whose thinking, or theoretical discourse, he considers insufficiently developed as ‘dumb makers’. I don’t believe there are such artists; just good makers and less good ones! There are some extremely intelligent, conceptually-led artists working today who turn their hand to painting. But sometimes the results lack the ‘complexity-in-depth’ that the best paintings have, and which would keep you returning to re-engage with the work. Paintings may fail if the thinking (or theory) that underpinned them is not supple enough to support the painting; like a floor laid by a carpenter who’s forgotten to allow for the expansion and contraction of the wood.

Encountering the right idea at the right time can be like a rocket under you! I think I’m just about bright enough to recognise one when it comes along, but if I needed another sack of critical theory every time I started the next painting, I wouldn’t get much done. It’s more frequently to do with a continuous engagement. Painting as an activity seems to lose any sense unless you are doing it more or less daily. My friend Simon Callery says if he pauses a painting for a weekend, he struggles to remember what it was all about.

My own painting is a very untidy project, and so my relationship to theory is rather difficult to map. The very stuff I’m working with – its physical pressure – seems continually to force me off-message, and I have learnt to work with that. If it’s the experience of the painting that you are interested in, then you have to allow for diversion (a useful word: it expresses being forced off-track, but also being entertained!) It’s quite a physical thing, with a hefty weight of paint in places. That may not come across in reproduction. Sometimes people assume the paintings consist simply of montaged imagery. But the slippage that happens, when imagery is rendered from other media into paint, and where paint is applied almost as glue, or mortar: that’s the life of it really.

Jeffrey Dennis/ The Master of Small Things/
oil and charcoal on canvas/ 142 x 122cm/ 2007

SOTP: As SOTP comes out of Northern Ireland, it is interesting to note your exhibition of 1993 at the old Orchard Gallery in Derry. Looking at the catalogue essay by Stuart Morgan, he had described some of the works as having the ‘bulge’ of television tubes. SOTP is struck by the fact that your resolutely consistent structuring of paintings over the years has nevertheless remained very much ‘of the now’, and remains very much connected to contemporary ways of seeing. To use a language term, why have you continued in this idiom?

JD: I want to mention that the tremendous opportunity to exhibit at the Orchard came out of the blue. The gallery’s director, Noreen O’Hare, was enormously enthusiastic about the work, and insisted I come over to see Derry beforehand. I had been aware of the gallery’s extraordinary record of significant exhibitions, but what I also understood, when I had spent some time there, was that the gallery was held in very high regard by the people living in the city, and that it was a vital ‘hub’ for the arts, with artists from all over Ireland dropping in. I’ve more to say about that experience later.

Regarding consistency within the work, there have been one or two moments when just about everything about the work changed. But having developed an ‘idiom’ that seemed to have potential, I have been keen to mine it as deeply as possible. To some extent, it only develops meaning with persistence. I have really noticed this change over twenty years: from the rapid turnover of ideas and forms, some years back, to the almost sedimentary accumulation of matter and content in more recent work.

The other part of your question related to the paintings’ relations to the contemporary world; depicting or reflecting aspects of ‘the here and now’. As a student I wasted a lot of time deluding myself that serious painting involved the exclusion of much of contemporary life. Then I gradually understood that it would be more fruitful for me to explore the margins of the medium; the zones that painting may share with other media: film, television, photography, the imagery of popular culture, even the non-visual, narrative and text. Granting myself this freedom seemed like quite a big deal when I was at the Slade: in 1970s Bloomsbury any legacy of Pop Art had been left to wilt like an unwatered pot plant. Suddenly, much more seemed possible, and I was able to be much more inclusive in how I constructed paintings. Of course, I wasn’t the only artist to have this realisation around that time. The critic Achille Bonito Oliva in the introduction to his 1985 show Le Nuove trame dell’Arte, in which I was included, noted that there was “ … the possibility of the work to represent not only the fragmentary pulse of the creator but also his relationship to the world. This relationship is the fruit of a linguistic model which synthesizes within itself an artistic vision and the constant rapport of an artist to his reality.”

However (and this relates to ‘sedimentary accumulation’), there is a cliché about the image-overload of contemporary life, with some kind of ecstatic drift through random mediated imagery as the only possible artists’ strategy to reflect this. There is something else; a kind of persistence of imagery that you notice if you have a daily journey through part of a city: perhaps a 1970s ‘Visit Jamaica’ poster, bleached to pale blue, that no-one in the travel agent’s office can be bothered to replace, or the ‘GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT’ graffiti that endured long after the gangster had been caught ‘bang-to-rights’ for the second time. These are tokens of a historical discontinuity that tends to get glossed over. Perhaps the pace of painting – how it allows for layering and de-synchronicity – may be more suited to reflect this kind of experience, these kinds of connections.

SOTP: The French poet and writer Paul Valery wrote with great foresight that in the future all of our images and sounds would be piped straight into the home. One of the reasons your paintings appear to keep updating themselves is that in the face of our increasingly ‘virtual’ world of the digital, your very real and tangible painted surfaces of bubbles (read pixels), pipes (read optical fibre cables) and montage scenes (read computer windows opened together on a single screen) are keeping Painting ahead of the game. Does it strike you this way?

JD: I am of course aware that the way I have been ‘insetting’ spaces within paintings is somewhat like computer-screen windows. As a picturing strategy, I developed it in the mid 1980s, quite a long time before I ever touched a computer. It’s one of those cases where there is an interesting convergence. It was something that allowed me to bring together different areas of visual experience, and different currencies of paint-handling in one place. As I mentioned earlier, I feel painting has the potential to adopt a discourteous mimicry of the idioms employed by other media. Early on, I became envious of film-makers: they can cut away, pan, track, jump back and forth in a narrative. Of course they use time and sequencing to achieve this. I asked ‘how do you do that with a painting?’

The pipes and tubes emerged from my long immersion in the urban environment; working and living in buildings that were falling apart or in constant state of repair and renewal. I also have a great collection of photos of road-works! I still find myself paying unreasonable attention to the down-pipe arrangements on buildings. It’s similar to the anatomist’s curiosity to expose the body’s network of veins and arteries.
The ‘bubblescape’ developed as an analogue manipulation and extension of certain observed phenomena, like the bubbles of detergent in a kitchen sink. What it offered was a way of modulating, by layers of small marks, the atmospheric density of the picture space; a permeable, breathable space could also become a hard and pebbly, resistant surface.

Road-works, Whitehall, London, 2011

SOTP: Who have been your main Painting influences over the years, both in historical and recent terms?

JD: Early on, David Trenow, an artist and musician who taught at my secondary school. By actually working on his own paintings and sculptures in class while he was teaching, he made the pursuit of art look feasible. He was then a recent graduate from Hornsey; enthusiastic, witty and superbly untainted with that joyless earnestness that always threatens to clog art education.

At the Slade I fell under the influence of a kind of awkward squad of painters who at that time were trying to find ways forward from Anglo-American abstraction: Mick Moon, Christopher LeBrun, Michael Porter, Ed Whittaker.
After graduation I was fortunate to stumble into a part-time job at Whitechapel Gallery. Serota was just getting into his stride, presenting a succession of shows by artists that no-one before had told me about: Richter, Lupertz, Beckman, Guston, Kahlo, Keifer, Baselitz, Atkinson, Morley, Clemente, Schnabel; it was the best possible postgraduate experience I could have hoped for.

The East End in wider terms provoked consideration of different kinds of assertive figuration. Around the corner from the Whitechapel, Brick Lane was plastered with posters for Bengali films, where you would often get a jumble of characters from the film depicted at different scales. In Limehouse you could see old banners of the trade union movement at the old Museum of Labour History (now in Manchester). There also was still plenty of work visible by the East End Mural artists, including Ray Walker.

Film posters from the 'Palaseum' Cinema, Commercial Road,
Stepney, c.1984

Part of a trade union banner from the old Museum of Labour History,
Limehouse, c.1984


The ‘New Image’ tendency overheated quite quickly: everyone (including some former hard-line minimalists and conceptualists!) was suddenly painting huge, dramatic figures. But I found the paintings of Nicholas Africano at about that time, and a little later Öyvind Fahlström. Both deserve to be more widely known. Both of them provided important ideas about alternative ways to structure a painting; an economy of means.
I’ve tried to keep looking where others weren’t. I also spent time looking at painters and craftsmen associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement (I’m probably still the only artist to have discussed John Everett Millais in a lecture for Goldsmiths Fine Art course!) I still use the wallpaper and tapestry designs of William Morris as an (eventually hidden) armature to nearly every painting.

Jeffrey Dennis/ The New Refusniks/ oil and charcoal on canvas/
36 x 47cm/ 2009

SOTP: Going back to your Derry connection: a Google search for ‘The Siege of...’ quickly offers up Derry as the number one search term, and Leningrad as number 4. In 2000 you were commissioned by the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham to produce a work which you entitled ‘The Siege of Birmingrad’, in which you layered a fascinating series of disparate histories. This work appears all the more prescient in the light of the recent London Riots which spread to Birmingham and Manchester. It was also another example of your tendency to sometimes ‘move out of the frame’. Can you say something about these aspects of your practice?

JD: It was mildly surreal to visit Derry. I spent my teenage years in Colchester, garrison town of the Parachute Regiment. There were some pubs it was generally thought unwise to enter if your hair was longer than collar-length. When I visited Derry, a place that looks to me much like Colchester, I was shocked (even though I had grown up watching the news-footage of bombs and riots) to see foot patrols of the same troops in full camouflaged battle-kit, padding cautiously through the town, assault rifles pointing in all directions. Of course the locals had lived through more than twenty years of it, and were getting on with their shopping. It was an almost comic juxtaposition.

Many cities are like clusters of villages that have expanded until they have been squashed together. This is particularly my impression of Birmingham. Very different communities live alongside each other, usually quite happily. For the Ikon commission, I wanted to speculate on what would happen if this co-existence broke down, as happened in Sarajevo. It was a way to celebrate a catastrophe not happening! The form of the work was deliberately unfinished, changing throughout the exhibition; an analogy for how ‘town-planning’ is constantly outflanked by actual events and by the way people actually choose to use their cities.

I now live in Tottenham. The fact that thirty different languages were spoken at my daughter’s school is certainly not the cause of it becoming the epicentre of the recent disturbances. But now it’s my neighbourhood that’s burning down, it would be strange not to consider making a painting that somehow touches on these events. That’s what I’m working on now.
I just mentioned Morris: in his novel News from Nowhere there is a visionary collapsing of time and alternative futures. One episode, a description of Victorian civil unrest in Trafalgar Square, seems to forecast the London poll-tax riots of 1990, and the book seems to share some territory with Philip K.Dick’s The Man in the High Castle where the narrator encounters ‘bubbles’ of alternative realities.

Jeffrey Dennis/ The Artist Successfully Levitating in the Studio/
oil and charcoal on canvas/ 35.5 x 40.5cm/ 2011

SOTP: Finally, you continue to have strong connections to- and influence in - Fine Art higher education. What are the challenges and exciting things within this today, for both tutor practitioners and students?

JD: I don't think I have much influence. I’ve never, for more than a short time, ever actually ‘run’ anything. Probably just as well! But I guess I have visited about ninety percent of the art colleges in the UK at one time or other.
A big challenge will be how to continue to accommodate artists as teachers within what has become an increasingly ‘pedagogically-professionalised’ system. I started working in art schools in the most casual way. That route, of being absorbed into teaching almost by osmosis, is drying up.
I belong to the first generation of UK art students to get a degree rather than a diploma, the change that some of my older colleagues regard as the point where things started to go wrong. I can’t share that view. Stephen Farthing, who ran the Ruskin, used almost to have punch-ups with Oxford academics from other disciplines who voiced their scepticism about whether Fine Art can possible be worth a degree. He was absolutely right to defend the academic credibility of the field. But a BA, an MA or a PhD will never be a prerequisite to being an artist. There has recently been a lot of fresh thinking about alternatives to the established art schools (just Google: ‘alternative art school’ or ‘the future of art education’) and I would hope this will develop the critical momentum to change the landscape.

We are fortunate that art schools still attract really inventive, questioning, ambitious students, and there are plenty at Chelsea where I work now. We shall soon see what effect the rise in fees is going to have, but I have to say that, currently, the demographic mix on the course I teach is wider than it’s ever been in the past. I enjoy being there too. One day, I was waiting for the elevator. The doors opened to reveal the lift-cage completely rammed: four students, with guitar, drums, keyboard, saxophone, amps; noodling their way through some improvised free jazz number. As the doors closed and I turned to take the stairs, I thought ‘This is a good place to work’.


Jeffrey Dennis was born in Colchester, England, and studied at The Slade in London. He has been a Lecturer in Fine Art at The Ruskin School in Oxford and Chelsea College of Art and Design.

His most recent solo show was ‘Extracts from the Log’ at Michael Richardson’s Art Space Gallery in London in 2008.

He’s currently working on the next painting.

EVELYN O'CONNOR

SOTP: One of the objectives of Subjects of the Painter is to see if there are any past or current debates within the critical field with which interviewees have an interest- in other words, where the intersections are between studio practice and critical theory. How important is this idea to your work?

EO’C: My studio practice is steeped in critical theory and has always informed my work. Past issues ranging from the Gestalt, to Clement Greenberg’s theories on the presence of an artwork, to Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt have all informed my work. The manner whereby Brecht provides his viewers with an emotional distance in order to enable consideration on what is being presented in an objective way, provides an important narrative to my work. This translates into my artwork through the size of the objects. The larger the artwork the more we are forced to keep our distance from it; it distances the beholder, not just physically but psychologically.

One not only learns to walk. One walks as an Irish woman/ 2010




SOTP: You graduated last year from the Painting course at Limerick School of Art and Design, and have just participated in a group exhibition ‘Fumes of Formation’ at QSS Gallery in Belfast. You are clearly interested in ideas of ‘expanded practice’ within Painting. What motivating factors have led you in this direction, away from ‘the frame’ as it were?

EO’C: Personally, the idea of building something from nothing has always intrigued me. By this, I mean there is no canvas to start with and every physical aspect of the work has to be invented. I didn’t want to accept the physical parameter of the rectangular canvas as the beginning point for the majority of artwork I wanted to make. However, some aspects of the canvas still intrigued me; for example, how attention is brought to the surface of the canvas by the paint. I attempt to do this when painting an object, to draw attention to its surface and emphasise its three dimensionality.

The scaffolding that holds my consciously dancing hands and feet/ 2010



SOTP: A very interesting show in Seattle a couple of years ago- ‘Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-1978’- highlighted the many different ways that the idea of this ‘frame’ has been challenged by artists. This legacy has been built upon by artists ranging from Jessica Stockholder, Phyllida Barlow, Angela De La Cruz, Victoria Morton and Karla Black. Interestingly as well, the cover of the publication for the above exhibition has Niki De Saint Phalle firing a rifle as part of one of her works. Do you feel there is a particularly ‘female’ sensibility in this approach to ‘breaking out of the frame’, one which might be seen to challenge the history of male dominated frame painting?

EO’C: Undeniably there is a female approach to this topic, and no one can ignore the fact that male artists have dominated the history of painting. However, I cannot help but feel that just because a frame isn’t physically present in the work, that an approach to a type of framing isn’t there. Although not literally framing their artworks or putting them on a plinth, the work of the artists you mention is ‘framed’ by putting it in the institution of the gallery. So although these female artists might be attempting to break away from the history of the frame, I think it’s easier said than done.

Follow: Second right, straight, right, left, straight, right, and last left/ 2011



SOTP: What has inspired you in the making of work, when it comes to looking at films, or reading something, or looking at anything around you? Is there one or more encounter which has excited you outside of the studio and allowed you to make a connection back to your own work?

EO’C: Inspiration comes from a variety of different sources but mainly it comes from walking around cities, and shops in particular. The architecture of buildings, shop interiors and hardware stores can provide inspiration, especially when it comes to rummaging around second-hand shops and salvage yards in particular. You can never tell when something is going to inspire you, as was the case when I visited a Co-op yard where a discarded display stand for mouldings was being throw out. It went on to become the metal structure in my work “No dog too big or small for the Blackpool dog walker.”

(The real and the really made up) Turner mimicking sounds, Shyla Simpson at the dog park and Lauren's impression of a certain Irish man/ 2010



SOTP: Who have been your main artistic influences, contemporary and historical?

EO’C: My main artistic influences are Sarah Sze, Rachel Harrison and Jessica Stockholder. I especially relate to the manner in which their assemblages are carefully composed wholes, with individual elements identifying themselves after careful inspection. This is something that I try to achieve within my work.

The mechanisms of reality/ 2011



SOTP: To end our interview, can you talk about your experiences as a recent Fine Art graduate- what hopes and ambitions you carried with you through art college and what you feel about your next moves into the art world? What are the challenges ahead for new graduates in 2011?

EO’C: The hope I carried throughout college was to become a successful artist but I also knew I wanted to continue with my studies and do a studio- based Masters, which I am aiming to do in the near future. There are undoubtedly many challenges that face 2011 art graduates, and difficulties arise if a graduate tries to make a living solely from their artwork, especially in these economic times. For those who need a job to support their artistic career comes the cost of less time in the studio. At the opposite end of the scale for those who need a job, they are difficult to get. There are many challenges that recent art graduates face, but for all the challenges there are also some amazing opportunities that come in the form of bursaries, residencies and exhibitions. This makes the challenge worthwhile.

No dog too big or small for the Blackpool dog walker/ 2011



Evelyn O’Connor was born in Curraglass, a village in North-East Cork, and graduated from the Fine Art Painting Degree course at Limerick School of Art and Design in 2010.

She recently exhibited in the group show ‘Fumes of Formation’ at Queen Street Studios Gallery in Belfast, and is currently exhibiting in a group show in Cork entitled 'Half and Half'.

She has just completed a bursary which she received from the Contact Studios in Limerick, and has an upcoming solo show in the Back Loft in Dublin this November.

DOUGAL McKENZIE

SOTP is authored this month by Painting students Wanda Johns, Colette Mallon, Sheila McCloskey, Bernie Sweeney, Irene Connolly, Trudy Cummins, Marie-Claire Douglas, Laura Trueman and Margaret Trueman.

SOTP: Historical context is prevalent in your paintings. Has this always been the case?

DMcK: I have always been interested in History- it was my favourite subject at school, perhaps as much as Art- and throughout my studies at art college I was always interested in bringing the two together. My dissertation was on German Art and Politics from 1919-1933, so I've always been interested in this idea of Painting's ties to wider contexts. However, I do not believe in the value of an artist as propagandist or flag waver for a 'cause'.


SOTP: What critical debates in contemporary art do you relate to as a painter?

DMcK: Critical Theory is an essential tool for a painter to be able to use, but I think it's more important to come to it 'through' the work, as opposed to theory taking you 'towards' your work as it were. Finding questions and answers through the process of painting, and then doing a bit of reading around or alongside it is good I think. You can usually get a good handle on what's 'critical' in art at any moment in time by just looking at its visual qualities and considering how these relate to contexts outside of the work itself. That said, for me personally just now the critical debate of interest revolves around Painting's relationship to new media and 'screen' images.


SOTP: How do you deal with the limitations of 'flat' painting, i.e. the restrictions of the two dimensional surface?

DMcK: That follows on nicely from my last point above- before I go any further I should qualify what I'm about to say with the fact that I do like the work of painters who 'build' a picture (Frank Auerbach or Gillian Ayers for instance)- but I'm more fascinated by painters who paint 'thinly' or sparingly. The late work of Leon Golub for instance, or R.B. Kitaj (again especially the late work) is a bit of an obsession with me just now. Also current painter Ena Swansea. 'Flat' painting really works when there is an understanding of the ground and surface preparation that is being worked on- how that becomes part of the work and not something to be covered up or obliterated by paint. The surface of a painting does not just 'hold' the paint literally, for me it can also hold an image like the pixels on a screen or digital image.

Fearful of Symmetry/ 2011


SOTP: Whose paintings do you enjoy looking at and find inspirational, in a contemporary and historical frame?

DMcK: There are the constants- those that I mention above for instance- and obvious historical ones like Titian and Manet. More interestingly for me, I surprise myself by revisiting works which I had previously not really been interested in and then suddenly find them fascinating. Pre-Raphaelite landscapes for instance. However, I've never been 'inspired' by a painter in the making of a work, but I have been inspired by a photograph I've seen or a bit of history I've been reading about.

Installation view of exhibition 'Hot and Cool' at the third space gallery, Belfast/ 2011


SOTP: In your recent show 'Hot and Cool' did you feel you had to have a local connection to the 1972 Olympics theme you've been exploring, by using Mary Peters for example?

DMcK: She was one of my starting points certainly- hers was such an amazing story. She was well into her thirties, and up against much younger top West and East German Pentathletes who were the clear medal favourites. Knowing that she would be up against steriod-boosted East Germans meant that her own coach- Northern Ireland body building guru Buster McShane (a regular at the Ulster Arts Club bar and collector of paintings no less!)- had to come up with a punishing fitness plan if she was to have a chance. I read her autobiography, and in it she recounts how one of her great reliefs was fitting in to normal sized dresses after she retired as an athlete. The dresses hanging on some of my works are in part a homage to her. But other than that, I did not want to use too many direct references to her in the show. Of course, 1972 was one of the blackest years in Northern Ireland and Peters returned with her gold medal and a bit of joy for everyone- but with death threats hanging over her head for representing G.B. as a Northern Irish athlete. To be honest the main reason for focusing on 1972 was that I like nice, round numbers and it was about 100 years on from the Franco Prussian War which had been a main theme in my last show at the third space gallery. It also allowed me to make connections between that time- the beginning of Germany as a unified nation state- and the very different place it had become by 1972. But over-all, I was exploring different aspects of late 1960's and early 1970's history and culture.

Left: Through the Fog of History, Stumbling Metaphors Loom (Portrait of Lasse Viren) Right: The Temperature of Black (1972)/ 2009-2011


SOTP: How do you plan your paintings? How do you use photography and digital images in the process?

DMcK: Well, I pretty much always make lots of 'drawings' which are a mixture of photographs (very occasionally my own, but mainly 'found' digital images from the internet,) Photoshop manipulated images and mixed media collage elements. I always work on pages pulled out of a sketchbook (I usually like 'rounded' corners for some reason) and sometimes feed them through an old inkjet printer that's always playing up- this is important, as I don't want the photo' elements to be too clear.
When I've done a few of these I select some to be done as larger paintings-the selection is based purely on what I think will make for a strange or compelling juxtaposition of images.

People of the Future/ 2011


SOTP: 'Hot and Cool'- can you tell us the connection between the title and hot and cool colours?

DMcK: I wanted to use a title that was multi-layered. So, as most paintings have different colour temperatures at play (as it happened, the show was also predominated by my use of Cobalt Turquoise and Indian Yellow Orange- a blue/ orange opposition) I thought that was a good, basic starting point. But then I came across Marshall McLuhan's ideas about 'hot' and 'cool' communications media and got into that a bit. I was also thinking about the Cold War, 'hot' wars (Vietnam, napalm bombs etc.,) and also the 'hip' language of being hot or cool. I'd also have a little joke to myself thinking: 'Are these paintings hot or cool?' So there were lots of different reasons for using that title.

SOTP: What are the market considerations of this work? They are mainly big paintings, in a smallish private gallery, dealing with historical themes that may not connect with everyone. Where else would you like to see them situated?

DMcK: You're right, they are not average living room sized wall type paintings. There's one from my last show 'Dunkelbunt' at the third space gallery now in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's collection, and another titled 'Cafe Europa' now in the Ulster Hospital's collection which allows for a more 'public' showing. But I really just make paintings to whatever size I think they need to be for each image- if there's a figure or something in it I would try to take it towards 'life size' if my studio walls allow it. But then you also think about the gallery space and how the elements in the picture will look at different distances and angles, and so on.


SOTP: The symbolic use of pattern in your images is very dominant. Can you elaborate?

DMcK: What a great question to end with! For this show in particular I wanted to test out where the possibilities of using a more graphic element within the painterly element might lie. I was using bits from Otl Aicher's designs for the Munich Games, 1970s patterned dresses, Islamic patterns and so on. I had a studio visit shortly before the show by someone whose opinions I really value. She was looking at one of the paintings and talking to me about a Kandinsky-like graphic influence. It was a spot-on observation, and I allowed one of his triangular motifs to emerge. The communicative possibilities and differences in Graphic Art and Painting may be explored further in future work, I don't know.


Dougal McKenzie was born in Edinburgh and studied at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen, and then at the University of Ulster at Belfast. He was a co-director in the early years of Catalyst Arts in Belfast. He continues to work from Belfast, and is represented by the third space gallery.

Forthcoming exhibitions: Berliner Liste Art Fair (with the third space
gallery.) Invited Artist at the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition, Dublin. A review of his recent exhibition 'Hot and Cool', by Maeve Connolly, appears in the Summer 2011 edition of Artforum.

TERRY SETCH

SOTP: Thank you for taking time out to be the second subject of SOTP. The intention is for the structure of the interviews to keep to a fairly consistent pattern of questioning, so that over the course of the year similarities and differences of practice and thinking can be compared.

So first off…what are the critical debates in contemporary art just now that you can relate to as a painter? Or, are there other more important questions/ debates taking place nationally or globally that you feel more responsive to?

TS: The issues I’m concerned with are global such as pollution and waste recycling, and taking a stance- questioning what is deemed to be good and bad taste.

Once upon a time there was OIL 1(left panel) 1981/ Acrylic and encaustic wax on canvas/ 259 x 259 cm


SOTP: Around 2003 you made a body of work about skateboarders, which appeared to be a radical departure from your long-term commitment to the subject of landscape that is perhaps most commonly associated with you. Could you say something about the detour you took within that body of work?

TS: Every so often I step away from my main subject. I have made series of paintings about an inter-cultural dance project, the Greenham Common women’s protest camp as well as skateboarders. All of these disturb society’s notion of everyday order and good taste.

Which Side of the Fence, Greenham 1984/ Oil and wax on tarpaulin/ 300 x 400cm


SOTP: You have always been a painter fully engaged with fresh approaches to materials and surfaces, continually testing the possibilities of extending the ‘mixed media’ potential of painting practice. This question of the limits to a picture’s construction might be traced back to the 1950s through Burri and Tapies in Europe, and through Johns and Rauschenberg in America. In the 1980s Kiefer and Schnabel appeared to be extending this ‘tradition’, although some would say in an overtly bombastic manner.

What are the limitations you have perceived in ‘flat’ painting mediums, that propelled you to work in the manner you have over the years?

TS: I move beyond flat painting, and its prescribed boundaries. I involve myself with opposites; real/ unreal illusion; tactile surfaces; challenging whatever boundaries are associated with painting.

Touch the Earth Again 1987/ Plastic, oil, wax and found objects on tarpaulin/ 8 panels 550 x 730cm overall


SOTP: Do you feel connected to one particular strand/ movement in Painting? Do you have a sense of belonging to something from Art’s past or present history?

TS: Not really, I have many influences. I distrust categorisation and labels.

International Waters (right hand panel) 1990-91/ Mixed media/ 3 panels overall 290 x 380cm


SOTP: Has there been one stand-out encounter you have had away from the studio- it could be anything, a scene from a movie, a poem or the way a billboard has looked- that has made you think: “That’s what I’m doing in my painting.” ?

TS: The Greenham Common women’s protest camp and how the women’s movement perseveres in challenging discrimination.

Branscombe (after the sinking of the MSC Napoli) 2007/ mixed media on paper/ 229 x 229cm


SOTP: Whose paintings do you love looking at, now or from the past?

TS: I look at many paintings and sculptures: ancient and modern; western, eastern, African art; outsider and amateur art; children’s art. I am interested in and give attention to all art. Obviously some artists have influenced me as much for their daring to move away from the accepted form of the times as to what they produced such as Pollock, Turner, Grunewald, Picasso, Van Gogh and many others.

Lavernock 2 2009/ Encaustic wax on board/ 30.5 x 41cm


SOTP: Finally, your involvement and leadership in Fine Art education, notably at Cardiff Art College (now University of Wales Institute) from 1964 to 2001, gives you huge experience in having navigated the waters around Painting as an ‘academic’ field of study. You have also been External Examiner at The Slade, Chelsea and Reading. What are the possibilities and benefits you perceive for today’s Painting students at Degree level and beyond? Are there still good reasons for young and aspiring painters to want to go to art college?

TS: There is always a benefit for the serious student in going to an art college. As in all higher education students have the opportunity to grow and develop individually whatever the nature of a college or course. Art colleges are as much a seat of thinking as any university. Unfortunately governments are less supportive of art study than other subject study and I think here in the UK there has developed a visual ignorance on one hand, and a misconception that art is for financial investment on the other. The more this can be dispelled, the better will be the opportunities and respect for artists.


Terry Setch RA was born and studied in London, before moving to Wales where he taught at Cardiff Art College (University of Wales Institute). He has continued his practice from Penarth near Cardiff.

Represented by Michael Richardson’s Art Space Gallery in London, a major monograph on the artist was published by Lund Humphries in 2009: ‘Terry Setch’ by Martin Holman.

He was elected as a member of the Royal Academy in London in 2009.

Forthcoming exhibitions (all 2011):
New Display, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London
Terry Setch, Art Central, Barry, South Wales

ELIZABETH MAGILL

SOTP: It’s great to have you do the first interview. In light of this SOTP would just like to begin with a bit of context, seeing as you are the first to sit down and respond to these questions. In doing so you’re breaking from your usual studio routine, or fitting it in somewhere else in the day. One of the goals of SOTP’s interviews is to see where the distinctions lie between the painter’s practice (‘the doing’) and the painter’s context (‘the theory.’) Of course the two are never far apart, but we perhaps make work now in an increasingly critical/ theory-driven environment of contemporary art.
Do you think there are any current critical debates within contemporary art that you can relate to as a painter? Is it important, to you, to think about the wider field or are you mostly thinking about questions of Painting itself?

EM: I suppose I could draw an analogy between painting and the music scene today, where no one style or ideology prevails- perhaps this is healthy as it allows for a freedom of engagement with the medium; this may also make it difficult should you wish to comprehend any coherent theory. Living in London I’m aware of things going on in the current climate, but I’m not so preoccupied with it all as I feel too much over-contextualisation can lead to stilted or frozen responses.

SOTP: Your recent exhibition ‘Green Light Wanes’ at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin was a wonderful show of relatively smaller works, which seemed to be taking on a wider range of narrative references within the imagery you were using. Embedded within all of this was your continued commitment to a ‘sense’ of landscape. Could you say something about the intentions within your approaches to that Kerlin show?
http://www.kerlin.ie/artists/Elizabeth-Magill.aspx

EM: The look of ‘landscape’ appeared in my work about a decade ago, it was a way of placing thoughts in a wider space- literally this illusion of distance in my landscapes allowed me to step back and see what I was doing. All art is kind of organic in that it delivers itself from a previous state. My approach to painting is always experimental, allowing for previous attempts to give way to newer ones- it’s a kind of unfolding openness I try to follow.
I often use the scenic background from my upbringing in the Antrim Glens as a kind of backdrop or template for a notion of landscape. This can be tricky though as I don’t see myself as a ‘landscape artist’ in the traditional sense. I feel more like an artist who sometimes uses landscape to convey or bring out something from within.

SOTP: In recent years there has been quite a lot of commentary on Painting’s ‘new relationship’ with the photograph or digital media. Some painters, like yourself, have always found new and interesting ways of employing the photograph to inform the painting process. In one body of work you made an explicit presentation of museum postcards of paintings which you had over-painted, to hang alongside another painting of your own (I’m thinking here of your postcard of Courbet’s ‘Origin of the World’ and your work of the same title which is in The Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery collection. You use personal photographs for paintings, ‘found’ images and also sometimes photo-collage elements in the paintings themselves. What does all of this say about the relationship between your paintings and photography?

EM: The postcards you mention have been an ongoing preoccupation. I love seeing exhibitions and trying to analyse how a painting has been made, what brush marks are used, what level of control is applied or casual disregard adopted to make the piece. At the same time I’m trying to grasp what underpins the intention of an artist. Often over the years, like many artists, I come away with postcards from particular shows and leave them hanging around my studio. At some point I’ve had enough of the postcard or I just get bored and paint over it, like I was trying to say goodbye to the image and at the same time re-establishing some of myself in the work too.
The piece you refer to on display at the Hugh Lane is a painted postcard from a Courbet show I saw in New York a couple of years ago. I was struck by how easily he seemed to move between landscape and an explicit nude work. I tried to turn the postcard image back into what looks like a darkened landscape. I really like his title too- ‘Origin of the World’- it’s poignant, funny and profound. Titles are another thing I enjoy- very often they reveal a whole new layer to a work.

Installation shot from the Russian Club Gallery, 2009, London

To get back to your question, I think photography is just another form of image making; I use nearly all my own photographs for my work. Somehow with these landscapes it’s important for me to have a connection with the land the landscapes are taken from. I think it’s something to do with the unreliability of memory, whereby I can remind myself: that was ‘here’ or ‘there’ for sure. Subsequently I’ve this vast archive of photographs taken over 30 years or so, from everywhere but mainly from Ireland. For the final painting though, I don’t really want the emphasis to be lodged anywhere specific- I’m just using what seems familiar to my visual experience. Like an armature or a compositional construct I use it as a springboard towards something else.

SOTP: There is a fantastic juxtaposition of sorts that can be viewed just now between two adjoining rooms in The Ulster Museum in Belfast (the hangers of the work probably did not intend it.) Your painting ‘Chronicle of Orange’ can be viewed standing slightly to the right, and through the doorway to the next room can be seen Turner’s ‘Dawn of Christianity (Flight into Egypt)’.
The connections between the two works in terms of atmosphere and colour is quite remarkable, despite being 165 years apart (a sense of this is increased more so if you view the Tate Gallery’s database image of the same painting, except here it’s out of its circular frame and you can see his ‘test marks’ around the edges of the painting- this makes it an incredibly ‘contemporary’ image!) http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=71935&searchid=9515&tabview=image
This is a long way of asking you how you position your work in relation to the tradition of Romantic landscape painting?

EM: Thanks for making that observation with my painting in the Ulster Museum- I hadn’t noticed your connection, and seeing the web link to Turner’s work the first thing that struck me is the centre bit of his painting which looks like a blue explosion. It’s a great work by a great artist.
I do find this term ‘Romantic’ a bit problematic; it has many definitions, sometimes contradictory. Perhaps the very act of painting is in itself ‘romantic’, I don’t know, but I do get this label and the description never feels quite right. The Romantics from the late 18th and early 19th century seemed to be more of a god-fearing lot, living at a time in a much less secular society. Perhaps their need to portray awesomeness was a genuine shudder in the face of a vast, unknowing universe. Today, with the progress of science and globalisation, the perception of our universe seems different.

SOTP: SOTP would also like to ask its interviewed painters a straightforward question about any discovery that may have, in a background sort of way, influenced or connected with the painting process. It might be a passage from a novel, or a scene from a film, or a colour you saw on someone’s scarf. Is there any one ‘encounter’ you’ve had that sometimes slips into your mind when you’re painting or looking at a painting?

EM: Yes, there are lots of connections and triggers that find their way into my work.
The title of my recent show, ‘Green Light Wanes’, comes from Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’- the sentence is much longer: ‘…green light wanes to mauve…’ I’m attracted to writers who can use colour to convey emotion. After reading ‘Ulysses’, I felt a freedom of subject matter and a fluidity of thought. I like the way he allowed the past to flow through the present, I’m interested in this juggling with time. There’s a beauty and crudeness with his language too, which is quite an extraordinary balancing act.
At times I try to posit opposing positions in my work, sometimes deliberately trying to sabotage the work’s potential beauty… then trying to rescue it again. It’s a bit like a crazy polarity of intentions with mind and matter, and at best turning energy into form.

SOTP: One other straightforward question- whose paintings do you really love looking at, now or from the past?

EM: Another work from my recent show at the Kerlin is called ‘C.C. the C’- it’s a transcription from a painting I saw when I was doing a residency in Venice a couple of years ago. I was there for a while, which was great as it gave me time to really look at the art treasures there. In one church, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, there’s a painting by Giorgione on an easel surrounded by Tintoretto’s wall, floor and ceiling depictions of biblical scenes. The whole place is a bit overwhelming with imagery, then there’s this small work of Christ carrying the cross. It just seems to stand out in this claustrophobic environment like a moment of recognition. Oddly too it’s not completely certain who made the work, as it has also been attributed to Titian.

With contemporary artists it’s usually the feel of the whole exhibition I remember, instead of individual works. Maybe this is because artists today are often working in white gallery spaces and the whole space becomes a canvas rather than individual pieces.
I’ve a painting by Prunella Clough called ‘Array’. It’s an abstract work- I love its presence and looking at it, I also like what she’s says about making art: “Anything that the eye or the mind’s eye sees with intensity and excitement will do for a start. A gasometer is as good as a garden, probably better.”

‘Array’, Prunella Clough, oil on canvas, 43x60cm, 1986

SOTP: Finally, you have had experience over the years as a lecturer and external examiner on Fine Art Degree courses. SOTP hopes that as well as being a resource for any painter to consult, this series of interviews will be of particular interest to painting students. In the main, art college institutions are the ones that the majority of practicing painters have come through. Views and speculation have been rife for a while now about the uses and benefits of an art education in today’s world. A recent book ‘Art School- Propositions for the 21st Century’ contains a range of interesting takes on where it’s all heading for art students and art educators today. How does your own experience of being a professional practicing painter square against what is being asked of painting students today? Are there still good things about the models of painting education out there just now?

EM: I wonder about the changes in art education. A question I ask myself: are people fundamentally different from previous times? Has the need to make art altered?
I think it’s important to have some structure, but all the bureaucracy imposed from above isn’t really the most conducive way to foster a good creative environment.
I feel that some of the main things to help educate students should be support, space, funding and inspiring tutors. But ultimately it’s what they gain from their own peer group that can be the most important thing and no structure from above can prescribe these kinds of connections.

Elizabeth Magill was born in Canada, lived and studied in Northern Ireland and London, and lives and works in London now.

Represented by the Wilkinson Gallery in London and the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, she is also featured in Phaidon’s recent survey book ‘Painting Today’ by Tony Godfrey.

Forthcoming show: Towner Art Gallery & Museum, Eastborne, March 25th to 19th June 2011

INTRODUCTION

"Y2K has come and gone and those curious letters have passed into oblivion. A technologically sophisticated world managed to contain its surprisingly medieval fear of dates and technology and has moved on. But to where?.....where is art history headed in the first decade of the twenty-first century?" Preface to the updated second edition of 'Critical Terms for Art History' (The University of Chicago Press, 2003.)
Through a series of interviews with contemporary painters, accompanied by images provided by the artists themselves, this blog will probe at where painting is headed at the beginning of the second decade. 'The medieval' and 'the technological' are also, perhaps, two good terms for framing Painting's continued ability to grasp at the past and face forward to new things, at one and the same time. The interviews are intended to reveal where each painter positions her/ himself in relation to these (and other) ideas.