Smoking Man

Smoking Man: Lime Wood Carving, 2015.

There’s something a bit haunting and lonely about this piece.

I purposefully meant for him to stand apart from everything I had been doing, as if he was the embodiment of the outsider. Unlike most of my figures, this is an allegorical figure, not an exact portrait of a individual subject.

I wanted to follow the face and see where it would lead me, but at the same time resist the urge to polish that I usually indulge in my sculpture. The result was someone I did not know appearing out of the wood; as I carved, I decided who I wanted him to be.

I saw a worn down company man, mostly there but not entirely, waiting to be filled with whatever you expect to see inside and taking up less space than he wants to.

It was a bit like telling myself a short story.

Smoking Man. Lime wood carving with paper and graphite by Lee Devonish, 2015 — Smoking Man. Lime wood carving with paper and graphite, 2015

Materials with their own truths

The thin slivers of coloured paper wedged between the raw wood blocks point to the shared origins of both materials and their differing end points, as well the level of refinement each material has received and its perceived importance in the structure.

I enjoy relating this lamination of materials to the seams of difference that run through us, whether in the form of feelings, ambitions or a sense of identity.

Planes, imperfections and crossed directions

We are all composites of parts that come from the same source but don’t quite fit, and our grain might not run in exactly the same directions within us. Cut us apart and we are cobbled together with pieces that are hopefully assembled, with the spaces between being sometimes as precious as the solid parts that surround and consume space.

Or perhaps we started whole, and lost something along the way?

This piece is available to buy direct or from Etsy.

Roots And Culture

Roots And Culture – how hairdressing constructs identity and race.

Hair, as a somatic marker of race, has historically been used as a tool in order to construct racialized subjects for oppressive means. The politics of afro hair styling – to straighten or remain ‘natural’ – can often appear to be simple, yet there is no clear consensus over how the personal statement becomes politicised, or whether it should.

This essay examines the concept of a post-racial future set out by thinkers such as Emmanuel Eze and Paul Gilroy, and considers the effects of the segregation of service provision for afro hair.

It considers matters of choice in identity and asks whether such a thing as a black community exists, and furthermore, to what extent does hair actively contribute to the concept of black community?

Context

This essay was written in 2013, before Rachel Dolezal became a household name; re-reading my words now, I can’t help but think about her as an example to illustrate the complexity of the construction of identity as well as community and belonging.

At the time, I lived in Peckham; it was a place where I could finally walk into any salon and get my hair done. I hadn’t been able to do that for thirteen years! I had a strange sensation of belonging on one hand, mixed with knowing that I was a newcomer to London and was actually a bit of a cultural mishmash; I didn’t really understand all of the cultures that surrounded me, but it didn’t matter. I still felt as if I could belong.

An excerpt.

“Where do you get your hair done?”

Mary had just arrived that month, transplanted from Kenya to Kent because of her new husband’s job at a local hotel. The question didn’t surprise me; I knew it would come eventually. It had to.

There weren’t many people she could have asked, seeing as the question was actually, “where can I get my hair done?”.

In our village there was me, and Donna. Kind of like a black girls’ support network. Only Donna always went up to a woman’s house somewhere in London and came back with a head full of new plaits and visible gridded scalp, and it was like a glorious mystery to me. She sometimes told me before she went, and I would order a box of relaxer so that I could straighten my hair at home, back in the days when I was chemically dependent.

Now, Mary had enough to deal with, learning the language of life in rural England, without having to make her way up to the sprawling metropolis in search of a hairdresser on her own. From where we stood, the A2 and A20 stretched down to us like dark, hairy arachnid arms, reaching out to us, pulling us in.

I knew that the closer we drew to the spider-city’s southern belly, the more they became cluttered with shopfronts offering fried chicken, money transfers, minicabs and, of course, hair. Hair in all forms. Hair to buy. Hair products. Hairdressing. But not just any hair – our hair.

Chapters

Where Do You Get Your Hair Done?
Race
Raciology and Culture
Hair
Roots and Rhizomes
Loose Ends
Bibliography

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Selected bibliography

Bell, R. H. 2002. Understanding African Philosophy: A Cross-Cultural Approach To Classical and Contemporary Issues. Routledge. UK

Biddle-Perry, G. & Cheang, S. (eds) 2008. Hair: Styling, Culture And Fashion. 2008. Berg. UK

Danquah, M. N. in: Tate, G. (ed.) 2003. Everything But The Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture. Broadway Books. USA

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. USA

Fuss, D. 1989. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference. Routledge. UK

Gilroy, P. 2000. Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. UK

Gilroy, P. 2002 There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack. Routledge Classic. UK

Mercer, K. 1994. Welcome To The Jungle: New Positions In Black Cultural Studies. Routledge. UK

O’Neal, G. in: Johnson, K. & Lennon, S. (eds) 1999. Appearance And Power. Berg. UK

Stilson, J. 2009. Good Hair. Chris Rock Entertainment/HBO Films. USA

Why Do I Paint?

Why do I paint?

When I was 14, one of my art teachers asked me fairly sharply why I wanted to paint in oils; was it because that was what I thought art had to be?

Actually, I thought that art had to be interesting.

After giving up two-dimensional work soon after starting university for a future career as a ceramic artist, I can honestly say that I didn’t hold any of the preconceptions that my teacher supposed I had. I just wanted to explore as many different kinds of media as I could fit in. I wanted to learn everything.

I still feel that way, and sometimes I think I could be happy with any branch of the creative arts, as long as there was a challenge involved, a skill to be learned, and a goal to be reached.

Technique and challenge

The technical aspect of the arts, whether navigating a four or six string fretboard, creating stoneware glazes, or getting perfecting registration for prints, is to me extremely addictive. Finding the links between these apparently disparate branches is in itself potentially compulsive, and I have to restrict myself for my own sake – although at times my projects do choose me, not the other way around.

Just knowing that there is so much more to be learned is terrifying and terrific at the same time.

Since I started seriously exploring painting as a teenager, my internal question was, just how do I want to paint? It’s taken quite a bit of time and experimenting to acknowledge my style.

It came down to what felt natural, and what felt like a departure. Not that the departures are any less important – they may be more important due to their very nature, and they have all embedded themselves in my working vocabulary.

The memory in the medium.

I knock about with all sorts of media but I’ve found a great relief in admitting what a love I have for oil paint. Just the smell of it alone conjures up decades of memories and a different mindset.

I went through an early phase of exclusively using a palette knife, then returning to smooth brushwork, experimenting with bold colour, all the while questioning what it was I really wanted to do with paint. I didn’t have a clue, really.

Analysis paralysis

The blank canvas – used metaphorically – can become a terribly frustrating thing in very little time.

Stopping for several years, working in clay and fabric was, perhaps, the best thing I could have done after all. When I came back to painting, the excitement of revisiting an old friend far outweighed any worry about the results. Somehow my memory took over and I found there was very little anxiety, as if I’d never put the brush down.

Despite this, I still prefer to think of myself as an artist makes paintings, prints, drawings and other works, rather than a painter.

Why paint at all?

This is the perennial question to the painter in the age of conceptualism and the dominance of photography and video. Its answer is simple, though – painting is its own purpose.

Filtering the image through the medium is the goal in itself: the physicality of paint and painting, with its smell, movement, texture, colour and its history takes it beyond pure imagery. In the end, what we paint now lives in the realm of the relic.

The Fire

She shivered as the hot water ran through her hair and down her body, turning grey with soot and ash at her feet.

The smell was invasive, thick and choking. It stuck to her skin and scratched her throat, and she coughed with huge gasping sobs.

Did he?

Her hands shook as she tried to wash it away from her face, making her feel weaker still, and she steadied them against the tiles and let the shower hit her. There was enough water for now, but she would have to get out eventually. She knew it, but could not face it yet. The water could get her clean but it couldn’t make the truth go away.

She knew he had tried to kill her.

The room had filled with steam by the time she turned the shower off and clambered out of the bathtub. She sat on the edge, gripping the towel she had wrapped herself in like armour, and wished she didn’t know it. What came next? That depended on whether or not he knew that she knew what he’d done.

What would he do once she came out?

Where was he now?

It was late – definitely after midnight – but she couldn’t tell exactly what time it was. Where was he? She couldn’t call anyone or go anywhere without him knowing.

The police.

But there was only one phone downstairs, where he would probably be sitting. She would have to wait until he was asleep, but no-one would be sleeping in the bedroom tonight, so that meant he would be sleeping downstairs. If he did plan it, why would he let her live to tell anyone? For tonight, they would both pretend that it had been an accident.

The shaking had not stopped but she had to leave the bathroom before her absence started to appear suspicious.

Even so, she might have locked herself in for the night had it not been for the baby. When the door of her bedroom had finally been opened after what seemed like an eternity trapped in the smoke, she rushed out and down the stairs, letting her breath out and sucking in the clean air outside the door of her son’s bedroom.

Don’t wake him up.

When she opened the door, everything was exactly as before, the baby sleeping in his crib, the ceiling unmarked, the air unchanged. The fire hadn’t burnt through the floorboards above. He was safe. She wanted to hold him but she had to get clean first, or the smell and sight of her might scare him. It was over and they were safe, and mercifully none of the neighbours had been woken up. It was over… until she began to think about what had just happened as the water washed over her.

To Be Continued…

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Visual Research & Working Methodologies – An Essay

Visual Research and Working Methodologies: An Essay

The following text has been adapted from my student essay for the “Visual Research and Working Methodologies” module of my BA (Hons) top-up course undertaken in 2011.

Looking back over student work is a curious exercise; it feels strange to have communicated so earnestly, and so formally at the same time. Here it goes…

Visual Research and Working Methodologies

The intention for the work this year is to investigate the depiction of the male figure in contemporary art through the creation of a larger body of work, to be realised in the form of paintings and carved wood sculpture.

Several artists whose practices have been referenced are Ricky Swallow, Ana Maria Pacheco, Clive Head, Ellen Altfest, Patrick Hughes, Tomoaki Suzuki, Gehard Demetz and Willy Verginer.

The depiction of the male figure in contemporary fine art arose as a theme in the middle of the previous academic year, after the completion of several paintings and drawings of the artistʼs male friends. The attention they attracted, particularly from female viewers, posed the question of why in the post-feminist age the nude was still almost exclusively female, and why both male and female artists and viewers expected or preferred to see females as objects of art.

The paintings completed at the end of the year were meant to explore the reaction of the viewer to male subjects, presented as objects of beauty, and to question the assumed gender of the gaze.

The combination of two and three dimensional mediums is an important part of the development of the practice. Spanish devotional sculpture from the middle ages has recently come to the fore in terms of an historical precedent in bridging the gap between painting and sculpture, and in researching contemporary polychromed wood sculpture, the work of Ana Maria Pacheco and Tomoaki Suzuki has been of particular interest.

Ana Maria Pacheco is an artist who moves fluidly between various mediums, finding solutions to problems in one medium through working in another. (MacGregor, 1999. p.5) Pachecoʼs painted wooden figures are relevant to this research, as her aesthetic philosophy is found to be very appealing and sympathetic. She reflects that her colonial background may be the cause of her preference for her work to be well finished; she says,

“there is this thing about spontaneity, very closely connected with modernism, I find it impossible.” (Wiggins, 1999. p. 47)

Patrick Hughesʼs work as viewed in his retrospective exhibitions at the Flowers galleries in London was provocative, not in the direct way of manipulating perspective, but in his combination of highly realistic painting and 3-dimensional support. Reflecting on Hughesʼs work in the light of the recent interest in combining sculpture and painting, the synthesis seems entirely natural and very exciting. One method of working towards this combination is to utilise supports in circular and oval shapes instead of the traditional rectangular format, as have artists such as Frank Stella. Exploiting the cultural references of the circular and oval format will be a key aspect of the work within painting.

The work of Northern Renaissance artists including Holbein the younger has long provided an inspiration to attempt a similar effect of smoothness of surface, with the removal of the evidence of the artist.

The latest oil paintings, [redact]Tobi[/redact] (fig. 1) and [redact]Phil[/redact] (fig. 2) have shown an inclination towards this surface quality, but there is some way left to go in deciding how much of the brushstroke should remain, and how much mimetic illusion is aspired to. The effect of the artistʼs touch, the sensual effects of the paint surface and how much this affects the reception of the image in the mind of the viewer, is of great importance. On reflection, these last paintings produced have appeared static and overly slick in comparison to previous work, in particular [redact]Cill[/redact] (fig. 3)

A consolidation of style is therefore a key aim in production of this new work.

Since seeing the work of Clive Head at the National Gallery in London, the ambition has been to move the work towards a more detailed, photorealistic style. Some progress towards this was made in the last paintings, but there is much more progress to be made in terms of technique.

The hyperrealist work of Ellen Altfest at her exhibition “The Bent Leg” at White Cube, Hoxton, was a later discovery, and thematically is closely aligned to the current investigation of masculinity. Altfest similarly cites Sylvia Sleigh as an influence, and although in terms of painterly technique, her works are more thickly layered and heavily encrusted, the focus on detail is an essential link. (Storr, 2011)

Referring to Ricky Swallowʼs hyperrealistic sculpture Paton writes:

“we tend to associate detail with clarity, and conversely to think of blur and vagueness as the outward signs of mystery. In Swallowʼs art, however, detail is not an antidote to mystery but a form of it – a way to delay recognition, to make strange, to enlarge an object in a viewerʼs mind.” (Paton, 2004. p.10)

This view of detail as a form of mystery is a striking concept which encourages an interest in smaller sized, more detailed objects –

“Swallow is less interested in how loud an artwork can speak than how closely it can make you listen.” (Paton, 2004. p.64)

The intention is to expand further into a wider range of sizes, and produce a greater number of smaller paintings as a way of pushing the working methods. Since starting to exhibit and to enter work into competitions and open calls, the presentation of this current work has become a prime concern.

The impact that something as simple as framing has on the perception of a piece is a key area of interest and influences the choices made for the presentation of the work. Its usefulness as a method of contextualising images of men lies in how framing creates importance around an artwork, and how framing could create an artwork in itself. The frames will be used to present the images of men as works of art, to validate them as art by placing them in a very traditional sphere by presenting them as women traditionally have been.

The treatment of the frame as an integral part of the artwork incorporates the element of form within the 2-dimensional discipline, once more providing a link between the pictorial and sculptural.

Suzukiʼs use of scale, presenting his sculptures 1/3 life size, is something that sets him apart from other artists working in wood, and confers a very engaging quality to the pieces. Gehardt Demetz and Willy Verginer are both Italian artists carving naturalistic figures in limewood, and like Suzuki and Swallow they utilize virtuoso carving techniques which inspire emulation.

Suzukiʼs method of carving and painting is very interesting; he works towards a high level of detail, using photographs taken from 360º and carves very close likenesses. Yet his figures are not smoothed to the extent that Swallowʼs are; there remain traces of the tools, slight angular planes on the surfaces. He uses acrylic paint on limewood, but does not seem to use gesso to prime the wood. Perhaps because of this the skin colours can appear to be flat – especially when the subject is black. The paint appears chalky, and some of the wood grain remains visible through the paint, which hints to the process in the same way that the carving does. In contrast, the highly refined process of gesso application in traditional Spanish devotional sculpture lends a more naturalistic ground, and produces effects which are closer to the desired result for the artwork.

Whether the painting or sculpture is concerned with image or form, a predominant theme is that of “re-skilling”, connecting to traditional aspects of production and increasing technical fluency. The aspiration towards technical mastery that wood carving as a craft instills is obvious at amateur levels, as contemporary carversʼ societies show; this is a legacy of artists such as Grinling Gibbons.

The V&Aʼs Power of Making exhibition highlighted the debt that oneʼs attitude to working owes to oneʼs experience in design and craft. The exhibition focused on craft, on “objects that relate not to the quick invention of conceptual art, but to the slow perfection of skill”. (Miller, 2011. p.20) The line at which craft meets fine art is perennially an interesting one to define, especially within the discipline of wood carving.

“ʻCraftʼ is still a charged, even scandalous, term in the end of the professional art world that Swallow inhabits… There arose “a view of craft-skill as a kind of excess in artʼs economy of ideas – something ʻgratuitousʼ.” (Paton, 2004. p.95).

One of the ideas behind a traditional, skill-centric approach is an attempt to elicit a feeling of trust from the viewer.

“The care that we take in making something properly is cousin to the care that we retain for other people and their labour…selecting depth at the expense of breadth” (Miller, 2001. p.22)

It is important that the viewer feels able to trust the artist and thereafter become immersed in the discourse started by the artwork. In addressing the gender of the gaze, the viewer-subject connection and relationship becomes an essential aspect of the work, and this is established by the formal methods of production.

Figures 1, 2 & 3 are studen works, all now destroyed.

Bibliography

Adler, K. (7-24) 1999. in: Ana Maria Pacheco In The National Gallery. ed. Jervis, J. National Gallery Publications. UK

Bray, X. 2009. The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting And Sculpture 1600-1700. National Gallery Company Ltd. UK

Jopek, N. and Marqués, S. 2007. in: The Making of Sculpture: The Materials And Techniques of European Sculpture. ed. Trusted, M. V&A Publications

Langland, T. 1999. From Clay To Bronze: A Studio Guide To Figurative Sculpture. WatsonGuptill Publications. NY USA

MacGregor, N. [ps2id id=’MacGregor’ target=”/]1999. in: Ana Maria Pacheco In The National Gallery. ed. Jervis, J. National Gallery Publications. UK

Miller, D. [ps2id id=’Miller’ target=”/]2011. The Power Of Making. in: Power of Making: The Importance Of Being Skilled. ed. Charney. V&A Publishing

Paraskos, M. 2010. Clive Head. Lund Humphries. UK

Paton, J. [ps2id id=’Paton’ target=”/]2004. Ricky Swallow: Field Recordings. Craftsman House. Australia

Storr, R. [ps2id id=’Storr’ target=”/]2011. Ellen Altfest: The Bent Leg. White Cube. UK

Slyce, J. & Hughes, P. 2005. Perverspective. Momentum. UK

Wiggins, C[ps2id id=’Wiggins, C’ target=”/]. 1999. in: Ana Maria Pacheco In The National Gallery. ed. Jervis, J. National Gallery Publications. UK

Williamson, P (ed). 1996. European Sculpture At The Victoria And Albert Museum. The Victoria And Albert Museum. UK

Web references.

Corvi-Mora. accessed Nov. 2011. http://www.corvi-mora.com/tomoakisuzuki.php

Demetz Website. accessed Oct. 2011. http://www.geharddemetz.com/

Hada Contemporary. Cha Jong Rye. accessed Oct. 2011. http://hadacontemporary.com/cha-jongrye/

Leo Koenig Inc. accessed Oct. 2011 http://www.leokoenig.com/exhibition/view/694

Meneghelli, L. accessed Oct. 2011 http://www.whiteroompositano.com/english/willyverginer-text-by-l-meneghelli/

Moore, S. 2009. “Open Frequency: Tomoaki Suzuki”. Axis. accessed Oct. 2011 http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=20469

Pratt Contemporary Art. Ana Maria Pacheco. accessed Oct. 2011. http://www.prattcontemporaryart.co.uk/ana-maria-pacheco-2/