Posts Tagged ‘art’
recent paintings
I have spent the last six months painting obsessively and I have come to the end of my 72 canvas stash! Feeling both excited and sad that this part of the journey is over. I had no idea how these paintings would develop when I started them. Here are some of the ones I finished recently. They are oil on canvas and range in size from 20 x 20cms, 25 x 25cms and 30 x 30cms.
This is the most continuous and uninterrupted period time I have spent developing paintings, working nearly everyday in my studio for 6 months on them. For financial reasons, usually when I make such a large body of work I use recycled and found materials, such as my rubble installation, the bank statement boat installation or the floating ink works made with buoys. It has been really great to focus this much on painting on canvas. I even started making my own paint.
I draw all the time but I never do studies for the paintings beforehand, I prefer to work things out directly on the canvas, enjoying the element of chance and surprise. I improvise, working spontaneously hoping to make constant discoveries, no matter how small. One or two of them I might go back to and work on, but time will tell how they feel after a little bit of distance. I am working on 10 Chinese paper scrolls at the moment, its nice to stretch out a bit, they are 8 foot long but working with ink is a lot less forgiving and every mark I make stays visible forever.
After a few weeks of painting, some of the paintings started to gain a feel of moment so I continued along this journey. Thinking about Taoism and Eastern philosophy. I decided to call them after different types of bamboo, bamboo being highly regarded for its many virtues, and a symbol for harmony between nature and human beings.
Holttumochloa magica
Ochlandra travancorica
Phyllostachys arcana
Himalayacalamus hookerianus
Images above 1,2,3,4 oil on canvas 25 x 25cms (top 3 images ) & 30 x 30 cms (bottom image) Marianne Slevin 2019
Currently these are all available for private viewing at the Funny Little Gallery, Doolin
All Returns Together ART
It’s a new year and I am full of new energy and intentions for writing my blog. After such a long pause that I am having quite some trouble with remembering how do do it. I have been writing in my new sketch book and thought I would start by sharing my first page with you. They are called daily artists statements and inspired by the I Ching and perhaps there will be 64 different statements by the end of the year.
1. All Returns Together
I like art making for many reasons, for one, it has no definite starting point, like writing does. I even write on my art in random places. You don’t start at one corner of the work and work your way the the opposite corner, neither physically or conceptually.
A million things can effect the work to greater or lesser extents. The artist is a filter of ideas. Raw ideas come along during the day and night, they collide and merge with older ideas, they settle and work away like a slow cooker while the artist gets on with what ever the artist has to get on with. When the time comes to make something resembling art, the artist trusts their own inner process and works without trying to recall the ideas. Over time the ideas develop and become so much part of the artist that there is no need to think about them during the process of art making. It is more a case of feeling and listening.
Changing Lines
Listening to the weather and sounds of nature
All of a sudden hailstones!
Staring at my work in the studio,
Thoughtless and silent and still
Even my wellington boots have stopped keeping out the cold,
I think its time to move!
Frames and Shiny Things
Why should a frame make a piece of art worth much more than the additional cost of the frame? I can understand it can add a certain amount more than what it cost to frame, but it seems to be disproportionate. It is a lot to do with perception, I suppose. Yes, I would like to frame my drawings and paintings in beautifully made frames, the really expensive ones! Real wood, no wood grain effect chipboard that seems to be all you can get in any reasonably priced framers.
This fascination with “finished product” outweighing what is underneath the surface sweeps across many areas of life in the West. There is superficial idea of what beauty is, from our food chain to how we judge art and even people. This tendency to judge things by their outward appearances alone has tricked us, our “beautiful” shiny objects are breaking down, they are designed to, so we are caught in the cycle of buying the newer version. When we turn to use the old way it is no longer available to us because everyone is caught up in the cycle and the old way of doing things is obsolete.
Marketing is even taking over the way people talk about how to be an artist, how to sell yourself. I am concerned that if you are not already established as an artist, who are free to be eccentric, that artists by the hoops that they have to jump through to get any type of funding or exposure have to, by nature be a certain way inclined. I cant help but be reminded of those pieces of fruit or vegetables that are not the right uniform shape to get to the packaging stage of the production line being cast aside, and their irregular kind dying out.
I always made it through the system as one of those irregular pieces of fruit! I was lucky because I went to interviews with human beings and it wasn’t just about filling in allocated spaces in forms. People are all more than their C. V. more than the forms they fill in more then their 6 jpeg images. We have strange selection processes, I think we need to rethink the way we choose things and deciding what things are worth, not to do things the easiest way, because we all know what we loose when we just go for the easy option, we loose our integrity.
View from “Vulnerable” at The Secret Gallery. Central image “Barbie World”
The Art Of Playing 24/7
Baby Doll with Goose Barnacles by Marianne Slevin 2012
Baby Doll reaching for Goose Barnacles by Marianne Slevin 2012
Baby Doll with Driftwood and Goose Barnacles by Marianne Slevin 2012
I play hard at being a visual artist, in fact I do it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year, there seems to be no off button ! Don’t get me wrong my play can get pretty serious, challenging and exhausting! Actually I started making art because I could express my more “heavy” and “intense” feelings without feeling like a freak, when I went to art college I met many intense characters! I tend to be a very serious person, though I can be very silly too! So my art tends to be very seriously playful! The work part of my practice is the other stuff that I have to do as an artist but I try to keep “work” out of the whole process of making art. We are obsessed with working, we work too hard and too much we should be living instead. Is this why to be a successful artist nowadays you have to spend way more time working on you career than making your art? I want to stop calling my art “my work”. Art for me is inventing a new visual language, shape-shifting between different disciplines, merging art and our everyday life and going beyond it into fantasy and looking back into the past, all at the same time. Art is attempting the impossible, failing, achieving something unexpected, balancing our own will with chance. It is playing with life and exploring the world around us. Art is working on a personal level and a universal level without interruption. Art for me is about transformation, the process of art is transformative and I choose materials that are not considered “valuable” and through the creative process I aim to transform the simple materials into something meaningful and inspiring, drawing attention to the creative process. I invite the viewer to take a journey, and perhaps to feel this too. Art for me is about waking up fully.
I don’t want the audience to marvel at my talent at drawing or painting because I am so precise, for me that gets in the way. I would like the viewer to come away from my art feeling something, maybe inspired to be creative and inventive and imaginative and playful themselves. I have not set goals or aims for my art, in how it effects the viewer, I do think about it from time to time but I cannot control its outcome. The whole process of of my art is a game of control and lack of control, intention and accident, logic and intuition, knowing when to push away or pull towards, so inevitably this sort of dialogue will continue when the art leaves my hands too. I think these transformative acts ripples out into the universe in many ways.
I found this doll and driftwood with goose barnacles hanging off it last February. It was on my Birthday, I was walking on Fanore beach, it felt very apt and kind of funny, to find the little doll. So I lifted up the wood and placed the doll standing up underneath it, as if reaching up to pick a goose barnacle. The doll is one legged but is able to feed herself, it is a very unlikely situation! As was the chances of each of us being alive as a human being today on this planet, I have heard some very mind blowing comparisons of how unlikely our existence was, the chances of each of us being here and alive today as humans were extremely small. All of these weird and wonderful thoughts filter into my art somehow, often in very unexpected ways. The journey into the unknown is what keeps me making art. I really like going to a place and finding stuff that I would have never imagined being there, and doing something creative with it. I love being nicely surprised by the whole art making process.
Is There An Artist In The House?
Work in Progress, studio, Marianne Slevin, 2012
I am not one for any kind of dogma, so I do not think that Artists should have to make art in any particular way at all. For my own practice I see it like this: The ship is going down and what am I going to do about it? I do not want to make art for art’s sake alone, nor do I want to make art for artists alone. I want to make my tiny offering of art for the planet, and multitude of ecosystems and communities that live on this great whirling rock in space.
Two books on art have changed my thinking more then any others, the first one was “The unpainted Landscape” essays and texts, by Simon Cutts. The other was “Conversations Before the End of Time” by Suzi Gablik. These books shifted my practice that had been more about the modernist ideal of art for arts sake, towards a more socially engaged way of working. In the words of Suzi Gablik, “…for such artists, vision is not defined by the disembodied eye, as we have been trained to believe. Vision is a social practice that is rooted in the whole of the being.” from The Nature of Beauty in Contemporary Art, New Renaissance Magazine.
Currently, I am making an art work with muffin cases and another with maps folded into paper boats. On the paper cases I am writing different things that would change the world for the better, in my opinion. I would also like to write other people’s wishes for a better world. If you would like to send them into the comments, I would write them down and dip them in wax as part of an artwork. Happy dreaming of a better world!
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