Making Of It - Hanging

Here are some pics of the hanging of The Making Of It.

This shows the venue itself, just of Brunswick Street. It is a nice place to exhibit, just down a vennel and just off Leith Walk itself. The space was pretty huge which was useful to accommodate all the artists involved! The space is run by an advertising agency in the building in the background, they were very helpful with all aspects of the show.

Myself and Scott discussing hanging.

 Scott painting the wall as part of the installation of his painting.

Allan doing his thing... Allan is going to paint his picture throughout the exhibition resulting in a sort of 'performance' throughout the exhibition. If you go in on the opening the painting will have altered by the end of the exhibition. He got stuck in straight after hanging to get a head start.

And Augustus' work being set up

The exhibition opens on the 16th of June from 6pm till 9pm and is open everyday thereafter until the Thursday the 28th for Leith Late.

The Making Of It

Towards the end of this month I am taking part in an exhibition at the Old Ambulance Depot on Brunswick Street in Leith. The exhibition runs from Saturday the 17th June until Thursday the 28th June. It is open 6-9pm on the 17th for a preview and during the week it is open 10am-5pm with a special late opening event on the last day to coincide with the Leith Late festival.

This exhibition involves 14 artists from around Europe working with totally different mediums/subject matters. It should make for an enjoyable and ever changing exhibition! As well as 2D works there will also be live performances by Martin Campbell, Augustus Veinoglou and Dominik Lipp. Also some of the artists, for example Allan Robertson, intend to make paintings during the duration of the exhibition allowing visitors to see the space changing if the keep coming back. We also have a dedicated blog for the duration of the exhibition were we will be posting images and video of the performances and other artwork in the exhibition - http://themakingofit.wordpress.com/.  

We are also involved in two festivals for the duration of the exhibition - firstly the Embassy Annuale and Leith Late festival on the closing night from 6-9pm.


 There is a map for Leith Late so you can go to all the venues on the night:

Damaged Painting

At my recent exhibition in the Whitespace Gallery I was photographing some paintings for my upcoming exhibition at the Old Ambulance Depot (Entitled 'The Making Of') including the below image. And while doing this I managed to drop said painting flat on its face smashing the rather sensitive bottom section.. I was obviously pee'd off with myself. However this was a good opportunity to re-make and renew the painting as a whole. I managed to, Time Team style, attach many fragments of cement back onto the board by cleverly guessing where they had been before. Once done I added a fresh (souped up) layer of cement to fill in the cracks, I have now finished the empty areas once more and am once again quite pleased with the results. I remember seeing when I was in Germany, a refurbished synagogue in which they had glued the fragments of paint back on to the walls individually and exactly where they had come of the walls. I was giddily excited by this insane attention to detail and the finished product was quite amazing and this little project made me think of that. 

Anyway the below painting will not be in my upcoming exhibition but is going to feature in some future plans... I will be posting more info on the upcoming exhibition soon

Photo of damaged painting after repair

Whitespace Exhibition

My recent exhibition at the Whitespace Gallery was a show involving myself and Roz McKenzie. The work was a mixture of drawings, painting and contemporary stained glass. To see more of Roz's work click on the link above.. 

Roz's stained glass panels were in lightboxes which we built ourselves and hung on a particular wall of the gallery to get the right level of light (direct light from strip lights on the panels would have ruined the effect).

                                     

My work mostly involved drawings but included the watercolours and oil painting hung on this particular wall. The big painting is titled 'Arsenic Mine' and is based on drawings and photographs I took in Cornwall of abandoned arsenic mines which ran down to the cliff edges. I have previous posts on this blog and my other website. The watercolours were looking at 10 Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament. I was interested in the odd way in which these places represented the heart of our 'democracy' while at the same time looking like a cage. I found the image of tourists staring at fairly mundane scenes through bars at the police officers within like some sort of bizarre zoo. 

More hanging Roz's stained glass panels.

These small drawings took up the last wall of the gallery, they were all drawings I have done in-situ. They are mostly from the various places I have been in the previous year - Wells, Erfurt and paderborn. These drawings represent a sort of travelogue of my travels.

Downing Street/Parliament watercolours with reflections.

Redruth and the world of tomorrow...

Having just finished my last exhibition at the Whitespace gallery and I am now in the process of making work for the next one I am having in June. This exhibition will be quite an exciting event involving artists from a wide variety of countries and backgrounds/styles. Watch this space for more info...

As part of my proposal I plan to show a quadriptych of paintings with the each showing a different aspect of the others paintings in some respect. I am examining what I think of large scale utopian dreams with the often harsh reality of these movements. The obvious ones being nazism, communism and 60s building programmes. 

Despite this I am an idealist! I love both the run down gritty side of the city but also find the architecture of various utopian dreams fascinating as well.

To this end I am painting the images below as part of the series of 4:

Redruth, Cornwall. This image is a painting of a building that stood next to the main station in Redruth, in a twist of fate the building apparently no longer exists. I like the idea that my painting shows a ghost image of what was and that in the duration of painting this it ceased to exist.. With this image I am looking at the anomalies that exists within a culture such as our own in Britain, at once vastly wealthy and yet deprivation and ruin still exists. A non-utopian ideal.

'The world of a past-present, today', collaged imagery. This painting is taking various images and collaging them together. In this picture I am looking at the utopian ideal of clean lines, straight buildings and huge plazas. But even in this image I am looking at creating a sense of unease, the image is empty - no people or any nature either. And the building could just as easily be a prison as a modernist housing block.

The sky was an important element for me in this painting - lifting the eye above the area at the bottom of the painting but also heightening the sense of emptiness of the city. 

I hope to show these paintings plus 2 more and one large piece (space permitting!) in the next exhibition.

Exhibition at the Whitespace Gallery Edinburgh

I am having an exhibition at the Whitespace Gallery in Edinburgh from the 10th till the 15th March. It will be open daily between 11am and 4pm. The opening is on the 10th and drinks will be served! We hope to see you along, the address us 11 Gayfield Square, Edinburgh, EH1 3NT.

Below are examples of some of the works to be exhibited:

The Tin Mine

I finished the Cornish Tin mine painting a couple of weeks ago, thought I would post the results on here. After some painstaking dot action I was able to complete the grassy foreground area. I was most pleased with the (subtle) results. No one will probably even notice the dots, I am however quite happy to know they are there and that there are literally hundreds of them. Next painting I do it on I should really keep a count and mark it somewhere on the canvas.. Anyway here are some pics:

This is the whole painting, my normal camera lens went haywire so I used another camera. After 5 years it has lasted surprisingly long, especially considering the bashes it took. Anyway hence the vignetting on the image. I added in a few details - the shadows and the moon. This was to add some more dimension to the painting.

Dots in the sky, dots on the ground...

I was back in Cornwall recently and was within a stones throw of the site this painting represents. It was interesting to go back and see the area again after over a year.

The moon and shadows.