Here are four slideshows extracted from scans of some of my artworks created in June and July 2023 on my pocket travel book of watercolour paper... Enjoy XX
Mini Artworks - Problem solving -
210 mm x 148 mm - 100% cotton rag sustainable paper made in India, aluminium tape, paper, acrylic paint, liquid paper, nail polish, gold string from V&A museum shop tassle, ball point, metal stapples, nail polish. London GB - December 2021 Made at home.
Mini Artworks - The String Series -
148 mm x 105 mm - watercolour card, acrylic paint marker, acrylic paint, acrylic gel medium, gold string from V&A museum shop tassle. London GB - December 2021 Made at home.
Mini Artworks - The Cars Series -
148 mm x 105 mm - watercolour card, ball point, acrylic paint markers, aluminium tape, nail polish - London GB - December 2021 Made at home.
YAAKAR - hope - illustrations
The illustrations which I recently created between my fine art studio F2 @lewishamarthouse and my iMac Photoshop at my home desk, for the soon to be published book by author Cheikh Bamba Diop, YAAKAR (Hope).
"The Content Creator" - Lewisham Art House Members' Group Show - 22 May to 30 May 2021
It is now 12.30 midday on Wednesday 19 May 2021. Today, the gallery/project space group at the Arthouse are starting to install the Arthouse members' Group Show entitled "Resolution Revolution Evolution Solution" for which I have been the third member to deliver a piece, during the past Sunday, when I was at the Arthouse last.
On that day, the 16th of May, I had started with one of my famous "Selfie Photoshoots" taken in my bathroom at home, showing how voluptuously round and voluminous my body had become during the past year of lockdowns, during which movement had been drastically reduced. A happy go lucky figure and attitude for me, nevertheless, preparing to head off for my studio near New Cross Gate wearing my customary yellow padded ski suit, the uniform to go to my desk in a cold studio during the chilly winter, and even spring time months leading up to May, to this day the wettest month of May on record. Hair tied up to the right side, in a voluminous ball of blond newly died shiny texture, abstract, avant-guarde, clownesque daring fashion which I adopt when presenting myself at work for the visual Arts, at my studio F2 on the first floor of the Arthouse, where the day also comprises occasional "Selfie - Photoshoots" showing the artist, JOYCESART, in action.
When at the studio, after a wonderful bicycle ride on my old up-cycled bike which dutifully carries all my yellow bags, that's the branding colour, onto the front basket, relieving me of the weight of two cameras, one small notebook and fountain pen, sometimes an iPad, two smart phones, one for international one for UK, an extra layer of a yellow jumper if need be, a wooly hat and scarf, my yellow patched up ladies' woolen gloves, my two pairs of lights front and back, my packed lunch of nuts and fruits or the like, my two pairs of spectacles far and near vision in their respective bulky boxes, and perhaps even more, depending on the day. Faithful amazing old bike which I bought for £60 at Jeffrey's vintage shop near the New Cross train station, up-cycled in my studio for a few sessions over a few weeks strengthening the back mudguards' frayed antique yellowed transparent plastic with plentiful coats of aluminium tape, before bringing it to Brixton Cycles for a new back wheel, than to Rad Bikes Sea Bass cycles in Camberwell for all the accessories such as front basket, two beautiful removable bags for the back, four removable sets of lights... Oh I do love my old bike! And the Covid 19 pandemic with my unwillingness to go to the studio by public transport has made me love it more and more.
But getting back to "The Content Creator": at first I knew months ago quite a lot what I wanted it to be like, in the gallery project space. Soon after I had painted the back of my long standing up-cycled mirror with a self-portrait of me giving birth to "Content", a great grin on my face, eyes bright alight with joy. That artwork had appeared in my studio on a day where I had found an image on Instagram representing some Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings on found objects, just before heading to the Arthouse. An artist whose work I was very fond of in the mid-nineties, when I had a huge studio and storage space in the house next door to my flat, a squat on the top floor of a corner house, 80-81 Bonnington Square, in Vauxhall, just south of the river. In those days, during a five year span of life with my now separated senegalese husband, whom I had encouraged from the time of our honeymoon in Edingburg, to buy a VHS camera and devote himself to a budding passion in film-making, I had been a totally devoted artist-activist supporting the cause of anti-racism and painting mainly, after a two year period of serious abstract modernist aesthetic discoveries, the theme of black african/carribean and white indo-european people dancing together happily.
But I keep on taking elastic loops away from my artwork, the installation which stands at present in the gallery of the Arthouse, the "Self-Portrait" painted mirror, it's back against a heavy white plynth that I covered with all the yellow pieces of fabrics of different textures and hues, one of them even printed with a fine pattern, all gifts from a master-prop maker for film and television, my gay friend Brian who used to have his studio across the corridor from mine. Across the top of the layered fabrics, as appeared in the Behind Closed Doors Group Show that we just took down, I have placed a found stem of fake ivy, coming from the pigeon-hole area at the Arthouse where anonymous members leave items they hope others may find a use for. Facing the back of the standing artwork, which is in fact the front of the leaning forewards mirror, is a ten centimeter wide tube of still drying yellow ochre household paint, miraculously extracted from it's container and standing upright like a half solid gelly construction, in the entrails of which can be deciphered thin random deposits of gold glitter of various size. This small abstract artwork draws you in to wonder at the insides of it's presence, from above itself as well as from it's mirrored reflection. "Be a Feminist", had been one of the previous ideas I had for a title to this installation, befitting the title of the Group Show well... Also, "The return of the Bohemian". Above the head area of the painting in off-white eggshell paint, household paint yellow acrylic and glitter of this beaming smile of a woman, I had placed over the lockdown weeks and months some of the other found pieces of material that I salvaged from the pigeon-hole area. Some very attractive fabulous shapes in yellows one more exiting than the other. I topped the lot with a big brown real dried tree leaf that had had the advantage of ornamenting the air above my little studio sofa for years and which I had dabbed with emulsion white paint to give it the effect of having received a dash of snow. That leaf, painted branch, was also a main prop in my short 4 minutes film "JOYCESART Behind Closed Doors 3-9 August 2020" that I created whilst being myself filmed by my dear old assistant friend from the 80's, Peter, when I used the Art house Gallery/Project Space for a week. The film is on my portfolio film and animation website, http://vimeo.com/joycesart and probably also on my YouTube channel: Joyce jocelyne Saunders-diop, forgive the uncertaincy.
At the feet of "The Content Creator", that appear to be kind of rounded flat shoes below legs and a knee length vaguely described skirt and two big circular un-mistakenly female breasts, the standing mirror's originally brown but also expressionistically painted in parts frame rests onto a loosely spread mesh of silky yellow fabric which I had initially bought as a skirt in a vintage shop, used as a part of a hat, once, in the very cold studio, than as a textural prop for installation photography and filming of the studio. Between the two feet of the protagonist, resting onto this mesh of yellow silk fabric just against the frame of the mirror, is a white pearl which miraculously came up, having attached it to the fabric many months before... probably an estranged earring of some sort. Is this the Content? Created by the happy protagonist? Or is it also the yellow diamonds of painted glass, smashed to millions of small pieces that lay to the side of the standing figure, in a now heavy small brown bucket the edge of which has been branded with yellow paint years ago, as it's studio equipment and cannot go astray? The brown plastic bucket, weighting perhaps ten kilograms or more with the tiny bits of painted broken glass, has been placed upon the end of the long piece of yellow orange fabric that descends from the back of the figure, from the plinth behind, like these big long victorian dresses with ample volume from behind the lower back of privileged ladies of the upper and upper-middle classes of which my grand-mother, Lilian Horsbrugh-Saunders, was one. She has studied and graduated with a master's degree in painting and music/violin, in Texas, before marrying my grand-father who was very active in developing Amarillo into the metropolis that it is now. Although she mostly painted grand big oil paintings representing flower bouquets, from her detached studio, each petal of roses carefully reminiscent of the very conservative time she catered for, she had great talent and has reminded me of these flower arrangements in oil paintings grandly framed in opulent gold frames at the back of the Royal Academy, at the end of Saville Row, or in Bond Street, where the aristocrats of England like to wonder when they visit London. The Royal Institute of Oil Painters, founded in 1882, just props up on my iPhone as I prepare to stand up from this white rocking chair and move my body around the space. It is now two o'clock.
Salad and home made "bread" and "humus"... satsuma.
My American great-grand-mother has painted a wonderful depiction of the edge of a canyon, with amazing colour and depth of field. My mother, with whom I grew up for many joyous very creative years, herself graduated from the "Beaux-Arts Academy" in Paris and has painted amazing artworks of museum quality up to now. Who is going to help these talented female artists gain the recognition they deserve, deceased or alive? My cousin Melody once suggested compiling a book of our lady ancestors' achievements in painting. My mother is about to receive, if the post does not fail us, two extra large colour gloss books of a collection of her works on paper and card dating from the sixties to this day, which I created for her via an internet book printer and finisher. One of these books is in the possession of a very wealthy and important german woman art collector. I need to create another book, if possible, this time with my own artworks, by mid-night tonight, if I want to take advantage of a sixty percent reduction in price... Perhaps I will just order another one of mum's artbooks, so as to send it later to M. and Mme Rubinstein, in Paris, who have collected her artworks for many years, since the sixties, when my mother me and my half-brother, than just small kids, shared Tia Rubinstein's flat with her above the creche where we used to go during the day-time and where she was the director, just up to Mai 68, when my mother decided to move with us to the wilderness of a remote community farm in the South of France's country side and mountains.
The Content Creator. All these talented women before me had children. My only child is my Art. This white pearl on the silk strands of yellow fabric fallen from between my legs. The abundance of broken bits or small diamonds of yellow painted glass holding my lady's long victorian like skirt anchored to the newly painted grey floor of the gallery space. Heavy with it's past story. The big yellow disaster which took place, just between me and the bottom of the Arthouse's white marble central staircase, as I was taking down a one meter and a half by one meter or so pane of painted glass to complement the installation in the gallery, as it did for many months, behind the self-portrait and against my big wooden desk at the studio F2 upstairs. As I arrived at the bottom of the stairs, the painted glass pane, also an abstracted self-portrait of me reclining with smiling sunshine shape above, exploded in between my two stretched out arms and hands, luckily only leaving a few tiny shreds of glass onto my fingers leaving my body, and most importantly, my eyes, untouched. I only needed to rinse my hands straight away with warm water and plentiful soap, than antibacterial gel, at the sink just a few meters away to remove any possible minute shards of glass, before grabbing a huge broom as well as a smaller more nimble one to quickly make good the "Disaster" before any other Arthouse member may need to walk past and through this vast expanse of beautiful, but worrying, broken yellow glass... I took the time in a dash to film photo and document the proof of the event / happening, that was most likely heard loud and clear from the two studios just above the staircase where I knew two artists where present being grateful that it had brought no reaction from them so that I may quickly fill my brown bucket with the traces of what could aesthetically very well recall the idea of the destructions that take place in urban areas when revolutions take place... I had come up with the word "Evolution" when someone had suggested the word "Revolution" after Tom had suggested "Resolution", as a title and theme for this Arthouse Members' Group Show, hoping we may have the show sooner, when it was announced before the New Year. Later, someone had added "Solution" in the Zoom meeting we had had about it. All clear. Floor swept. Brooms put aside. Bucket full of yellow diamonds, aesthetically speaking, to the side of my installation, heavy with it's present beauty, as it reflects the light in myriad ways through the opening of this A4 sheet of orange yellow paper, resting onto the full brown bucket, into which I had cut with scissors the shape of a cloud, to attach to my foot lamp in the studio the sign signaling that "I only use one halogen heater at a time", for Health and Safety reasons... ...bucket of yellow diamonds heavy in how it speaks of danger, hurt, accident, violence, destruction, potential pain, in fine contained passive settled weight of painted substance. Recalling how women artists, all too often, throughout the ages, have only let the refined versions of their creative energies express themselves onto the canvas and sculpture, leaving the raw primal forms to their male counterparts... To enjoy and reap most of the recognition.
Resolution. Revolution. Evolution. Solution. A feminist aesthetic call to action from me and my Content Creator? You can see images and films related to this artwork, from the 20th May 2021, on either one of my web publishing platforms: http://vimeo.com/joycesart http://weebly.com/joycesart http://www.joycesart.co.uk Instagram: joycejsdlondongb joycesart123 joycejsdartist also @lewishamarthouse Facebook Twitter YouTube: Joyce jocelyne Saunders-diop Also
ONLINE OPEN STUDIO F2 @lewishamarthouse - 16th to 29th November 2020
F3BRH Thursday 26 November 2020
Yesterday, Leila filmed my studio F2AH, first floor at the Art House - http://www.lewishamarthouse.org.uk - @lewishamarthouse - and a little bit of me while passing through. She came inside my space on two occasions. Alma and Samuel were in the corridor, giving support to the operation for documenting Online Open Studios at the Arthouse 2020.
The first time I was sat on my little contemporary sofa, filming her as she did me, with my Canon EOS 600D mainly set up for stills so it only does four seconds long snapshots at a time. That's the way I like it. She herself was holding with both hands a foot long stem onto which was affixed her camera and was filming a continuous sweep across my space, mostly towards eye level, missing all the fabulous bits of installations props and artworks that are either way up high or towards knee or floor level, as one would normally not care for those levels in most art displays. Fortunately, given the importance I give upon my own personal image as myself representing JOYCESART the brand, and JOYCE in particular as artist, main star and character in my own movies where I chose to be the scriptwriter, master prop maker, location researcher, casting director, head of hair and make-up, wardrobe and fashion stylist, editor cinematographer photographer camera-woman and producer, in my own Life, consequently...
Yes, fortunately she did at least film me a little, and I might be lucky to get that footage, however ridiculous or unflattering, which always adds a bit of spice to any character, especially female, bringing in an always welcome touch of humour, to otherwise serious self-important narratives. As is mostly the case with self-important artists such as us... but, as I had done when my young friend the documentary filmmaker Gwen came into my space with her massive black bag of equipment, I was at the same time pointing my own camera at her.
There were times when I didn't feel the urge to document the passing of the content capturers, the "paparazzis" before kind of becoming one myself, at times... When Vivienne (Dick) used to come and film me, in the 90's, at my studio in Bonnington Square or at one of my shows, such as in London's Russel Square, when I exhibited "The Thirty Squares Series" of abstract multimedia paintings on stretched canvas with sculpted frames, a number of which are now distributed across the USA, Ireland and London... Or when my father, Joe, who had a few years before graduated with a PHD in Philosophy Communication Cinema from the University of Southern California would make an advertisement for his latest invention, the "Face Fender", asking me to wear it with my long blond hair brought forward over thee tanned brown shoulders, under the tall palm trees of Venice beach, with people on skate boards or roller skates swaying around, and that bright sunshine and blue sky, and all the vivid colours that people wore in that part of the world in particular, in the mid-seventies... or develop a film idea with me on the beach, asking me to walk in the sand towards the wave of the Pacific ocean holding a beautiful surf board ornamented by a large colourful butterfly... He would have liked me to become a cheerleader and named me JOYCE perhaps with the intention that I may bring Joy and Happiness to this world, or at the very least to his own...
Joyce. And I do my uttermost every day as an artist to wear this name with pride and success. Fending away clouds and webs of grey dark smothering depression and misery with bright yellow strokes of Cadmium Yellow Medium, I look towards the sun, the warmth, the light. I seek optimism and cheerfulness, joy, happiness, health, vigour, energy, Life... anything that will lift me away from the sadness despair and negativity this world abounds with, if you let yourself stare at the half-empty glass, rather than at the half-full. Joyce. And re-joyce again and again. I have been developing a theme around the colour yellow for so long, it's proeminent outside and all around in my studio, and in my wardrobe and flat, and has been in previous homes...
If the registry office in Toulon, by the mediterranean sea, at the side of which my mother and father had gone to live for a year while I was born named me Jocelyne instead of Joyce, when Joe brought me there alone, mum still in hospital or at home for a few days after the tiring event, him not speaking French very well with his strong Texan accent, as he told them that I would be Joyce Lyn Susan Saunders... well that's a matter for bureaucracy and the fact that I have had an identity for the French under the name Jocelyne and that I have always been called Joce by my mother and by my half-brother, a mix between the sound of Joyce and an abreviation of Jocelyne; the fact that my American family has always called me and written to me as Joyce, as my mother in writing, and that as soon as I started living in the anglo-saxon metropolis of London, at the age of 18, I reclaimed my true first name JOYCE, with which I have signed my artworks since the age of four, previously with large rounded initial, small caps, and a swirl ending into a daisy beneath, than in Capitals, Underlined, from the 90's onwards... And created my yellow logo, derived from the later signature on a painting, at the University of The Arts London, London College of Communication, whilst studying on my BA (hons) in Digital Media Production, in 2003...
Well that is probably the reason why when Alma, announcing at loud for Leila and camera, entering my studio, and for the second time, despite me having put a large A3 card on the door reminding her of my name, this time around: Joyce jocelyne Saunders-diop... and despite the fact that my logo is a foot square print on aluminium up high on the studio door: JOYCE underlined, in yellow... She named me at loud, for the camera, Jocelyne, and for the second time, and this time around I was sat behind my desk, three masks hanging above me to the right, having just made and sent out a "selfie" on Instagram, not wearing any of them, when Leila turned up with her camera again, suddenly, wearing an amazing white flesh... light pink orange beige... face covering... and me none, looking disgruntled and rather irritated after having corrected Alma at loud, for the camera to capture: "Artist name: Joyce: The name my father gave me". In between all the hanging plants and cards and signs and necklaces and thought magnets of all sorts hanging above the desk between her and I, there was a moment when her little hand held camera and her covered face stared at me for a while, as if hoping that I may say more as I just looked up, respecting the fact that no other artists had been interviewed, however briefly, to talk to camera. Will they keep my previous voice in the film? Have I committed a huge offense by having been seen without a mask on? This is Lock-down for heavens sake! But Leila was at a safe distance. And this encounter was very brief indeed.
They had had to come back and do the shoots again because of a discrepancy around names... Samuel told me so, as they were going up from the basement again, when I returned from a short video WhatsApp with my ex-husband in the yard, where I had just gone to smoke a Camel light with a tiny antique glass of Alison's strong home made "Melissa whine", made from the produce from her allotment, that I keep in my special "Party Cabinet" in the studio...
Yes, the first time they had arrived to film, Alma had named me Jocelyne. And I had corrected loud and clear: "JOYCE, also known as Jocelyne in France"...
Later, just past midnight, from my rocking chair at home, I had corrected again, on an Instagram post showing me at Studio F2AH, minutes after Leila filmed, in a "mirror art" iPhone pic... That's what Gwen had started calling these shots, "Mirror Art", that I had been making thousands of over the years, after I photographed and filmed her and I in my studio when she was making her four minutes documentary. Today, the next day, @lewishamarthouse saw and liked that post, with mention and correction around my name and identity.
Damn! My artist name! The name my father gave me and that I have signed my artworks with since the age of four! That I have made into a logo for my brand of Creative Arts since 2003!!! My identity! The one that truly counts for me! The one everybody at the Arthouse has always known to call me. Alma included. Is it because she is german that she had to create something around the French bit of me? Joyce jocelyne... Take some time and accept the both. That's me. Joyce Lyn Susan. Susan like my mother. Saunders from my father and Texan family. A big red letter "S" is hanging above the far end of my little contemporary sofa next to a large poster of me modeling for the Photoshoot Factory (London) in 2007, yellow logo included top right... But we will not go any further with that one.
Thanks Leila, Samuel, Alma. Thanks the Lewisham Arthouse for having had me, and still, for the past 16 years or more... thanks my lovely plants in the Studio F2 first floor that are growing together with the paintings all round my space there. Thank you Life. Earth. Gaia. God. Buddha. Science. London. GB. The West. The World. Thank you for having and keeping me. Kindly, Love. Peace. Art. Abundance. Health.
ONLINE OPEN STUDIO F2 @lewishamarthouse - 16th to 29th November 2020
JOYCESART "Behind Closed Doors Artworks" 3-9 August to 4 September 2020
Mixed media on up-cycled gallery card and canvas board initially based upon the Beirut Nitrogen explosion which shattered the city whilst the first paint application and installation in the Arthouse's Gallery Project space took place
25 August 2020 In the park
Where could I sit and think A poem to the World? There a bench The sun before me Coming down in the early evening And the wind Louder and louder On these big dry trees of August Pushing brown crisp And brittle leaves and twigs Across the park’s paths Summer drought leaves A usual now And the big trees of the world Are dying all around us But the sound of the children In the playground nearby And the young mum and dad with pram On the bench behind my shoulder Hope Hope anyhow An airplane, solo, above When before the Lockdown It would have been One amongst a procession of arrivals In the South London evening sky Small green parrots Escaped decades ago From the aviary of a zoo Now proliferating all over the country They cut above from tree to tree Free Fluorescent green feathers And piercing cries The sound of this moped With it’s missing exhaust pipe Thundering along the side road Delivering food Like a Third World protagonist
The dry parched grass Of the park and garden London barely breathing With it’s huge empty new offices And modern apartment blocks Sprung all around Staycation Quarantine Local Lockdown Face masks All these words I try to ignore To enjoy the breeze on my cheeks The gold of the descending sunlight On my dancing fountain pen Peace Love Time Abundance Humanity Nature Life Art For all that keeps me going Is the love of Art And the love of artists And friends The few that I can still share warmth with Film Painting Literature Music What else is there for me then them, and their creators The supermarket The food The bleaching of the packaging And of my door handles Once home
I am grateful for this little park That has been playground And leisure heaven To all these local people Over the past six months Now quite eroded and worn It still breathes and thrives It’s big trees heaving in the wind Welcoming the sun coming down Behind the soft top of their dark foliage Grateful for the Green The leaves the birds Below which these three small kids Drive their tiny meandering bicycles A scooter zooming past electric quiet and swift It’s rider tall and proud standing straight A Spanish mother and blue ball With her small child Her voice like exotic music Resonating in the air The scooter zooming Just past my feet this time Peace Abundance Air Space Time The clouds are racing In big grey and silver volutes Through the sky above all Two rays of sunshine Piercing their brightness Through an aperture Two tiny drops of rain A father pushes the pram Away from a patch of green grass And rusty colour dry leaves The sky is darkening I go home
Some Lockdown Artworks Made at Home - March, April, May, June 2020.
OPEN STUDIOS @lewishamarthouse - Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 September 2019 -
Yesterday was Open Studios at the Arthouse from ...... This calendar doesn't work well for the purpose of writing up as in, with the intention of possible later publication of content. Let's switch to my other more antiquated iBook... … Although the feel of this keyboard is very smooth indeed... All metalled, rather than white hard plastic, it has a great sound and response to the finger tips. One gets to enjoy tapping onto it. I might stick with it after all.
Yes. Yesterday at the Arthouse: Sunday 22 September 2019.
Got ready first wearing the same yellow jumpsuit I had worn the day before. Walking to the bus stop as my bike was parked by Tesco then for two nights in a row. Wearing my gold and aviator style lady's sunglasses bought at the side of Windsor Castle when I was there last with my darling, for 5 or 8 pounds. Kitsch bling... I gave two red A6 card leaflets for the Open Studios on the bus, first one to the creative looking young woman sat to my left at the top of the bus, front row, the other side of the aisle, than another to the impeccably dressed long straight haired white dress and make-up pretty young African church going woman behind her, stretched my legs with no heels yellow water shoes up front to the corner of the window, yellow water shoes I have had for so many years and wash every week in the summer... trying to catch a power-nap of some sort as I had only slept three hours and a half the night before.
Yes, because the night before had been the party from 6 PM 'till late in our yard, reserved for Art House members and friends this year, with bonfire and bar. There, Gian Lucas, one of my dear assistants and friends from the late nineties, had joined me after having helped to invigilate my studio space from 4 PM... which had been the time I had arrived more or less, not even ready to greet him in my deep cadmium yellow and black stars dress from TRAID Camden Town, only worn once in the changing room with filmed mirror art in one of my Hard Drives to prove... with red found (fifty yards up the road from the Arthouse, past the second hand furniture and bric-a-brac shop, on the way to Goldsmith College) new shiny boots _NEW!!!_, that I only put on with my customary yellow ochre stockings and hand-made thin cream salmon coloured under dress shorts (previously a charity shop find, Indian thin cotton loose trousers, than cut and hemmed)), a little while before the party.
Yes, because after the party, where I had had the chance to meet Brian for the third time now, Brian Francis the solid (“lovable”, as says Amanda) Anglo-Jamaican young man I have been talking film and animation with over the years, on three occasions now, and who sparked the desire in me to plant the seeds for our Short Artists' Films Open Studio Event, this year... Project I have been ruminating on since we both last talked at "The Pears" Group Show Private View at the Art House gallery's Private View, where a painting from my mother, "Pensees", was exhibited together with a small one from me, of "The Artificial intelligence Series", in June of this summer. There, he had reminded me of how we had met at another bonfire Art House party, a couple of years earlier, and talked about film and animation. He had continued by enthusing that he may be able to help me show some films with him at some "Deptford X" event in which he was participating, in the area, around the same period, had expressed some concerns on how some of these art organisations tended to be a little elitist and exclusive gate keeping people out unfavourably... I had said that we had a remit for inclusivity at the Arthouse, actually something that had propped up within the previous couple of months as we had even paid over a £1000 for a consultancy from a female individual out of the Royal College of Arts, Japanese if I remember well from her self-introduction with photo on the techno-sphere, website email and the like... Inclusion. Within the Arthouse, amongst ourselves, and without, towards the external community of art lovers and talents. So there, I invited Brian in return, on that evening, stating that if I if could get together a Short Films and Animations Event at the Arthouse, he would be our first guest.
However, during the summer, I was having major concerns of my own trying to secure my Settled Status from the Home Office, in these choppy waters Brexit times, as I still only hold a French passport, and all the anguish that came with it. Also, I had workers coming to my flat installing a huge scaffolding in the middle of my space creating days of displaced furniture and belongings, and blocking access to my working iMac, and keeping me at home only able to operate via my old iPhone CS5, sending out emails and texts and doing some calls or the like. When our Arthouse administrator, Reuben, had finally returned from holiday, it was just impossible for me to join the Short Artists' Films team in person, in situ, as I was also trying to reach a deadline for “The Coffee Art Project” and Festival in New York, that I had missed last year and was determined at all costs, to participate in this year.
I took my big soft yellow bath towel to the Brockwell Park lido once to find a mile long queue at the front and around the building, under the torching sun, and ended up laying it under a tree at the top of the dried grassed hill by the cafe, enjoying the welcome breeze whilst working on the strategic planning and GANTT chart for the organising of the event. What. When. How. Who. and even Why were sketched out and expanded. I further refined the strategy with a lovely eco-intello-factory style bare expensive coffee near the fabulous launderette below Goldsmith College and Marquis of Grandby' s gorgeous nature and sky mural painted facade in New Cross Gate. I later did more of that management planning in this other little cafe I like nearby, where I also ended up talking to the young lady boss with a big swirl of long dark brown curl of hair propped up to the top of the head, as we discussed possibilities for showing films there too, after her wedding, in October.
Than there were these numerous emails I had send to Alma, after we had met at Eleanor's Graduation Private View at the City and Guilds College of Fine Arts near Kennington Park, and where Alma had exploded into a fabulous temper saying she would do "everything !!!", after I had expressed on our way out of the building my own negativity as in... “I will not do this, and this, nor this”… meaning I couldn’t… After that, Arthouse members mostly back into action from holidays here and there, Reuben in the office, and reassured that Alma was on the ground highly motivated to make this project she believed in passionately come to fruition, I piloted the project from a distance, emailing to her and the Arthouse membership the points and gaps to be filled in the production, and looked after the making of this happening, to support her in the coordination of the event. After my second encounter with Brian, in late June, I had had a chat with Alma in the office where she had offered to help in any way, design posters or help coordinate. Than I had presented the project to the first Open Studios meeting where the coordinator, Janine, and Alma were present, Janine much later emailing me asking me to coordinate “The Short Artists film Event” which I had done anyway since early June... in my very own way...
So I was like the producer, or the CEO, overlooking the process from a distance. after Alma's explosion of temper when every Arthouse member present and leaving Eleanor's college to go the pub one way, and I the other way setting up my bicycle lights to get home... Until she got mad at me again on on email saying she didn't want to be told what to do... By that time I had remotely gotten Fanny and Reuben in the communications' loop, as well as Leila, who had a lovely green screen and set of lights in her own studio, has newly arrived with us, and got to put all the short films in an actual digital loop on the Thursday before the weekend, as planned. Fanny whom I had asked to draw out the invigilation rota and post it on two walls as I couldn't make it to the Arthouse, finally got quite a knot untangled by removing this annoying invigilation of the equipment problem and talking to Reuben who assured her it would be possible to hide the equipment in a plinth... In the end, Alma brought her plasma screen with her partner who plays the piano as it seems our projector and screen at the Arthouse are less than satisfactory...
Alma had complained that I sent her too many emails when she had also written that she didn't want me to tell her what to do. So I had stopped emailing her personally. She seems to be wanting to spread the view that all I did was give the idea to have such an event in the first place. To what I tell her that no, it came from Brian who sparked it all up in me. As in the sparks we have in our bonfires... A spark. A passion for the moving image. That Alma shares with me. And Leila. And Gwen who turned up yesterday and saw my 4 minutes film "The Cars Series Exhibition at the Arthouse 2009" with her boyfriend, Joseph and me, when I finally got hold of some time to get down to the screening room and sit there for almost half an hour. They both seemed to like it a lot. So did Brian, he had said the night before. And Jacques, a marvellous artist friend of my mother's based in the South of France, who had sent me a "Wow!!!" through the techno-sphere once... Incidentally, it was also "Car Free Day" in London yesterday, as well as in Paris, I later heard, with hundreds of roads closed by the mayors... At first. Gwen, who has made a short four minutes documentary about me last year, filming in my studio, or rather Joseph, her partner, asked if I had known previous to the Open Studios Short Films Event that this was going to happen, to what, sat with them in the film viewing low ceiling dark room of Sheena's studio, I had turned around and said that, “now, I am going to mystify you a little: You see, I am a little... let's find the word:... clairvoyant”. They must have loved that. Gwen is now doing the preliminary research for her next film project, this time based on performance artists who perform ... witchcraft... Wow Wow!…Ooh! Ooh!
We than went to the yard and saw no-one there apart from Richard, in the distance, towards Basia' s space, talking to another man in the day light. I had been hoping to eat some sugar free gum and smoke a cigarette that I had a £1 coin ready for, as my contribution towards the cost of this expensive tobacco, but the bar was dead too... only emptiness... Strange as I later came to help Fiona, our Queen of all Bars at the Arthouse, to bring upstairs, from that very bar, boxes of whine and beer bottles.... No. Not so strange. She must have just delivered them from the street at back of the Arthouse, and was going to wheel them on a shopping trolley to the pigeonhole area from the top of the basement stairs. I also brought upstairs, to the pigeonhole area, all the chairs from the Film Event room, a good chance for me to catch up on hands on participation for these “Open Studios Short Artists' Film Event” tasks where I had just been monitoring from afar, also for our Health and Safety duties, as well as Front of House Invigilation, or loosely coordinating Fire Wardens on the late Sunday afternoon. I managed to extract a few slices of cake, to eat on the spot and to bring home, from Janine, who was packing up the cafe and had to be asked, when she was generous to others turning up as I was putting away most chairs from the cafe. I still remember offering her two pairs of hand made self-invented concept acrylic and plastic yellow fluorescent earrings that matched her little hand bag. Why hasn't she even offered me a coffee? OK. Perhaps I take myself too much for a Star at times…
Gwen, herself, was eager to offer me a coffee. And to go with me upstairs back to my space where she was happy to take over from Conel... yes, that was yesterday, Sunday... Conel had arrived at 11.50 AM to help me invigilate wearing a big white teeshirt bearing a big black Extinction Rebellion logo and label, his grey baseball cap reverse on his grey longish tied back hair, shaven, long sun bleached grey shorts and white socks and sandals with bag containing a one liter bottle of water... I had asked him to wait on the kneeling chair in the corridor where my two Climate Change/Crisis paintings where exhibited, whilst I was changing from yellow ochre polyester jumpsuit and lemon yellow water shoes into ochre yellow stockings, creme salmon thin cotton loose undershorts, "Nude" heels, polyester very vintage long sleeves indien motif thin top, under the knee cadmium satin polyester under-dress (or whatever that may be called) that I bought from a market stall outside my favourite Peckham-Plex cinema one afternoon for £5... and my fabulous designer neoprene yellow dress found at the Barnados store in Brixton, charity for Children's welfare, quite a few years ago and that I have worn on numerous occasions now, both at Arthouse Open Studios and at Pancakes and Booze Art Shows (an American Arts organisation that I like to work with every year if I can, when they are in London).
I took numerous Canon EOS 600D shots of Conel as he was leaving the Executive Suite's desk, and as Gwen was preparing to take his place. He had been reading with great attention, a little book that was part of the installation amongst my wall of plants, and that he had returned there before leaving: a little book written by Greta Thunberg, with a photo of her wearing a hooded yellow raincoat looking seriously at the photographer, front face, or to the viewer. The directives to friends and assistants invigilating for that weekend had been to say that there were only two paintings there for sale; two little A6 deep edge paintings on canvas, framed in white wood and wrapped in cling film; one named "Artificial Intelligence Series *3", the other "Spiritual Soup", after a word coming from Conel that same day, each going for the price of £200 to try to cover the rent for my studio and storage space for a month. Gwen, who didn't mind either when I arrived a little later than planned, to relieve her from her duties, had been sat behind the desk reading the big "The Gentlewoman" magazine with filmmaker Agnes Varda on the cover that I had left on the sofa. She listened intently as I talked to her, as had done her partner Joseph outside our big sculpted oak door and entablature with portland stone columns to the front of the Arthouse when I had finally managed to get hold of some tobacco. Steve had come to me at the reception desk where I was invigilating for an hour, and did accept my £1 coin that I just must part with if only to keep my dignity and to slow down my smoking. The only cigarette of the day. With a little bit of torn red card from one of our leaflets as filter. Armed with my mega big yellow box of matches, a marvellous find from my local 99p store, Joseph kindly accepting to carry my pink orange and yellow straw lady's bag with butterfly design under his arm so as to keep my hands free.... “You don't seem to mind doing the film assistant jobs”, I passed on the him as we walked to the side of Fanny and a couple after she had agreed to take over the invigilating from me for a moment.
Looking at cars glistening in the distance at the top of the hill in between glimpses at his nervous thin fingers and white socks in black and white striped plastic slippers I had reiterated my intention to put Vivienne and Juliette in touch with Gwen. Both friends involved in film, one in Dublin, one in Paris, One whom I had seen recently in Paris for an hour at a cafe, and who had asked me if I knew anything about Art Brut goings ons in London. That had let me a little bewildered, and I had just mentioned “The museum of Everything, perhaps”. But for the first time since my recent return on the Eurostar, after two days in Paris and that conversation with Juliette, someone at the Arthouse had responded to that french term with an inkling of understanding. Joseph straight away replied that Gwen was the one to talk to about this as she knew quite a bit on the subject. Yes, Gwen, this young female filmmaker with quite a lot of experience under her belt already, is working on an MA Filmmaking at the moment where she is always asked to prepare her projects with copious research. When she choose to film me at the Arthouse Studio last year for her four minutes documentary project she may have done some research prior or subsequent to the experience and come across a few trails that may have guided her into exploring Art Brut. or was that before? I need to discuss that with her as it would be fabulous to finally have my childhood friend Juliette, who has graduated from filmmaker to producer recently, turn up in London with her Arte Film Project about Art Brut and while she is at, and finally visit my studio after all.
Both my mother and Dallas, who know me well, especially considering my mother has done seven years of study in Fine Art - Painting, at the Beaux Arts Academy in Paris whilst having me, and has been my mentor throughout all these years, since I developed my art practice from the age of four, in Paris, when she put colour to one of my drawings and framed it under glass to be exhibited in the lovely shiny dark wood and black antique telephone flat above the creche where we were living at the time and where Tia, soon to become Mme Rubinstein, started collecting the artworks of both my mother and I... Although Mum called the last contemporary artwork I had put on her table in the South of France as a gift to my brother, Jeff, “degenerate Art”, neither her nor Dallas, whom I lived with for five very happening years in my art practice and career, and still collaborate with to this day, call my art “Art Brut”. During this recent short trip to Paris, I also stayed for a day and night at the Rubinsteins' residence on the leafy "Ville Nouvelle" outskirts of Paris. Mr Rubinstein took the small square art catalogue of "The Squares Series" which I painted whilst living in Bonnington Square, South West London, on my roof top studio, in the early 90's, and said he would show it to the daughter of Hermes (High Fashion) for possible silk scarves creation…. Conel has two of these square paintings with sculpted frames. Dallas has two. My uncle James and aunt Celia in San Francisco have one. Cousins in Texas may have salvaged one I once gave to my Uncle Tom and Aunt Celia, unframed. A friend who once restored a whole wooden floor for me in Bonnington Square for my largest studio ever, in the early 90's, has one of the Squares, unframed, and moved to Dublin with it. I have five of them hanging in my home as I consider them the jewels of my entire production, and wanted to bring them for exhibition in NYC in the 90's... One of these dreams... Dreams that may also become true at times...
Anyhow. To return to these Open Studios. Peter, my dear friend and PA since the late 80's had come to help me paint around the entrance to my studio with some gouache yellow I had bought one litre of in Hoxton on my way back from getting my twenty centimetres square black and white drawing of two men drinking coffee by the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park for The Coffee Art Project and Festival in NYC. The Print Space is right there opposite the Arts Material Shop... “bestest” shop ever... and they do good Giclee archival prints with ease of order over the techno-sphere. Peter had helped for a day, on Thursday nineteenth, coming to meet me at home to travel together by bus, letting me pull and carry my travelling case as he is starting to have slight hip problems... Peter has been a bit of an adopted surrogate dad for me over many years, as I lost my own dad, unfortunately, in the late 80's, and as they have a few things in common: good background, a true gentleman, well read, vegetarian, spartan lifestyle, creative artists... He turned up at mine around noon, and we left the Arthouse around 7.30 PM or so, a little later than anticipated, after having checked on the progress in Sheena's space where we found Alma overlooking Reuben on his knees endeavouring to plug in plasma screen and DVD player, and on our way to the yard for late brunch (for me at least), in the sun with flower on the table, as they preferred to be left alone. Peter did a marvellous job impressionistically marking the frame of the door from the outside of my studio with playful dry brush, than onto the doors itself, within the swirl pencil lines I drew out for him as limits, which he needed, and I finished off the serving of paint, from the little flower shape white porcelain dish from China Town I had given him, with the same fitch, quickly adding depth and intensity of colour, with clear definition along these lines. The overall result is great, leaves the layers of subsequent years of markings and gentle graffiti intact, making a lovely impact as visitors pass by and may venture into the space.
As a matter of fact, as I was invigilating at our front of house desk, a woman took my card and was wanting to buy my (not for sale) "She's established", a small twenty five centimetres by fifteen approximately, baroque like three dimensional collage painting with golden frame. She was wearing exciting clothes and hair, together with the other woman stepping behind her onto our marvellous white marble staircase as I was returning upstairs to the studio and Gwen. She knows the High Fashion shoe label "Nude" that I was wearing, with heels metallic and acting high and... absent.
When Conel was there we had the visit of a family with two little long side pony tailed twin girls wearing wide black framed spectacles who sat on the sofa swinging their legs in joy exclaming "Yellow! Yellow! Yellow! Yellow! Yellow!... in so many fun keys and tones of voices that I was sorry I hadn't been ready to record them. “On your phone?” had said the mum... but I wasn't even ready for that. Enough memory space? No more space for film and video, sound. Full up… They were lovely. They also asked if the big work horse shoe that I brought from France many years ago was real, as I have wrapped it up in an orange plastic bag from the supermarket Sainsbury’s, and transparent tape, to protect from the possible rust accidental scratches, at least provisionally...
Later, whist Conel was reading seriously behind the executive desk, spectacles below his back to front cap. a little Chinese family came in, the man staying by the door for the corridor peeping in holding the little girl's plastic scooter, the mother guiding her lovely little girl inside the space and me offering her a little A6 painting on canvas, onto which only a mark that I had asked Peter to make with his yellow gouache laden fitch onto this little deep edge white canvas whilst slacking on his door painting endeavour. That yellow dry fitch gestural spontaneous and fast Zen mark had been exhibited within an orange found metallic half sphere with holes and base that we use in kitchens to wash vegetables and the like before cooking or preparing salad and that held for the show some remnants of multicoloured cutting Chris and Oliver where cutting out into table tennis foam on a manufacturing workshop with kids one day... placed behind a corner of the sofa on top of the end of my tent... That particular painting, initiated by Peter, and my own intention, was now painted as a lovely carefully designed little girl with the three yellow nail polishes and some other colour I had put at her disposition, pretty Chinese girl in a white dress standing against my yellow round table, who had then signed beautifully SOPHIA in sharp grey black pencil. I had straight away offered to buy it and whilst looking for the one brass pound coin and silver fifty pence coin in my pink orange and yellow butterfly lady's straw hand bag, the mother had uttered the word, "magic!", softly, to her daughter... But she refused the money, also refused the big deep cadmium yellow grapefruit I was offering as a gesture of thanks as the painting still hadn't been signed with Peter's name at the back and I couldn't possibly give her the painting instead as yet. They all just left, after possibly taking a card from my table, after I had offered another such session for future days... quickly, as if some spell need not be broken... The lovely Peter and little Chinese girl, Sophia's painting now rests at the foot of an artwork cutout by Bill Greenhalgh, a friend I haven't seen for a few years and would like to meet again, who had given it to me off the boot at the back of his car one evening in London, in the late 90's. It's painted black, matt, and appears in one of my black and white drawings on up-cycled cards that Peter had stored in his house in Clapham, after I had just picked them up from the pavement outside a local gallery in a big white and black luxury brand glossy card bag, for a few months, before I took them all in a big Sainsbury’s bag to my studio a couple of years ago. There is a film about this "Up-cycling Cards" adventure on my http://vimeo.com/joycesart website. And so is "The Cars Series Exhibition at the Arthouse 2009" four minutes short film by the way... Those drawings, made recently, from the sofa and from the desk's chair, representing the studio, were also on show this weekend.
Peter, who had also helped me clarify the space a little by taking a couple of boxes to the basement storage, broke one of my micro installation made onto a medium sized yellow plate, which is now swept to the side into my small storage space's delimitations, awaiting a possible gluing... Could Janine, expert in mosaic, do something with these for me? Could I? I talked about the Ai Wei Wei vase reconstituted with gold as artworks of many powers, trying to stop Peter from being too apologetic for the breakage, unnecessarily.
Gian Lucas, on the Saturday 21 September, first day of the Open Studios 2019, helped from 4 PM until midnight or so when he drove me back to my door before leaving to sleep and get up at 7 AM the next day. At the party, he had offered me a half-whine half-orange juice small glass, had taken hold of my Canon 600D to take some shots of me in the loo space of the yard, where there was the most light, chatted with Fanny and Brian, and as we left, after I had changed into my yellow jumpsuit and comfortable shoes, had let me know how much a good time he had had. Gian Lucas has been an artist in Italy, and on a foundation course in the college where I met him in the mid-90's, and says he may return to Art in the future. At any rate, he sure worked in the Creative Arts this weekend! Conel left calling me Superwoman after I called him Superman. Gwen wants to come back and film me at some stage. A young American student of Goldsmith College, studying Management for the Arts wants to come and have tea with me at the studio sometimes. Another creative, who was also with us at the party left his details. The chinese family took my card... No sales. As is often the case with my Open Studios, especially since I started working in Installations, years ago. I must go. It's time to call my mentor, the artist, the painter, the philosopher, Susan: my mother.
P.S: Oh, I had mentioned my concept of "Alter-Ego" to Gwen, the budding filmmaker, for JOYCESART, my most extravagant creative fashion and behavioural apparitions in the Arts' World, Arthouse mainly but also elsewhere... “Brilliant!”, she had said; understood.
Open Studios and Group Show 4 & 5 June 2016 Lewisham Arthouse SE14 6PD LONDON GB
Yesterday, was Open Studios day, @ The Arthouse. And so was the day before, Saturday 4 June 2016.
Considering I had a number of shows in February, March and April, @ "Vinyl" Deptford, "Undercurrents Gallery" Deptford, Pancake Booze and Art Show Wapping, all in London, but that I also had a major "breakdown" @my home desk with the iMac giving me huge concerns in April and May... finally resolved after 2 friends and the guys at the Mac Store Covent Garden gave me all the support I needed... I just had to find my way into passwords and latest software security downloads, something seemingly so simple and obvious but that my many years at adult education college and university studying computer graphics, multimedia and digital media production just did not ... well I am not complaining: it is my fault. I always relied on the men for technical assistance, as they would always be most eager to help. All these wonderful teachers and tutors. Male. Female. Young and older. Quintessentially english or from the continent, always great individuals. I am grateful to all of them. And to Tyx, who updated the Sophos anti-virus, so kindly as always. Always coming to my rescue even though he already does so much overtime for Passion Pictures, W1, doing marvellous edits for adverts like the meerkats and Swartzernegger at the Hollywood studios... did I get the name right? Sorry if I didn't, or the jolly uncle in Kentucky fried chicken animation, or the lovely cat in Felix the cat for cat food... Whatever. Txy is one of those supermen friends of mine. And has been ever since we met when we were working on "The Thief" animation feature at Ink Crowd in Kentish Town, 1995. Always such a diligent dedicated character. I will miss his friendship and invaluable help with mac and editing when he moves to Berlin in August. Must quickly get another 1h + film done, JOYCEs Art Showreel *2 or something such, before he does, or I may have to get a week-end hotel break in Berlin every now and then in the future... in my dreams at least...
Or I need to find other help, as Jxx from "Vinyl" so smartly suggested a while ago. She does have an amazing intern who studies at Central St Martin, Exx, who has been so wonderful at helping set up my DVD for "Vinyl"s PC and monitor when I did my first film showing to a live audience there in spring. She had been ill with flu, was very poorly and tired, but held to her promise of coming to do the technical stuff so very reliably nevertheless. A wonderful extraordinary young woman. And probably very talented at her art too. She also helped me roll away my big expressionist mixed media canvasses in a layer of thin transparent plastic at the "Undercurrents Gallery" when I, Jxx, with her glass crows, and Kxy, who organizes the exhibitions there were packing up our show to make ready for the next exhibitors, whose private view was on the same day, or rather night. Kxy, from the "Mine Sweepers" collective is terrific in human warmth and efficiency as well by the way. Yes. Together with the iMac, the dishwasher, the grill on the cooker, the outside door handle of my beloved home, and I forget the rest... All seemed to be breaking down on me. Enforced holiday where I only managed to keep up with house work and work hours at the Arthouse, and trying to go walking with the wonderful Ramblers a little more frequently again. I just managed to push my desk forward into the space and take some items to the storage space in our basement. Tidy up a little. Reorganize TV artwork installation and sofa so as to make visitors to the Open Studios feel at home in the space... print out black and white skulls on cream paper for our Arthouse family trail...
By Saturday, our building was immaculate. Apparently, having not managed to participate much in any of the Arthouse preparations other than having my name JOYCE underlined and painted yellow on mirror selected by a star of the Artworld ( ! ! ! XX ), Jeremy Deller XX... I later found that I had also omitted to turn up to invigilate our group show on Thursday prior to the Open Studios. Jxx had kindly, and quite luckily for me, taken the seat at the reception's invigilator's desk for me. Thank God, Life, the Universe. Thank you Jxx. And the Arthouse, for always having been such an organic and tolerant organisation, with a creative culture that has been able to accommodate individualists like me over the 10 years + I have been working there as an artist. Thank you Rxx for having done such a good job at coordinating our event this year where all ran so smoothingly well, or at least apparently so. Our inhouse DJs Bxy and Txy did good sounds and vibes in the yard, on the Saturday's bonfire night that Fxx lit graciously, starting on the fibres of an old doormat. Our good speakers were beautifully set-up to the left towards the shed and to the opposite direction towards the crowd sat and chattering to the side of the enclosure where the bonfire sent it's wondrous lights and waves of energy, at the foot of the gorgeous lush gloss green leaves facing Axx's studio, doors open onto her space with A0 painted commercial fashion or cosmetics posters, deck, and groovy DJs with or without headphone, perfect willing subject matters for portraits that have been asked of me in photo, and will be on DVD in my desk's front drawer the next time I get to my studio... or so I hope. ASAP I mean.
The guest caterers for Jerk Chicken also played some sounds the next day, in the afternoon. A team of jamaican young men all smartly dressed in white. I found myself sat opposite the bonfire black metal tray, facing ashes and cold burnt charcoals, just where I had been the night before after taking some shots of Bxy and Txy our inhouse DJs as well as of the chattering crowd who had come down to the yard for the event. This time, daytime, I was dressed in my long doubled up frilly white dress, and Bxx came to talk to me and sat on my right, after the young spanish woman who had chatted to me sat on my left, with night and flames and words of Rome and the puppy at the front of the Bilbao Museum of Modern Art the night before. Bxx was very keen on getting some chicken, and even dancing to the island music, but felt a little shy. She finally tucked into a good plate of whole grain pinkish rice and grilled meat. The caterers, who had been there the night before, and who operate from the building opposite Tesco express just past the Arthouse and the Big Yellow Storage on Lewisham Way, had asked me to pose next to their small beaming team leader, barbeque equipment at the back of us, for one of my cheesy poses which I very happily, well as graciously as I possibly could, donated to their iPhone... back a little hunched to look forward into the camera with my head as close as possible to this young short man's happy and proud features.
Upstairs in the Arthouse Gallery, refurbished by the maintenance group a few years ago to now claim up to the minute contemporary style standard A+ ratings, our Arthouse member's Group Show had been "speed curated" by Jeremy Deller, winner of the Prestigious Turner Prize 2004. This artist's page on Wikipedia explains how he calls himself a "Post-YBA", had a solo show at the Hayward Gallery, is interested in collaborative work, video, installation, the... loss... forgetting of the ego... something such... and turned up at the Private View on Friday 27th May 2016, wearing red and white stripped socks in unpretentious leather sandals, a little old indian colourful cotton bag accross the body. He mingled here and there, probably noticed me arriving an hour after the start of the Private View evening, although I am usually always so punctual, landing onto what used to be the wonderful white up-cycled sofa my 1980's friend Pxy helped me carry from a nearby street to the yard, a bandage or plaster on one of his arms, many years ago. Sxx had put her superb jute soft sculpture of a nudist man with spectacles resting on a big nose towering above a smaller penis shape and a massive lump of wooly beard that she calls "The Husband", and that apparently her actual husband seems to hate. I looked at Jeremy to my right, talking to Txy, probably, landed on the sofa with my knitting kit cotton bag, my oil painting and gold thread enhanced canvas bag, gift from dearest cousin Melody, Amarillo Texas 2000, where film and photo equipment were kept and carried as a back-pack, my tiny bag for keys pens phones money etc... and took a breath after the long journey down south, quickly followed by cheesy grins, my favourites, to a few cameras that started snapping shots. Most likely Txy's, and Bxy's, who seem to like having me on record somehow. Bxx urged me to hold the "Husband"s penis and I held his hand instead, fondly... A little while later, Jeremy Deller came to hide behind Rxx, our present chair, with whom I was conversing near the bar, said a few words to her and disappeared before I could offer him 1, 2, or even 3 cigarettes as a gesture of ... "shall we go and have a chat outside with a drink (?)"... as I do smoke and drink at my gigs... my shows... as in the old days, the 90's... the days the YBAs rose to stardom, Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst, Michael Landy, Gavin Turk etc. etc... when I myself was a more happening but still underground anti-racism artist activist, that people whom I did not know would stop in the high-street with an enthusiastic: "Hi Joyce ! Where, when is your next show !"... The old days...
During the Private View all the Arthouse artists looked fine and proud and chatted amongst themselves and the visiting audience with lively moves and conversations. Some looked great. Some wanted to be more low-key, all black, or grey perhaps... I was wearing my "Patti Smith" inspired hairdo, naturally spontaneously prepared over 2 weeks without shampoo and 2 final days and nights were I would rinse my hair at great length with warm water only, sleep with it just barely towel dried onto another dry towel laid over 2 pillows, without brushing nor combing until returning from the Private View. The roots also were ripe for colour after 3 months of not having gone to the hairdresser, which is usual with me if not "better" still 4... I did have my cap bearing the miniature image of the "Classic Stretch Limo" that I exhibited in the very same gallery in November 2009, to wear whilst doing my planned (boredom fending performance) of knitting, for 1/5h at the very end, before 9PM. Sat on the little black stool I have used over the years to draw "The horse and rider" sculpture, "The ladies sat at the South Bank" sculpture, "View from Waterloo Bridge", "Jesus on a donkey" looking hippy from the V&A museum, etc. etc.
On that stool, my last most exciting performance has therefore consisted of knitting at the back of Bxx's towering mannequin, that was facing the gallery door, the AO white washed "Star" poster and my JOYCE mirror to the top of the door. I watched and listened and "chilled out" like a nice grand-mother of my Art that I am, knitting away on an experimental multi-wool garment made of a concoction, hapazardously composed of light brown and moss green silk yarns together with fluo green, lemon and cadmium yellow acrylics. Bxy took some more photos of me on his iPhone. I was wearing my yellow stockings, yellow Doctor Martens canvas shoes painted and drawn with black permanent markers as well as fluorescent powders and super fine gold glitter, with my "Boy friend's Jeans upcycled into a skirt that I have used to the bare thread over so many years. It comes from LA, California, Levi Strauss. Extremely light blue, stitched up with gold, light blue, light pink, white cotton thread and cream coloured upcycled linen fabric. Tee-shirt hand and home printer and scanner made with a Photoshop graphic, bearing the image of one of my painting: "The White Dove", and my paintings' website address "Joycesart.co.uk", below a sawn on necklace of amber, white and green beads... with a green fluo acrylic loose top to add, under a silky satin short "posh looking" jacket, cream colour, for a "too many jumpers" look... as I overheard Rosey and Anita commenting, having fun.
At the very end of the evening, while waiting for my cab and while Txy was showing a beaming set of white happy teeth sat next to his installation "Happy Feet", for the photography from a female friend of his, the stool broke down on me. Although I have endeavored to saw the nylon fabric at one of the tearing points since, I also today, notice that the wooden, plastic rings that hold the 3 legs together are now cracked... so Bye Bye Stool. You were much loved. But I sadly have to let you go.
On the Open Studio week-end, we had a "family trail" with a kids' game consisting of finding and counting all skulls artworks in the Arthouse, table drawing and writing in cafe with wax crayons, adults and kids all ages and denominations. I did my bit, early on, signed and dated and located as LONDON GB before turning towards Camden at the cafe bar who was to offer me my first in a long series of free refreshments.
Fashion, filming, photos and selfies. There were some very interesting creative outfits, due to colour, texture, shape combinations, some less... inc. photo by Jxy, Bxy, Txy, a passing guest who stood in front of our brightly lit yard loos and asked to aim my Canon EOS at me, very kindly so. And the jerk chicken caterers.
Some "JOYCE@The Ladies" work done, thank God, thank herself, or else one would not remember much of my appearance on the occasion, for fame and posterity. ( ! ! ! ) ... And "JOYCE's Art" PR, Marketing, Archive "departments" of global and cross time zones intent would be left short of most important content... Hola ! Mark my word ! ... As would say Gabriella with much spirit ! ... She had actually said to me that she intended "to live 110 years or beyond", "Mark my word !", which I did instantly in the little red note book that I had to the left of my desk, at my space, Studio F2, last remaining souls at the Arthouse, on Sunday 5 June's night...
The little red note book, where a young lady from the Basque country by Spain, when we were sat looking at the bonfire, wrote in small neat letters on Saturday night: "I saw you. In that empty room. I thought. Your artwork is the less pretentious and positive work in the room. Thanks a lot". Her name starts with "C" and seems to finish with "ianne"... She may actually have omitted to write "most" before positive... I just assume she did because we were both a little drunk. That remains a mystery. She had been referring to my name, JOYCE, underlined in yellow and painted with red and blue heart on a vintage mirror hung above the gallery door. As we chatted I was actually dressed in my long moss green silk dress with sequined chest ornamentation above a fluo green stretch lycra tee shirt and yellow beaded arm and shoulder "crop gilet" together with makeup and bangles and rings that could easily be mistaken for wanting to project exactly the opposite interpretation from any viewer. She had greeted me with a "Oh ! You are Joyce ! ". She had asked me to come and sit near her and her boyfriend. Than she had let her boyfriend go to come back to us later. Lovely young lady. Thank you. May you make the most of all the wonderful creative endeavors and offerings London produces and provides all inhabitants and visitors, for short long term or eternal stays... Creative capital in the UK and in the world, our bonfire has had a young lady from Switzerland before enchanting me with distant images and thoughts that this metropolis here, and South London more particularly, is always more than happy to welcome. May you all spread the vibe. Wherever you may go next. The Creative Arts: Fine arts, painting sculpture drawing installation video photography theatre acting singing music making and song writing fashion writing and I forget so much... animation... We are strong. We can win over hate and wars and hardships. We are Love. Life. Hope. Even in our darkest moments.
I wish to thank friends for their wondrous participation and appearances at the Open Studios: Camden and Gabriella. inc. Those that could not come. Dallas, Ouleye, Gian Lucas, Conel, Tim, Chris, Hanan, Diana, Jenny... Thanks to Jeremy Deller and Rxy, our Arthouse administrator, as well as: Arthouse members (Sxx, Sxy, the new health and safety group member... Sxy, Jxx, Hxx, Sxx, Jxx, Rxy etc. Fxx, Bxx, Bxy, Rxx who very successfully coordinated our Open Studios this time around... and all I forget the name of because they have only newly joined the organisation, or that I haven't seen busy busy busy working hard at making this event as enjoyable and inspiring and fabulous as the Arthouse can deliver, to the community from close or further away, local in Deptford or "far out" of the basque country in Spain, and all unknown, undefined, yet marvellously inspiring... Camden from the Mine Sweepers collective in Deptford, who so kindly introduced me to the "Undercurrents Gallery" at the back of "The Bird's Nest" pub (where Dire Straits played in the 70's), after meeting me when doing the cafe at the Arthouse at our last Open Studios... Terrific person. And a good friend of Gabriella who came all the way from Stratford, and knows me from the Bonnington Square years, in the early 90's, when I was a very prolific and happening painter, and socialite. She hasn't given up partying. Quite the opposite. Out and about anywhere in London meeting bands and artists of all denominations, Gabriella came from Rome many many years ago, and loves London as much as I do, having been here myself since the age of 17 1/2 years, with just a few subsequent short stays in France before settling here for good... We both see ourselves as Londoners, where our hearts and friends and lives thrive. Marvelous forever inspiring world, melting pot in it's own right we will keep on loving you as long as you will keep on loving us and beyond.
There was a special star guest appearance in my space on Saturday, out of the blue, Simon, who lives near Catford and shares a mobile between 3 people, where he cannot afford to put any credit for quite a while now. "I sometimes don't know what is going to happen", he had told me after I got us a non-alcoholic afternoon drink from Camden's food and drinks bar in our large workshop space. He did not want any food as we went past the jerk chicken in the yard before arriving there. We had just shared, with cadmium yellow plate and silver antique cutlery, on the yellow and chrome round studio table, the fresh diverse multi-coloured salad with separately brought to table olive oil freshly ground pepper 60% less salt, "herbes de Provence" and american mustard (established 1905) I had prepared in the morning, as well as fresh organic rye bread from the South London Bakery on Landor road near Clapham North... filled with: 1* Cornish Brie, 2* Brussels Pate, american mustard and various other condiments... Open Studio Feast ! Simon had loved the sandwiches, that he ate with great gusto, while discussing "Star making" and Andy Warhol and other related matters with me at this late 4 PM brunch. "I sometimes don't know what is going to happen", Simon had said. "From inside or from outside?" I questionned. Simon had replied to me: "From inside me". "You need to Trust Yourself, Trust Life, Trust God... some people like to call this in that way, or Trust Divine Intelligence, Divine Inspiration, Cosmic Energy, Trust Yourself..." I had replied. Simon looked a little like a scruffy thin damaged injured fragile long cat of a gentle man, about my age, with teeth and nails that probably needed more regular treats of paste, soap and water. Light colored clothing, no jacket, he had just appeared into my space, bending head down forward and twisting hands at times in an awkward manner.
After he had arrived, Saturday noonish, we soon agreed that he may sit on the sofa and start cutting out a star out of the material that had been kindly sent to the Arthouse for me, by a british company I had met at the last Surface Design Fair I attended, at the Business Design Centre in Islington. The gentleman whom I had talked to, interested in what they could come up with in terms of printing for visual and textural effect on a novel material, had received the promise that his material would appear in the installation at my next Open Studio. However, instead of applying it, after application of "spray mount" glue, to the side pull-out shelves of my big white desk and onto the opening out door-shelve of my secretary unit, it became: 2 stars, made by Simon:
One large and signed by himself looking very happy and enthusiastic in design, that we collaboratively agreed could be pierced with a gold drawing pin and placed above the green sofa where he had been sat whilst engaged and very absorbed in the creative process. Very meticulously indeed, after preliminary drawing and cutting on paper, than application in place secured with masking tape... a most perfectionist and controlled approach. The Arthouse Members' Group Show we had on in our gallery downstairs and running over this Open Studios week-end had been curated by Jeremy Deller, winner of the Turner Prize 2004, said on his wikipedia page to uphold the collaborative approach, as well as a certain "dimming" of the ego. So here we were, Simon and I, him come into my space out of the blue of creation, making gold and brown stars... "The Stars Builders Enterprise" sort of thing...
The other star, smaller and more spontaneously cut out by Simon, I asked if I could buy from him, with a hand written receipt, and put above my heart, with gold hair band and gold drawing pin, before leaving him to carry on enjoying some time and action in my space, as I had to coordinate the health and safety slot between 3 and 6 PM and look out at bottom and top of our large marble staircase to ensure fire officers would be duly sat at their posts, greeting and ready to guide people out in the event of a fire alarm. Before leaving Simon on the sun bleached contemporary sofa, TV with permanent frozen animation cell of a blue teddy bear in big white tee-shirt singing in a microphone with big fluo-green-yellow heart and black blond wigged lady wondered at back... animation cell painted by me in the 1990's... painted TV looking marvellous and bluesy... little oval portrait golden frame with "FILM" clear blue on yellow facing the viewer watching the TV, my goergeous huge "Star Plant" installation to the top right of that... All of that facing him, well, it was agreed between Simon and I that I paid £1 for the smaller star he made, and that he could sell any more he made to any visitor for any price he choose, even in the 3 digits, considering my brand "JOYCE's Art" was established in the UK in 1986, and if he would just sign the star he made and give them one of my cards. He would take 50% and I would hope to get the rest. At the end of the afternoon, before parting I had informed Simon that I would be back same time next day. However I came back at 2 PM, instead of 12 AM, when the next Open Studio day started, and cannot know if he returned to try and spend some more time in front of my TV and plant.
The next day was another day. Very different. Before that there had been the party in the yard. Which has left a smoky bonfire smell in my hair to the moment of writing this piece. And I am concerned that I forgot to remove my "Rock an While Crocodile" white rocking chair, with white cotton pillows from Axx Lxx in South Kensington adorned by a big red acrylic heart, and titled with name of the 80's Bonnington Square Vauxhall Grove era long time good friend Conel who send the quotation on the phone while I was working with the piece in the studio, one cold night, hallogen heater on. it is adorned with a big long fluffy white scarf, that i found in one of London's marvellous vintage/charity shops on The Pavement in Clapham on my way to another dear 1980's friend, Peter ... It bears a little black cotton rectangular tag with the capital letters, STAR, in thin white sans serif font. Also, placed around the "shoulders" of this white rocking chair, that I initially bought at Jeff's Antique and second hand shop just before the Sainsbury's and stupendous mural and petrol station at New Cross Gate Station coming from Peckham, on the left (I also bought my fabulous studio plant there, and my latest super acquisition, a 1990's lady's bike, that I am gradually turning into a totally excellent travelling friend... With the help of Lxy, longest standing member at "Brixton Cycles" cooperative on Brixton Road, just before the huge mural top right at the back wall of Brixton Academy Music venue overlooking the fabulous Brixton painted skate board ground... But this is going a little abstract up in the air oblique down right away from the subject:
My rocking chair artwork piece, that has a long green thin boa that I knitted with long thin bamboo sticks and marvellous moss green wool from a supermarket in Limoux, the region of the "Blanquette de Limoux", sparkling white whine just as good if not superior to our ordinary Prosecco sparkling white and rose whine, and of the marvellous enchanting Cathare Castles, of the fortified city of Carcassonne, near the beaches, the ski slopes and home of so many happy retired british people... I knitted the green boa whilst sat in a car, in London. I can be seen in one of my animation "The Boa", on one of my websites: http://vimeo.com/joycesart . The animation was created at the London Film and Video Workshop, between Camden Town and Kentish Town, when they would still accept old members like me... They than had to commit to being open for "young" people only. To keep their funding...
Anyway, my black "University of The Arts London" cotton bag with hand made home digital print and ironed advert for my 2009 solo exhibition at the Arthouse entitled "The Cars Series - blockbuster - exhibition" of murals on paper on the subject of cars (with ontly 2 human beings painted: their top back head, one brown and grey, one immaculate white, from the back of a whale sized white cadillac... my american aunties, Marion and Celia, whom I now dearly miss... That cherished black cotton bag of mine, were they feature in miniature image, was placed on the rocking chair for a few hours yesterday, containing the "wild" knitting quit of thin fluo green and 2 different types of yellow acrylic and wild beige and green silk from a hospice charity shop in Victoria Pimlico where I was also fortunate to find my precious silver plated antique Arthouse studio cuttlery... That bag, I used for a 15mn performance at the Group Show Private View, wearing a white cap bearing my "Cars Series" "Classic Stretch Limousine" miniature image of one of its murals, and a carefully prepared, over 2 weeks of non shampooing, ended with 2 every other day Hair long rinse/sleep on large doubled up bath towel over pillows no brushing no combing before returning from the Private View... that included fim and photo and selfies of course... That knitting kit, with a little glamorous chocolate and hazelnut wrapped in gold foil to it's side, onto the neo-classical baroque Edwardian cimented structure overlooking the staircase, was there for a while. I had told men and women of any age that any one who may "dare" sit and rock this chair was automatically a star, long before leaving the knitting kit and chocolate there. My intention was to at least spend 15 mns knitting and unwinding there. I guess I did not find the time in the end.
Instead, I found the time when the building was closed to the public and Gabriella had finally arrived from Stratford, and Camden had finally had the chance to close down the cafe and pack up to join us in the yard for an early evening chat, to let them know that ALL I probably did this time 'round, at Open Studios, was "be a Star". I may have picked up a few germs with white tissues on the floor of the yard, whilst tidying up with Bxx who was given the key to lock it up, taken a card box filled to the rim with empty whine glasses, with 3 more and my yellow plastic tumbler, yellow plate and left-over quiche with silver antique fork all the way back to the kitchen with my long double white frilled dress and high spicky cadmium yellow stilletoes... yes ! past 3 doors, 3 flights of stairs, successfully all the way up to our big beige natural wood kitchen table... All glasses intact ! Coordinated the Fire Officers for 3 hours, held post at cafe for 10 mns selling a 70p bag of crisps and a £2.50 glass of white whine to Sxx while Camden was going to the shop to get more beer...
Oh. And I also noticed the email sent out to members as regards our children activity game" counting the number of skulls on show throughout the Arthouse. That involved scanning 4 or 5 of the mixed media paintings and drawings I have of skulls inspired by the cover of an Andy Warhol soft cover handbook, his thoughts on Art, with him holding a skull on the crest of his platinum blond wig and dark haired head, looking a little bony and older in facial structure himself... The morning of Saturday 4rth June, printing out 3 of each on good quality creamy A4 paper that I inserted in plastic sleeves extracted from the bottom drawer of my tall sienna marble effect yellow cabinet. Those were later placed within a green up-cycled folder of mine, that was awaiting them, empty, straight of "The Big Yellow Storage people's donations" left by our big blue plastic bins, just opposite their building, that Txy and I smartly proceeded to up... yes UP...cycle. Acrylic paints and all... and folders, yes... last year or so... Now behind my big marvellous beloved white desk from the corner antique and bric-a-brac shop where there is always a book bearing a beautiful photo of the Queen Mother with sparkling white pearls necklace... also a book about Churchill, always in the cracked glass window display... They were so kind to deliver this whale of a gorgeous wooden and huge £ 50 desk to my first floor studio space with no added charge.
Oh, by the way, the name of my studio installation this year was not something like "Joyous Riot" as had been the case a couple of years ago, but "The Advertising Company". I had cleared out the yellow leaves from my communal garden that had turned brown over the winter, including lots of gold glitter from "Russel and Chappel" who have now moved from Drury Lane, theatre land to some newly redevelopped, as more and more and more areas in London are now, quaint area at the back of Tottenham Court road... involving whilst clearing out a large orange bag of the above, and making the mistaken decision not to keep for a later installation, the throwing out, most probably, of my Arthouse and Studio keys, not labelled... Hum... in the process... (note: as of April 2017, the keys have been found in the pocket of one of my studio shirts). The memory of some rising dust, which I simply could not remove by use of my cherished yellow little hand broom and shovel due to the fact that it is part of my studio installation, ladden with the chocolate chinese design georgeous rounded bottle that fell off one of my book shelf-cabinet-head and shoulder mirror. Aphrodisiac chocolate body cream... All of that supposed to be very erotic. The design certainly had exited me for a while... Now. Bring one's nose down to the little broom and shovel hanging from one of my doors and from the wall gives the great pleasure of chocolate smelling still, after 6 months or so...
Yes, I told Camden and Gabriella in the year that most of my work at Open Studios and Group Show this year had involved the concept: Star. "Post-YBA", "appelation controlee" as can be said in French for a good certified mature whine brand... After all, I needed to live up to my name and the great honor and responsibility Jeremy Deller, and the gallery group members had imparted unto me, wearing my name "JOYCE", as fabulously and inspiringly as possible, for all to see and feel that "Post-YBA" is not a vain concept and appellation. My return from the ashes, the days when walking down the high street in Brixton having people stopping me and asking me "Hi Joyce, when and where is your next show?", and when i was up to all sorts, the days when the YBAs were thriving and so was I in my carry on underground manner... well, there was a little of that flavor in the air. The artwork speed curated by the "genuine" mass media certified Star Jeremy Deller (yes, he was in the news in July 2016, just a little while later for sending soldiers actors artists dressed in the first world war fashion all around London, on streets and tube lines)... Well the artwork he speed curated from my studio space being a small antique mirror painted with yacht varnish and theatrical glitter and yellow and red and ultramarine blue oils paint with the expressive name and logo JOYCE capital underlined that I have signed my work with since the YBA's era... That artwork was in the group show, last on the list, top left of the antique brown door bearing the gold letters EXIT to it's centre, as visitors can exit the show before also seeing a huge white poster of a model's face covered with white wash appart from cupped red lips and large black serif font "STAR", placed just down below... Huge A0 commercial poster... My name bottom of the page, quite noticeable, in the name and price list compiled by Lxy, and "Untitled", £ 600, as I do so wish I could one day at least start covering my overheads for rent, materials, equipments, expenses... Or even buy a studio and storage space, of much more ample sizes, after selling one or more entire series of artworks of mine, or even or all the paintings I have created so far. As long as they are available for later retrospective shows... And as long as the collector(s) seem trustworthy ie: will ensure the artworks survive more than 50 years after my death... Their memory can be digitally distilled, like the ashes sprayed over the water of the ocean, onto the internet, and onto various print media. But at least some of my studio rent for the year ! Praying for a miracle... I believe in miracles. I do. Miracles do happen.
I need to get on my ladie's bike, or on my "Roseland Free Spirit" mountain bike with gorgeous yellow flower from Barnados Brixton Children Charity Shop in front of the nose... and go by train to the Arthouse. The rocking Chair. I forgot to put it back in my studio when I locked up the house with Gabriella last night. It is a health and safety concern, possibly... Bye.
***** ...I cooked a post-Open Studio vegetarian feast instead... And again for lunch today, after further writing on this piece, as I need to rest and take some time off this hustling and bustling metropolis of ours. Birds are singing in the garden. Airplanes passing overhead. South London. I do need to go out though, at long last. Perhaps to get some vegetables, as there is not much in the fridge. Bye. * * * The rocking chair is probably still on the marble staircase landing. There was the Brexit referendum, when Britain voted to exit Europe. After a last evening appearance at some external exhibitor's private view in our gallery, on the 24th June 2016, I haven't had the heart to return to my studio and the Arthouse organisation for now more than 2 weeks...
JOYCE @ 'THE PANCAKES AND BOOZE ART SHOW LONDON, 2016 _ The film can be viewed on my film and animations website http://vimeo.com/joycesart as well as on YouTube *Joyce jocelyne Saunders-diop Thursday 7th April 2016 was 'The Pancakes and Booze Art Show', at Studios Spaces E1, Unit 2, 110 Pennington Street, E1W 2BB, near Wapping, London. I prepared for it in the previous few days, once taking from Studio F2, by bus, than on the basket of my faithful bicycle, my big yellow plastic bucket full of tools for hanging and carefully sealed with brown tape small jars of acrylic paint which I still keep from the left-overs of the 'Bible Murals' I created in 2000. Some of these colours are now rubber-like dry, but I have still left them with added water on my round table at Studio F2, to see if the binding agent loosens them up a little... it may be possible to still produce something, however (and probably quite) materially colourful, out of these... is it 3? hardened colours? Wimbledon Spectrum acrylic... now at least 16 years old... Beloved.
The night before the event, I came across an article by the Evening Standard publicising the event, on the screen of my iMac. It was implying that the Live Painting activity may be a sort of free for all where 'The Pancakes and Booze Art Show' provides materials and one may sell their artwork if leaving one's details. In the end it was none of that, as I had thought at first. I found myself a little perplexed as to wether I really wanted to take all of my colours, and decided to tighten the palette to 2 whites, cadmium red, and ultramarine blue acrylics, as well as a little handful of thin colour permanent ink markers comprising 3 'liquiflex' pigment thick fluorescent markers, yellow, orange and pink, as well as a thin one, turquoise, which a passing artist friend used, and a fresh roll of 9 ounce cotton duck primed canvas, 1.80m X 1m, as well as a dust sheet of thin transparent polythene, that turned out perfect to wrap up the painting with it's still drying glitter and paint at the very end of the performance. Together with all the glitter, at the end of the performance, I threw in the roll a paquet of tissues, as a gesture of tender "bye byes", an offering to that painting, until we meet again. I have yet to see this artwork again on March 2017... But will endeavour to unroll it in view of it's future life, in the yard at the Art House studios, to take photography of it on a bright day this spring or summer, so as to further it's existence, or start it's new beginning, a new process of painting, drawing, collage, ...?? The film for the 'The Pancakes and Booze Art Show' 2016 is in the making at present... Past, Present, Future... always a promising process when in process... The process of Life.
The 3 'Dance Tableaux' paintings from the 'Dance Series' that I produced in 1994 and that I had already exhibited in Paris at the cafe gallery 'La Belle Epoque' in the district of La Bastille and in London at 'The Oval House' near the Oval tube station were neatly packed in their original, very aged and browned by time thin cotton cloth, as well as within their magnificent yellow satin cover. I had been lucky to have a big flat cardboard box precisely suited to their measurements, available just for that very purpose, quite miraculously so, on the second level of my storage scaffolding at home. For practical reasons involving time, resources and energy (car driver friends or cabs included eventually), and because this show came so soon after my previous consecutive ones at 'Vinyl' and at the 'Undercurrents Gallery', I actually did not glitter up the frames as I had previously planned, and just left them plain mat gold onto a thin edge of raised wood, as they were shown in the 90's.
My friend from the mid-80's, Conel, who turned up and stayed at the show for a short while only, told me he thought the artworks and frames should be set into a larger box frame and back-lit... To what I replied: "That is down to the collector or gallerist". But I may think otherwise now that I write, thinking over one of these possibly constructive criticisms that I always find impossible to accept, at first shot... That may be an investment to consider if I really want to attract the payment I feel the "Dance Tableaux" are now worth: '£1000 each, at least, or 3 for the price of 2', I had written next to them on a collage of torn leaves from one of my little note books, onto which I also stuck two used light pink chewing gums throughout the evening... the note was written with a small Affordable Art fair pencil and stuck together with torn bits of masking tape from the mid-90's when I had wrapped the paintings up the last time. What a 'punk' price sign, stuck besides these artworks ! I must say ! But hey ! Such are the demands of the instant... The instantaneous feel, need, to provoke, capture, stand out... I saw a couple looking towards that area with great intent, incidentally, as I was checking the scene from the outside of the gallery space where people were also queuing for nutella pancakes. A bit later than previously planned when sticking this little nasty collaged price note on the wall, I finally removed it towards around 9.30 PM, after showing the display to my friend Philip, whom I met before at one of my 'Open Studios' at the 'Arthouse', and who was magnificently dressed in a most extravagant and exuberant way, boots, very primarily colourful tie and top, cap covered with large badges and spectacles customized into big yellow eyes bearing the black vertical cat-like slit pupils. Philip was subsequently kind enough to queue for me twice for a nutella pancake and I still feel a little bad about not buying him the drink / or half-drink I promised to get as soon as I would stop painting around 10PM, in thanks for having also been the male contributor to the painting, applying some thin wavy lines of blue while I went to the Ladies to tie my hair up in an austere bun... Stopping at 10 PM would give the artwork enough time to dry before rolling it up around 11 or 11.30PM and leaving at 12.
Around 10 PM, my friend Gian Lucas arrived accompanied by his female artist friend that I had seen before on a photo from a beach in Goa he had sent me digitally by email many years ago. It was agreed that Gian Lucas would take her to the bus stop a little later, as that would enable her to return to the Notting Hill area where she lives. He would come back to pick me up with all my items once packed up. I went to get us 3 glasses of white whine, after a little successful bartering at the bar (considering I spent a lot of money on materials for my Live Painting performance) (and I was on a budget !). Gian Lucas' artist friend said she did not drink. Gian Lucas had just a little. I finished packing up: the big 'World Map' bag, the small 'World Map' bag, the flat 1.5m x 1m card box of paintings, the 1.20m roll of canvas wrapped in plastic and inserted in up-cycled carpet packaging also of transparent plastic... that was all if I remember well... Oh! and my beautiful big and spanking new plastic yellow bucket, the type builders use, inside which my little brown wooden stool painted in Thailand with the design of a proud and happy superman flying in the air, his cape floating around him on a blue sky and small white clouds' background, topped up with the fushia pink nylon scarf with a light bohemian tied-strings edge effect.
Gian Lucas was very professional. Helping to grab the items from the gallery where the DJ and Bar where taking down their gear as I was the last one there together with them and the 3 organisers: one from LA, a little stressed out, counting the money, kneeling in one corner, the other young woman from the UK so beautifully kind and friendly, taking some nails off the wall, the other young man whom I just cannot remember the name of, typically, even though he told me 2 or 3 times, who could speak french, (was it Tom?) and who after I thanked him for a great night suggested I come back the next year... I had been one of the 3 Live Painters. Actually one of the 2. The third one was actually making a screen printing demo for 1/2h to a most interested crowd. The other painter was doing urban-scapes of London in a black lines sketchy way over warm reds and yellows, his medium sized hard-board canvas stood up on an easel, had a mid-sized table at his back.
At the very end of the night, a few people still chatting next to my area, I went over budget and bought another glass of whine. Or did I get it on the house? Anyway, in total, 2 and 1/2 glasses of white whine inside me, I finished off the evening around 12, as planned, quite drunk in Gian Lucas' car, who was expertly driving me back to South London, like a great long-time (1997?) friend that he has always been. I rarely drink alcohol. It doesn't take much for me to "wilden" myself up. Gian Lucas and I don't see each other that often, but he usually turns up at my gigs, the last time at my penultimate "Open Studios" at the Arthouse. He is, like all my male friends and assistants, very trust worthy and has been a bit of an artist himself, in Italy, as well as in London.
The night proved to be very successful. A great number of people attended the event. Possibly 200 throughout the night. I need to double check with the organisation, that was then doing it's second year in London, and was on it's way to Paris, for a show a few nights later, before heading to Berlin. Predominantly operating in the United States, though, where they do a great number of events throughout the year, they had on their Facebook page a short video of their event in Los Angeles in 2011 or so, that seemed much wilder and underground than the one I participated in. There, at "Space Studios", the 2 adjacent gallery spaces at both sides of a very corporate sleek grey and black modernist entrance and reception, were huge and pristine, with very high ceilings. The floors were polished varnished cement, spotless, the walls nice and immaculate and easy to hammer a nail in securely. There were 4 or 5 doormen at the entrance and a receptionist. Just right. The team of 3 organisers were very professional, efficient and helpful. They were charging £5 entry to the visitors and £10 for each painting exhibited with a maximum of 10. No charge for the live painting. They had somehow heard or found out about me at or subsequent to my 2 shows at "Vinyl" and at "The Undercurrents Gallery", just a little while earlier, as a friend gallerist and co-artist Jenny, who was also involved in both of these events, also received an email invite from them asking her if she wanted to participate.
I filmed and took photographs throughout the night. But not so much when the crowd was there, and in particular towards the end. I want to document the artwork again at a later stage, when I unroll it at the Arthouse, probably in the yard, and when I may also continue working on the image... possibly. Possibly not. I will see when the time comes...
At the date of the final proof-reading of this text, on the 24 March 2017, the film I made on the night is the process of being edited and when completed will be uploaded to my moving image website: http://vimeo.com/joycesanimations as well as on You Tube for Joyce jocelyne Saunders-diop. All "The Dance Series" tableaux paintings can be seen on my 2D artworks' catalogue: http://www.joycesart.co.uk They are all for sale. Contact me through that website's link if interested. I need to have funds to participate in more Art gigs, pay my studio and storage space rent, clear my storage spaces, get some new hard-drives, put food in the fridge and pay all my other bills, etc. etc... Peace.
Ciao! Love.
"Extracts from a visual artist's diary March to July 2010" by Joyce Jocelyne Saunders-diop
- the copyright for this work has been asserted - - 2010 - London, GB. ---------------- 26 March 2010
Hello Friday! How fortunate I am to be able to start the day as I do today. I have the freedom to shower, prepare my packed lunch for the studio and a large cup of good coffee with glass of bottled water, after having spread my little blue carpet unto the floor for the quick yoga session. Yes. Freedom. Creativity. I can even drink my coffee while playing out sounds and words onto this cute little second-hand apple IBook. I even have the luxury of a stereo classic FM radio broadcast lightly diffusing it's American Express card commercial out to me... An airplane thunders above head, through the gothic window left ajar open onto the sunny spring late morning... Someone was attacked during the rush hour in Victoria station yesterday. Bloody London. The crime capital of Europe - something I read a few times over the past few years - and that seems to stick. I have actually experienced it first hand, as well, on a few occasions... Seventeenth century royal court jolly music diffuses it's enthusiasms over the begining of my day. I am going to the fine-art studio today. To check out my babies, these small abstract pieces which I have left drying and waiting on Wednesday.
We had had a general meeting at the Art House, chaired by T. who is at present the director. J, P, J, S, P, R, D, P, Me, A, H taking the notes, A, T. I may have missed one or two of us (note of the artist writer editor: please excuse these blunt privacy preserving short cuts to names of individuals). I had only opened my mouth twice, being sparce as usual. Once, when reminding P briefly that messages should not only be sent out to members via e-mail, but also in hard copy to their pigeon-hole if they are not on the internet. That was brief. The second time, I had intervened with a loud and clear voice, having ommitted to raise my hand in the asking to speak, woops ! I realise that now... It was about the survey that is planned, which appears to be quite detailed and long in asking each member numerous questions related to their use of their studio. I was (in fact, inwardly, outraged at this invation of privacy), in speech, to all of us present and sat facing each other in a wide circle of chairs and spread out legs and shoes supplombed by torsos and staring faces, quite vocal in defending what I perceive as personal life and freedom rights. This fell onto the gathered and stayed suspended above us for a little while, a few words were mumbled here or there and the next agenda point was raised before the meeting proceeded. I had a slight pain of tension in the neck while I sat on the 436 bus on my way back to Camberwell, a little while later, thinking that again I made a splashed out cake of my interventions, when either no one seemed to notice my contribution, or it struck all into closure of the topic. Meetings.
--------------- 27 March 2010 Gasworks.org.uk 155 Vauxhall St London SE11 5RH International Residency Artists: - Cristobal Lehyt (Chile) - Priya Sen (India) - Alberto Tadiello (Italy)
I had the chance to talk with each one of these artists, although the woman from India returned a few too many 'No's to my taste and I choose to just enjoy her films, after 3PM, with an audience of about thirty other viewers after having only exchanged a few words on technical matters "- Did you use a filter to create this kind of sepia effect? - No, it's not crazy. It's actually black and white. it's the TV that gives this pink colouring. - But there are colours there. - Yes it is a montage with different stills. Some are in colour. Is this your country, your city there?" ...the images obviously show India ...then comes some snow... "- No. It's London. - Is this an autobiographical piece?" after she mentioned the diary placed below the TV screen. "- No. It is based on my grand-father's diary. I was trying to fill in the gaps of what may have been missing." I later found Priya Sen, who is New delhi based, to be quite brave, with her trousers and cropped hair, for having filmed semi-deserted streets, at night, in what appears to be a very humble and unobtrusive manner. She comes very close to bicycle taximen, awaiting their load, and other poor men who risk their lives hanging to the iron partitions of an extremely buzy highway. The contrast between the film which she shows previous to these images and sounds of heavy oppressive traffic, with the frailty and vulnerability of these men, is striking as the first film which she had chosen depicted the peacefull ease of a New Dehli middleclass interior. Also her footage of London, edited in the studio at Gasworks during the 3 months residency, is very hands on, very small crew, perhaps her and another, at the most, with a very good eye for poetic photography of each of her chosen scenes. She uses "Final Cut Pro" to draw together fragmented writings, sounds and snapshots to a moving, enlightening and poetic effect.
Alberto Tadiello, whom I talked to first, had created a sculpture made of 2 long large black tubes which seem to protrude out of the white wall of his studio like a pair of telescopic binoculars pointed to the floor ahead. They were affixed to an assemblage of mecanical filters which when activated electrically produced a deep sound. The sound, in my mind, of a building made up of architectural, mechanical, and technological components. a sound which one who has lived in the urban environment for long doesn't notice anymore but which is omnipresent in most modern buildings where contemporary comfort and indoors climate regulations dictate the environmental audios. Sound pollution. Sound comfort. He talked of tension, of agression in his piece. He is going to New York after this and only has a studio near Venice for short visits. His gallery in Naples, through talking to a curator of one of his last show who is also on the board of Deutsch Bank has arranged for that show in the small New York gallery. He will be visiting New York for the first time. He is only in his late thirties but says he travels a lot and only for his art at the moment. He has had a piece about him in Frieze and is shipping quite a few wooden boxes to New York as this will be a solo show.
Cristobal Lehyt, based in New York, had created a large piece filling up a small room, in collaboration with a female brazilian artist who was sick today so had remained in bed. She had made the structure of this sculpture, with wire and cloth, onto which he had applied layers of plaster. The plaster which is used to even out walls. His last job involved lecturing for one hour every month at a university in Harvard, when he wasn't visiting student's studios instead, in exchange for a salary. He has an opening for a show in a small Clerckenwell gallery next tuesday. The small wire and plaster sculptures which he produced, in his words, "like a monkey", were created at Gasworks during the residency and are now the bases for this show in Clerckenwell. Somebody had visited the studio at Gasworks and offered him another show there. He had already had to travel back to the States for two weeks, for the hanging of another show of his (with assistants, but he participates in the hanging himself), during the length of the past three months residency at Gasworks.
---------- 29 March 2010 Notes from the pamphlet handed out at Gasworks when I visited the open studios there last Saturday -
"- Cristobal Lehyt works with various media to examine the ways in which politics affects and manipulates cultural and subjective identity. The artist often reworks collective symbols such as tourist souvenirs, folk singers, landscapes and craft objects that relate to a specific place, class structure or time in history. Born in Satiago de Chile, Lehyt lives and works in New York. His residency at Gasworks is funded through BECA AMA, a professional development grant for Chilean artists.
- Priya Sen uses moving image to draw together fragmented writings, sounds and snapshots. struggling to make sense of the fast changing cityscape, the New Dehli based artist engages with the particularities of a given place and explores the possibilities of collective production of knowledge. Alongside her individual practice, Sen is also a part of Cybermohalla, a group working in the media-based social research centre Sarai. She is the recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust award.
- Alberto Tadiello's installations challenge the boundaries between seemingly disconnected materials, disciplines and phenomena. In many cases the artist's works are ephemeral, resting dormant or occuring in latent states waiting to be activated. Tadiello lives and works in venice, italy. he was awarded the prestigious Furla Prize in 2009 which includes a residency at Gasworks. (His gallery is T293, Naples)." ------------ 15 April 2010
I haven't done any work in my studio since the 26 March, almost 3 weeks ago, but am now starting to dream again of applying colour and form to the blank canvas with renewed desire and inspiration. At least I know that making this black and white drawing in the Maison du Chocolat de Picadilly, yesterday, while sipping an outrageously delicious cup of dark chocolate, gave me great pleasure and vasts amounts of joy. So there must be something to creating Art. After all what seems to have been a mid-life crisis for me, during the past 3 weeks or so, during which I have been puting all into question, and above all the making of Art... or was it just a week? or 2? Anyhow, it has been dreadful. Deep torment. The foundations of my life since the age of 4, the meaning I have giving to it ever since my first studio in Bonnington Square in 1986, Art, which I have also studied for, albeit on a parallel, at the University of the Arts London, until reaching the completion of a Master's degree, all for the Arts always, and the never ending gift of my time and resources while painting consistently every week from my studio at the Art House, since 2004 or so, all these years of continued effort which only brought 3 friends to my Private View for "The cars Series exhibition" in November...
The Rubinsteins had travelled all the way from Paris, just for my exhibition, and a little associated cultural tourism, I must appreciate, and bought a small painting on paper with a tee-shirt or 2... But it hadn't been the big partying and large gathering of friends that I had been used to for my Private Views while living with Dallas. So quiet. Different times. Different context. However, Art is great, still, and as ever, in my heart, my mind, my soul, Art is all and remains, rest assured... --------------- 17 April 2010 2 frames collected from our local frame maker - £20 - destined to accommodate plaster of Paris and crustacean shells, in the manner of the parrot's head I created out of a crab claw, plaster of Paris A. gave me in her basement studio one day, and mural acrylics I still keep as left-overs from a year 2000 outdoor painting commission. "The Parrot" now resides in Greece and is the opening star featuring on the first 'pages' of the CD-Rom catalogue of artworks which I am updating for publication at the moment.
I post a large recycled envelope for Mum containing many laminated colour prints of "The Horses Series" and a "Thank you" letter for her previous encouragements with my Art. £ 1.35
At last, good fresh fish! Salmon, lightly mustarded bread and raw spinach sandwich delicious contemplating the work in progress from my refurbished studio sofa.
I phone Jedd and arrange to meet him to say bye bye as he is moving to Scotland. ----------------
18 April 2010 I have spent the past 5 1/2h painting colour and forms in oil on canvas, after 3 weeks of having taken vast distance from my painting practice, tormented by huge doubts and anxieties as to wether I should give up the studio I have been occupying at the Lewisham Art House for so many years I cannot count them now... Is it 8? ... to perhaps downsize. Creating black and white illustrations while on "field" trips out in London and beyond, with my battery of permanent ink feltmarkers, watercolour paper books, stool if needed, together with digital media work at home with Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Director, Text edit, some other means for editing and my connection to the world wide web... Possibly moving the paintings which are stored in the basement of the Lewisham Art House in an alternative storage space, if costs would permit, to try and frame and bring to market, to recoup some of the costs, (the eternal wish) as and when possible.
But the smell of spirits, the flow of the oil onto the canvas, the narrative unravelling first from the line of a charcoal sepia pencil, then progressively reinforced, deepened and clarified with the applications and layerings of a vibrant colour palette have brought me back to my senses. Mind body soul spirit are now thankfully reattuned and in line as I have today repossessed the fibre of my ultimate being. JOYCE. Whole again. Why did I have to fall into such an abyss of doubt and self questionning I still haven't fully comprehended. I know that the proof reading, illustration, design, print management and publishing of Dallas' autobiography has drained me of most of my creative sap. The artist in me was being devoured away from both within and without. I was feeling as though it was dissolving into sheer exhaustion and dispair, while feeding the ever growing, and at times alarmingly arrogant ego of the author writer of the "oeuvre". Some additional day to day life challenges adding to this draining pressure annihilated my desire, strength and inspiration to paint. I had also started to write, on a regular basis, with my morning coffee... Perhaps that was also a contributing factor. I had found another channel for my creativity and to communicate thoughts and feelings about the world and my existence within it. At this minute, as I write, I feel as content and wanting to pursue as when I was painting an hour ago. Bliss is having had the chance to do both, on the same day, in the same space. I want to try that again. 7PM. Time to return home. X --------------
2PM Monday 26 April 2010 Studio @ Lewisham Art House
Table canvas painting awaiting it's 3rd session of work, 4 brushes laid flat, aligned along the boundary between sepia charcoal drawing and the end of the first day's application of oil colour that I filled it with. Yesterday came the completion of all drawn lines in sepia charcoal pencils for this unstretched piece of 180cm by 63cm 9 once cotton duck canvas bought already primed from the basement of the little Russel and Chaple store on Drury Lane in Covent Garden.
Today I will start by removing the cling film wrapped around my palette to finish using the 9 oil colour blobs remaining from the first session last week-end. Let's hope that the paint hasn't dried out too much since then. My little recycled glass jars of white spirit, in varying degrees of "contamination" (yes, that's a specialist decorator's term), are now out of the flammables metallic box, together with the artist painting medium from the large Atlantis store in Aldgate East, and placed onto a small step ladder by the canvas' table, ready for opening after I have switched on the extractor fan above the corridor. There, also a old ragged sheet with orange daisies and white tulips and a white restaurant napkin stained with violet paint. Little Sony radio blending in. Radio 3. High soprano female voice. The studios are quiet. There are only 2, no 4, other artists on the top floor this Monday. There was only 1 besides me yesterday.
I am fortunate to be here with a respite from the illustration, page layout and design, associated web page set-up, print management and publishing of Dallas Cheikh Bamba Diop's autobiography, sent to print by the printers late last week and which will hopefully be delivered to the author, in South Kensington, by the end of the month. The author is my ex-husband, aka Dallas, with whom I have had many a fruitfull creative arts collaborations throughout the years. The oils on the palette have dried somewhat, enough for me to be looking forward to a thorough scraping off session if I want to restore it to it's former formica white, but no so much as to prevent me from painting with what remains of the colours. Some small flakes of dried oil have been upsetting the image build up, at times. It is ally best to plan and have at least 2 consecutive days of painting if I am to apply the oil rather lightly, onto that sort of scale.
I find that I am continuing to work from drawn story line onto primed canvas followed by application of colour by brush, the technique favored by Mum throughout many years and that I also developed for the first time while creating a large mural canvas fantasy depiction of the metropolis of London, completed in January of this year. In fact, just like Mum in her patchwork like oil compositions of lush colours, I have since then started becoming more narrative again and incorporating many different elements and characters to my story, rather than following a strict discipline in subject matter, such as cars, horses, faces, circles, squares each respectively explored in length and in focus for a given period of time, which could encompass months, but more usually years. Up to 7 years with "The Cars Series, 3 with "The Horses Series", more recently. This last one is "The Life Series"...
The image of a smiling attractive african woman's head with head dress and the round face of an infant with closed eyes have taken colour and shapes, as well as a bird in flight. The bird I sew in studio rags and red and ochre satins as the dove for my contribution to the "A Piece for Peace" group show at the Art House in February of this year. The same bird features in Dallas' portrait, the bust, that I painted in oils in the early 90's and where he wears one of his flamboyant high quality staff discounted shirts from Harrods. The bird, there, has the same flight posture, but is all chromium yellow, my favourite colour, and represents the bird of Creativity. Behind it stands the tower-block we had at the back of Bonnington Square, above our squat's roof top, that I used as a studio at that time. The portrait is suspended with a transparent fluorescent nylon fish line leaving a thin gap of freedom around the painting within an antique frame that I had retrieved and rescued from the vast storage spaces of the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth North. It now lives in Portobello. There is a similar bird in flight, beak also pointing up to the left, above the guests' single bed in my mother's living room. That one is blue and I believe refers to the name of the private school near Switzerland, in the Alps, "L'oiseau bleu" that she travelled to with my half-brother, Jeffrey de Heydwolff, in the late seventies early 80's. She has also painted another such bird carrying her, me and Jeff, above the french landscape, from Paris to the South of France. It always resembles an urban pigeon, or a dove.
I just come back from the Art house's yard where I found the climbing french beans, calendula sunflowers and everlasting sweet peas, prim and eager out of their little compost containers of terracota brown plastic and cardboard toilet roll cylinders are doing marvelously, nicely arranged onto the shelves of the mini transparent plastic green house. The blue plastic bag high up on the tree to the side of the park is now siding with the bright lush buds that have come out with the recent rain and previous hot days of sunshine.
5 to 7 PM The palette board is fine. White again, thank's to the thorough scraping in a fine grid with the large palette knife. And white -dirty but still very usefull - spirit. It rests, it's little tin cup anchored and shiny to it's edge, onto the folding table that I salvaged from our refused items' corner last week. I had cleaned the precious item with ecover multipurpose cleaner from the kitchen and an abundance of water and chores' brush's strokes before leaving it to dry in the sunshine and wind. That table was used as a palette board by the artist who used it previously and has a historical beauty of it's own. It is in fact a folding school desk, Michael told me, as it features a recess for pens to the top of the surface. Beautiful table! Tuck against the painting table where the canvas glows with a predominance of warm colours besides the white drawn areas calling for future delights, the large and fine brush back at the middle line of the piece, resting for the day, it holds the thin white rubber glove that has survived the session. One of my 2 mobiles is calling for attention with a couple of persistent buzzes. Let's get ready to go. My love is calling me. -------------------
5 May 2010 I have just started the session by doing a second layer on a small rectangular thick stretched canvas where I had previously applied the remnants of 9 oil colours while cleaning my palette, by small palette knife. Oranges, dark blue and violet, emerauld green all have been brought back to life, from under the wash of a jar of soiled brown spirits into which I have been cleaning my brushes while painting. A warm earthy brown, semi-transparent as it would than descend upon the surface of the painting stood at an angle against a large jar of water. 3 throws of fine glitter dust by small palette knife to glamorize and uplift the effect followed by wild noisy scribbles etched by palette knife and reminiscent of the colourfull marks I saw on a small abstract painting purchased by Dallas' benefactor, millionaire and art collector, A. L. , in a Peckham gallery recently. 2 softening invisible dry brushmarks onto this composition, and this is were this small work stands at present.
Having returned to the medium sized canvas laid flat upon one of my painting tables, after removing the cling film wrapped around the palette to preserve it's remaining oil colours for today, I started off with the crimson red of a London bus, before finding myself immersed, with the small brush, into the urban landscape of 2 tower blocks rising high like knitted patchwork of multicolored windows, a row of terraced houses repeatedly lining a road of traffic, and the greenery around a rail road track. I couldn't resist but bless, subsequently, what had at the onset been a dull murky coloured high rise estate of the poor people, with the gold glitter collected onto the newspaper that had received the previous small abstract's painting's excess materials, by shaking it gently from above. Some of the glitter will naturally become bound to the surface still humid with oil and painting medium, but will also, at a later stage be sealed with a transparent spray fixative.
I am now moving to the far left upper corner where a few cars and the surface of a motorway are calling out for some of the grey purples that have just been applied at the other end of the canvas. This painting aims at developing like a poem about life, that, although akin to a journal centered around mine, at varying moments in time, during the edification of it's imagery, can transcend and encompass experiences common to other viewers. It may also have the appearances of a dreamscape to them, as some of it's elements are surreal or disposed in a fantastical manner onto the surface. It is now 8PM and the evening is starting to darken the sky above the Art House. I have taken a series of digital photographs of the work in progress with the small 10 MPixels compact, cleaned brushes and palette. The painting has very much evolved with the left handside corner all but covered with colour and shapes.
The application of white, all throughout the width, in details and lines recalls the monoprints of Gillian Ayres that I came accross at the London Original Art Print Fair this Monday, and where she seemed to have started using white in a much more profuse way. Contrary to my mother's taste in these matters, I actually also think that it can lighten up the image, in a possibly spiritual way, as a light catching recipient for hope, or peace. It plays well with the rich luxious harmonies of deep colour and alleviates some of the weight that they may place accross the composition. I have reworked the face of the long haired indo-european woman that my partner had recognized me in, and rendered it more humane, more content, and more naturally flesh toned than before, when reds and green and blues were lending it too much of a tormented artist look. I guess I feel much better in myself today than I did for the first layer of this semi-autobiographical portrait of myself. Two magpies conversing in the sky are waiting to dry for further retouches in blue-black that will be more relevant to their actual natural beauty. More cars, more flowers, some retouches on one of the horses... All is good, until the next time when this work will be taken to the next level.
Orchestral music lightly vapourizing the space, the sound of a big bus outside. I need to travel by bus, train and bicycle to get home and will leave now rather than too late. Thank you God, Life, for having allowed me to work another full day at my fine-art painting, in another one of these painter's studios that I have come to cherish. X ---------------
14 May 2010 Very Cold
The top right hand side of the canvas now bears the weight of heavily loaded clouds and drops of rain coming down onto the darkness behind a moon with closed eyes. Another star, three actually, this time chrome yellow Windsor & Newton 13, and the cat in the far bottom left corner has also been redefined with some of these deep grey purples. The chromium yellow lights up the heart of the large daisies and the windows of a small passing train below. Although I only came for a half-day session today, I am hoping to have covered all of the canvas by the time I leave. After a quick word with P, downstairs, by the office, I put my thin latex gloves back on on proceed with the painting.
7.45PM Done. + 3 small abstracts of oil on canvas with aluminium paint, predominance blue. A mini triptych oh, no, not so: those are to be hung together in a trio but are not actually attached to each other. X --
Dimanche 25 Juillet 2010
Apres avoir done un apercu de la facon dont on s'introduit a la Art House pour faire une exposition dans notre gallery a un joli couple mixte indo-europeen/asiatique et leur bebe en poussette, j'enleve mes couches fines de vetements predominance verte pour enfiler mes habits d'ete "Marion la souillon", tout taches de coups de pinceaux par endroit montes en cuir multicolore, enfile mes sandales ouvertes, et m'impregne de la musique de Fela Kuti que mon voisin de studio, B., diffuse par dela les partitions a plafond ouvert. Je me rappelle le petit tableau collage cree avec deux fils de guitares et un baton de percussion de bois casses laisse sur scene apres l'un des concerts de Fela Kuti a Brixton Academy, dans les annees 90. Le tout est colles sur un fond d'une photocopie de carte cadastre noire et blanc des alentours du Strand Palace Hotel, face au Savoy, d'ou j'etais partie avec une de ses femmes/danceuses/chanteuses a la recherche d'un restaurant. Elle portait des claquettes, et si je me souviens bien, c'etait l'hivers. Dans le bus de tournee, Fela portait une fourure...
La musique est relativement forte et me distrait.
Mais apres les retouches au vernis a bateau avec lesquelles j'ai humidifie, donnant sueurs, secretions et reflets, par endroits, aux deux tableaux "oiseaux" et a tous les petits abstraits qui se trouvaient a ma portee, il est temps de songer a la photographie qui me permettra d'archiver ces pieces ainsi que de les exposer sur mon site internet. Aussi, il s'agit de faire participer les oiseaux a une competition.
I really trust my Canon power shot G3 camera more than the compact Finepix I brought in today, for a better record of the works, though.
Je devrais revenir avec l'autre appareil photo, si j'ai le temps, avant d'avoyer ce CD comprenant 3 Jepgs, CV et declaration d'artiste, a Cor Blimey, la gallerie de Creekside dans la competition de laquelle je pense faire entrer mes oiseaux. Mais il faut que je me depeches. Nous sommes deja le 25 et la deadline est pour le Vendredi 30 (Juillet 2010). Je cours le risque de voir mon concept, fort et tres original, d'elements crustaces et platre de Paris, "vole par la competition". Je prends aussi le risque de perdre mes £10 par oeuvre et de voir mes efforts partir en vain, n'aidant qu'a renflouer les caisses de leur gallerie, qui comme la notre a la Art House, est managee par les artistes de ce groupe de studios. Mais le desir d'exposer ces pieces inhabituelles me mene a m'y preparer. Je vais ecrire le "artiste statement". Ou plutot, pour commencer, je vais rassembler les ecrits decoules lors des sceances de travails pendants lesquelles ces 2 reliefs ont pris forme, lors des 3 dernieres semaines. Fait. Je viens juste de parler avec P.W qui s'etait enferme dans le yard, la porte a code ayant claque derriere lui par megarde alors qu'il allait chercher des plants de "soap wort" que A. avait ramenes de son jardin pour lui. La conversation nous ramena a un projet de livre d'illustrations contenant des dessins de voitures cubaines qu'il m'avait montres il y a quelques annees, et auquel je repensait recemment. Je lui dit que dans l'espace de 1 1/2 ans ceci pourrait se realiser, car je dois accommoder d'autres projets. Scanning, image manipulation, text editing, page layout and design, print-bying avec les imprimeurs, lui laissant tout le copyright et la prise en charge des commandes a l'imprimeur ulterieures et de la distribution. Nous en reparlerons. Pour le moment il est extenue apres avoir fait un voyage de 100km a velo la nuit derniere et est en grand besoin de repos. Pour ma part, je laisse mon vernis a bateau secher sur les tableaux environnants et me concentre sur les prochaines etapes de ma pratique artistique.
Le CD-Rom doit etre pres pour Cor Blimey gallery et delivre le vendredi au plus tard, dans 4 jours . Pour cela je devrais certainement revenir avec mon appareil photo Nikkon pour faire de la photo de meilleure qualite. Aussi, il s'agierait de savoir si ils demandent 3 Jepgs de travaux differents ou si cela n'est que pour l'un d'eux. Le "artiste statement" de 200 mots au plus necessite un travail d'edition de texte et le artiste CV demande une mise a jour. Aussi, je veux aller chercher un autre sac de platre de Paris et commander a L. qui fabrique des cadres, 2 ou 3 "moules" de plus pour mes reliefs crustaces/animaux. Il va falloir aussi bientot que je m'attache a encadrer par une bordure de tissus, a la machine a coudre, les toiles peintes a l'huile qui sont a present roulees ou etirees sur mes murs et pour cela il sera necessaire de faire un test avec le bout de toile peint qui m'atteint sur l'etagere au-dessus du studio numerique a l'appartement. Aussi, apres avoir achete le tissu voulu, soit Munsell gris soit dore, ou apres avoir decide de faire sans, il s'agiera de choisir si je viens faire le vacarme de la couture a la machine au studio ou si je fais chantier a l'appartement. Il serait peut-etre bon de discuter avec J. qui cout a la machine electrique dans un studio du bas, pour voir ce qu'il en est pour elle. En fait, J. qui avait un studio a mon etage, cousait regulierement...
Je suis seule au premier etage. L'extracteur souffle au-dessus du couloir et une sirene d'ambulance ou de voiture de police passe dans la grand rue au-dehors, au lointain.
!8.15 Artiste statement. Ou et quand pourrais-je bien ecrire cela? Ici? Maintenant? Pour le moment, je ne me sens l'inspiration que pour ranger mes petits pots de peinture acrylique et doree, faire tables rases et eclaircir l'espace pour ma prochaine visite. Fait.
2 petites et 2 grandes assiettes jaune vif, legerement emailles, achetees ce matin pour quelques livres a une vente de bric a brac de pas de porte en face de chez un couple qui demenage, sur le chemin entre la gare de train et le studio... je viens d'en utiliser une pour y manger la deuxieme moitie de mon sandwich au pain au levain, a l'artichaud et aux tomates sechees. Un veritable delice! Tel que je suis tentee de garder ses assiettes au studio, pour des repas de travail prochain, la visite probable de D. ou de P. ou de quelque autre. Elles pourront aussi etre utiles pour les Studios Portes Ouvertes de Septembre prochain, ce jaune chaleureux etant partie integrale de ma "marque" JOYCE. Mes cartes de visite sont signees en jaune vif et l'on trouve cette couleur tout autours, ici et chez moi. 19.30, Il est temps de rentrer. X ---------------------------
Thursday 8 July I have about 20 small or semi-abstracted paintings in front of me, and 2 semi large unstretched figurative "Life Series" table paintings (painted flat onto table surfaces, pinned to the partition to the left. 2 tables side by side ready to accomodate a new long rectangle of primed white canvas. Half a chewing gum in my mouth and a cup of green tea couling down in the warmth of the summertime studio. Planes flying overhead, to be heard through our rounded stucco and glass ceiling. An artist in the studio nextdoor, another hastily passing by.
What's next? That IS the big question looming above my enclosed space at the moment. This last roll of canvas, quietly waiting it's turn, tied with a little rope, in the corner behind me, or rather these "sea-food" claws, that I want to turn into bird beaks, embedded in a background of sculpted Plaster of Paris? No time for procrastination. One must dive into the realm of creative self-realization: Now! It will be the birds. I have much to communicate through them at the moment.
15.48 My green tea has become luke warm. The 2 crab claws now peak out of miniature mountains and valleys of pink hardened plaster. I had mixed it, in my brown basin, with the largest palette knife, into this colourful paste, having emptied onto the flour of white plaster all the remaining contents of one of my pigment jars. "Krappret kenz, Gustav Jerwitz & Co, 2000 Hamburg 4 Telefon 04074...645..." onto a worn out stained label. The little empty red plastic jar makes an artwork in itself, with it's mysterious past journeys and gifts of itself to artists. Another one of these "hand me downs", that I have moved along with my paintings from studio to studio; probably given to me by an older (than) male artist who was clearing out his space at the Jeffrey's road studios in Stockwell, which I happened to visit once in the early 90's... almost 20 years ago. And Art goes on, unstoppable, irreprissable, in my veins red like the beautiful inners of this old jar, red cells of creativity, vital, inherent, inseperable from the self.
The light unprimed wood of the box frame into which I had poured the thick pink cream, an action replacing the making of cakes that I never do, has somewhat opened at the corners, leaving a slight aperture. The plaster must have expanded as it hardened, fast, in the hot studio space. Sweat was dripping profusely down my back, under this vintage thin yellow summer dress that has seen too many Julys. The bucket is now empty awaiting for a thorough scrubbing and wash in the basement or in the ground floor sink. Basement perhaps as I may want to empty it's contents in the yard so as not to block our drains... Sitting at my desk to write these words has enabled my body to cool down. Also neighboring artists, B. or B. have switched on the fan up above, that sounds a little like the ventilation in a big hotel, magnified, or in an airplane. My 2 birds, beaks arguing or just talking facing each other, call out from the painted palette like table. "Attention", like babies.
17.45 The rough reliefs of these 2 parrots and of the emotional landscape from which they rise have softened and smoothed out, in places, and become cruder in others. The piece emates from the experience of a recent argument but seems to have found it's way towards the more peacefull tones of a conversation. It wants to have life, breath, noise, veracity, as it extracts itself from a strongly felt interaction between two close beings. But it takes the freedom, from this emotional starting point, to just evoke a facet of a pair of individuals' life, in harmony and happiness. It might very likely be called "The 2 Parrots", without any further guidance onto it's source of inspiration. People may view it as an three dimensional image of joy as much as they may recognize it's roots in human conflict. All that matters is that it may carry with it the power gained from surprise at the materials used to compose the message, and from the strength of deeply felt energies, universal to woman and mankind.
Unwilling to soften the composition too much into a perfected soapy rhetoric, I hesitate between... no I do not hesitate, I ponder my next moves. PVA, a much favoured component in my mixed media fine-art practice since the early nineties, may at some stage seal the porous plaster of Paris, and give it strength. Spectrum mural acrylics, of which I am still using the left-overs of a year 2000 commission, 10 years on, and that I blend with additional water every few years, is also an element that seals and plastifies, while it colours, the surface of the sculpted plaster. What to apply first? The colour or the sealant, that can penetrate within the substrate if allowed to soak into it, diluted with water, in numerous successive applications? How did I proceed when creating "The Parrot" with a small plastic restaurant take away dish that T.,who has a studio downstairs, marvellously framed for me with recycled wood before it travelled onto the back of a big yellow shiny motorcycle, carefully protected into thick bubble wrap, onto the passenger cabin of an airplane to find a home in Greece, as a present to a friend of a close friend's mother...? How did I choose? PVA, mural acrylic? A bit of each?
Why not start by these eyes, that I find as expressive as these beaks? A few layers of thinly diluted white acrylic, applied for extra brilliance and shine within the half-tone of the coured pink plaster. Yes. That was the initial idea today when considering the proceedings ahead. And the initial idea, the one that just jumps to mind spontaneously is usually the best. This may be a case of trusting one's instinct, while also allowing to take steps back for consideration.
I will go down to the Art House kitchen and make my last cup of green tea for this session, before contemplating these 2 birds again and considering the next move. More carving? No more carving? Brushing away all of the pink grit and dust of plaster that remain onto parts of it's surface? Or not? Keeping it there, precious, tell-telling in some areas, keeping the piece "real", (does that equal to saying "imperfect", amongst other definitions?), sealing it in PVA, fixing the imperfection, or perhaps rather the complexity of the texture that this irregular grit, produces? Questions questions. And the colour. Yet another vastness of considerations. Same parrots? Different parrots? The second most likely... Let's make my body move up and down the stairs of our big old building. A wiff of fresh air and a look at the birds and sky from the yard is most welcome also.
18.44 A black bird has watched over me, as I sat in the yard for a moment, perched onto the pole of the high fence that seperates us from the youth centre's disused grounds behind. A child was crying for his mum and her comforting loving foreigner's voice was softly blending with his in the pathway to the park at the back of our shed. The bird, after a long pose looking down on me and the surrounding, flew of to join it's partner, that had taken off from the little tree up front My art is the child that I have never had. I create it and nurture it as the years go by, forever loving it, with it's trials and errors, always accepting it and agreeing with the hold it continues to have on me. And as my mother was defending herself to me yesterday, as a parent, the child is also imperfect. And both need to be loved regardless. Creator. Creation. Mother. Child. Grit on "The 2 Parrots" composition. My babies. Still in their pink flesh of tinted plaster of Paris, until the feathers come to speak of their own beauty, message, expression, presence. Tomorrow.
Love. Peace. I thank life, and God, for having granted me the chance to come and work in my artist studio once again. ---------------------------
Friday 9 July 14.36 I have just scrubbed clean my little brown bucket. The gaps between each wooden length of "The 2 Parrots" frame have widened since yesterday evening. It is 30 Celsius outside and hotter inside still. As it continued to dry, the plaster of Paris has expanded further. This is now becoming a case of applying some wood paste, when the structure has fully settled.
I am very tempted, at this stage, to even start again through yesterday's process, but this time with the 2 smaller sets of crustacean claws which are also calling for attention, in the empty box frame in front of me. All the finishing carving and smoothing and PVA and acrylic colouring can come at a later stage. I want to listen to my desire: shaping the 2 small birds, something I discussed earlier on in the day when D. called me over the phone. Mass production, or rather, jokingly, a little hint at that. When creating "The Parrot", first in this series and so successful that it quickly left home to fly to Greece, it's new country of adoption, I knew that the concept of the piece was one of it's strongest points. Who knows, as I am far from patenting the idea, and ultimately aiming at posting this studio diary on my weebly writer's website, birds of this breed might start appearing all around the globe... One can dream. The originals are here, with me, until they leave the nest, materially or digitally, spiritually even. May they grow like seeds producing flowers, and beauty, and expression, and freedom.
Now, hands on. Noisy business of mixing the plaster and colour pigment. Pouring the cream into the box frame with the big large palette knife, after having chosen the approximate positioning for my beaks, birds, background shaping. Planting the beaks in the wet mix and working out the landscape of mountains and valleys with the palette knife as it gradually hardens... Go!
15.42 Each artwork has it's own life energy. This one dried so fast that I had to pour an additional milky mix around the two beaks as the background had already become too hard to allow me to insert them fully. Brown terracota, later dark grey, later fine glitter, as this time, I was painting as well as sculpting with a small palette knife within the softer plaster. Tea break.
16.17 More carving onto the hardening plaster as a priority, the break comes now. Urgency!
18.49 This session is soon coming to an end. The rough irregularities of the terracota plaster that I had to press hastily, by hand this time, into the box frame, are now smoothed into curls and volutes of beauty and expression. Semi-abstract, semi-figurative, they portray feathers, wings, heads and movements, a glistening golden heart now nestling between the two birds' chests. My brown bucket is clean, again, and put away, as I have run out of purpose made frames as well as plaster of Paris. A few snail shells are now awaiting attention, for a later day. Before I sculpt them as well, into another reincarnation of themselves. "The 2 Parrots", in their present flesh of pink, and "The 2 Black Birds", a the moment terracota brown, dark grey and gold, will dry within their respective light wood frames until I return filled with new feelings, desires, experiences, memories and ideas, to further ascertain their veracity and rightful claim at existence.
I may decide to use the "all purpose filler" (no sagging, shrinkage or cracking) that was towering on a shelf behind me, instead of shopping for wood paste, to close the corners of my frames once the plaster has settled. ("The less shopping the better". That's one of my mottos. "The more creating and producing the better". That's another one.) I may want to make fency gold leaf finishes onto these frames, or... let's leave this open. The frame could also be an extension of the artwork within, in colour and design, as I have done one numerous occasions in the past.
At any rate, 3 "The birds Series" artworks have, and are seeing the light.
Will the last 2 travel as far and as swiftly as the first one?
All is very impredictable with art. At least they will have been born, and in the act of creation, I will have found self-realization. Despite all the sacrifices incurred in running this practice, in financial resources as well as time and effort, despite the extreme uncertaincy of any fruitful returns, I will have felt enriched, once more, for the simple love of Art.
I thank, God, Life, once more, for having granted me the privilege to work with my talents and skills on what I perceived to be my foremost purpose in this world, that of the creative artist. Content producer, painter, illustrator, sculptor, digital media producer, animator, graphic designer, writer, editor, publisher... the fine art takes it all. The fine-art prevailed at 4 years of age, and I foresee it prevailing for me, at the age of 60, 70, 80, however far I may reach.
Billy Childish recently said at a University of the Arts conference, that he beleived a good artist should paint 2 days a week, cook, and walk in the country. Soon after that, he was having his first one man show ever, and at the ICA, at the age of 50. There is some good truth in his saying, and I have applied it to my own practice for many years now. Perseverance. Beleiving in what one does, and in oneself, never giving up on what one loves to do, and giving it all one's might, always.
Sweat has poured down my back again today, in the extreme heat of the studio, but this was no suffering. It is now 7.20 and I have a long journey through South London before reaching home. Time to shut down ------------------------
Wednesday 14 July 15.00
A little moment in the yard where I looked around seeking for inspiration. The colours on the brick wall, to the left of our large worn out chair gave me tones of grey, black, terracotta, with a dusting of white, which recall those already present in the sculpted relief of the "2 black birds" with golden glittered heart. On the wall, there were also areas of ochre, and while contemplating these hues and textures, my eye caught the small little square mosaic tiles, applied onto our large Buddha bust's head, shining in blues and coppers. My mood of today reflected into this composition, I return to the studio, armed with the palette of the day. My heart is heavy with painful feelings. The day had started with alarming thoughts, before my perception of the week and years ahead, started descending into turmoil and despair. Now depressed, downtrodden, I endeavour to find the strength to make a fruitful session of this time at the art studio, working through the blues in my soul.
Heavy rain has just started to hit the glass ceiling above our first floor studios. My life is crying with it. Focusing on my artwork seems like the only path to inner peace. Wether it represents escapism, or wether it is indeed the bravest way I have to face my predicaments, it goes on. Takes me onwards. Downwards, upwards, linked with my reasons to live. Thank you God, Life, for granting me the chance to work in my art studio another day.
Mural acrylics of terracotta, blues in 2 tones, ochre, have enriched the relief as well as the frame, which, in a Howard Hodgkins manner, is an abstract painted continuation of the 3D image within. Only a thin line of ochre, sinuously delineating the later's prominent square edge, stands above a chaos of tormented layers of colour. At the moment, there is discomfort and distress within this piece, and the colours applied onto the existing tinted plaster of Paris, together with the dark grey beaks protruding from them, are still enmeshed and sunk into quick sands and muds of unresolved aesthetic doubts and unclear substances.
How can I rise above these confused shapings and elements? At least to give them a specific sound, intent, or if not so determined, more defined presence. The message. The poem. The song. The breath of life above this inanimate piece. To make these visible. Understandable beyond the feeling. Or more precisely within it. To make it's feeling shared, graspable. Or if not this specific feeling, which I am trying to extract from the depth of my being, at least one that may strike a chord, from within the viewer.
The expressionist frame unleashes emotions, that I might tame at a later stage, to distill it's beauty. If not tame, on the contrary, emphasize, push further into it's impulsive sensuous layers adding beautifying elements. To increase the complexity of it's design, rather than simplify and blend, and pacify? Decisions will be made during the process of making, and may even wait for my next visit here, as I contemplate, with increasing desire, bringing here the end of a small gold paint tin that I opened recently at home.
18.00 Bright white onto the eyes of each bird, "The 2 Parrots" included, have extracted "The 2 Black Birds" from their background and intermingled feathers and wings of confused distress. Catching the light into protruding ovalish shapes, they have introduced both an aesthetic and a conceptual focus. Now, the 2 adjacent beaks have gained veracity, aided with a furthering application of dark blue by thin brush, rather than finger tip, this time, behing the crustacean claws. Their natural dark grey coloring, harmonizing with the tinted dark grey plaster forming the body of the birds, in parts, have now become more poignant. They will probably remain natural, truthful, bearing their integrity to the piece, untouched but by, perhaps, a thin layer of yacht varnish, which could just deepen their intrinsic colouring and ascertain their presence. Water based gold specialist decorator's gold paint, yacht varnish, 2 dots of black within the eyes...
The remnants of mural acrylics, terracotta and ochre, dry slowly in the plastic party cups that I have used as container palettes.
The french national enthem sings away it's tune calling citizens to create paths of unpure blood as they march... How extremely violent this 1789 french revolution has been. Producing freedom from the bloodied entrails of the "enemy". A never ending human pattern, replicated throughout the ages. Yesterday an afghan fighter, who was training amongst the british forces, killed one of it's commanders in his bed, as well as 3 other british soldiers, and injured more before fleeing away to the Taliban's protection. Will there ever be an end to wars? Or are they to just gain momentum with the increasing pressures for survival that the exponentially growing global population experiences with climate change?
My "2 Black Birds" can now see, and are blind no more. The white of their eyes holds the hope in their existence. These 2 clearly defined points of focus are an anchor to optimism in a distressed emotional and physical landscape.
The sun now shines above the glass roof of the Art House, as the evening arrives. I want to close the day here by preparing my tools, brushes and palette knife and scouring sponge, for the next session Saturday or Sunday. The remaining paint wants to be taken care of as well before I clear up.
18.40 All is washed and in order on the 2 adjacent painting tables. The remaining terracota came as 4 last impasto palette knife marks at the centre of each frame length, above a gentle noisy battering of yellow ochre, rythmic also onto the edges of the frame. El Hadji Sy, a famous senegalese artist who visited my studio and home on a number of occasions, while producing work and appearing in the widely broadcasted "Africa 95" series of cultural events, advised me to be noisy, as I create art, not to refrain from making sounds. In those days, I was already working my materials with actions and moves akin to this approach and remain to this day. One imprints life and energy to a piece, when giving that extra dimension. The instant becomes visible, so does the intent. One becomes at one with the present in it's immediacy, while working on the piece, and that moment remains frozen in time within it's mark of sound. Zen. The ultimate. Peace. I must go. X --------------------
Tuesday 20 July The "2 black birds" that I thought finished when I first saw them again on arrival at the studio today, now appear, resting against the studio wall facing me, to lack additional colour. That is probably due to the fact that I have placed them almost side by side with the "2 parrots", brightly coloured over their pink sculpting of tinted plaster of Paris. The later I am working on at the moment, having extracted some of the more vibrant hues I have remaining from a past mural commission to accommodate this new subject matter. The beaks, claws of large crabs planted into rounded shapes of etched pink plaster, once again face each other, as though engaged in intense communication. The backgroung is of various greens, blues and cadmium yellow, with a sprinkle of fine gold glitter to catch the light of a sunny day. Erratic marks of those colours, applied in noisy rapid touches by palette knife cut through the gradients of pink on the surrounding protruding frame.
At present, they are almost painful to the eye, as was my stay, on an emotional level, at my mother's house, last winter. Having had a long conversation with her on the phone today, on the way to the studio, which ended with many said kisses closing down on distressful exchanges, I am working through the emotions of discord and lack of harmony. A difficult moment in a relationship. An argument. Anger. Resentment. Harmful words, however intended. Discord. Breaking the Peace, the happy gentle softness. Destroying the clarity. Confrontation. Destructive love. Anyway. These birds need to evolve. As do perhaps the 2 small ones at their side.
I need to take some distance, move my body through the house a little and come back with renewed inspiration, hope, and strength.
Or perhaps not, vulnerability. To perceive and convey more. More Truth. More purity. More veracity and more life. These 2 big birds need to come alive somehow. To gain sound and movement. The background longs for more depth. Also, the emotional environment of the frame needs to find resolution, acceptance, integrity, without losing it's power of expression. As for the 2 small birds, thought to be completed at the begining of the session, they need to be reconsidered with great care, if to be coloured further, because they found root in a totally different emotional landscape. They make up a different kind of poem. Actually, that is what the aim is. To turn this pink piece into a poem as well. A poem that holds itself on it's own very terms. the 2 bird artworks stand apart and are alien from each other. They represent moments in 2 different relationships. They will later be set free to relate to any kind of viewer, who may see or recognise in themselves or in known others, aspects of love and interaction that may move them.
19.10 The "2 big birds, or parrots" are probably completed by now. At any rate, they are signed and dated in thin permanent ink feltmarker on the top bottom edge of their frame. The application of colour has become more vigorous, in the palpable heavier sense, and definite. The brush marks are louder but gentler. No palette knife this time. Some wetness, some drips, some blobs... substance and solid marks. The communication from this piece has become clearer, and in a playfull manner, more loving and at peace within it's elements. Aesthetically, it works with force and enthousiasm and one can hear it, in the visual sense of the term, which I like to extract from these inanimate objects and materials, even as I work.
The "2 small birds, or black birds" are definately remaining untouched, at this stage anyway, and are now resting against my miror door cabinet, and the white secretary beneath. This is how these artworks are meant to reside: leant against a vertical surface, rather than attached to it, rising from the surface of a piece of furniture or of a shelf. The plaster of Paris renders them quite heavy and the standard gallery and home partitions and fixtures will most likely not hold the weight... Unless deeply set screws are used, and affixed efficiently, these artworks need alternative displaying arrangements.
Are they pure "objets d'art"? A blend between a painting and a sculpture? Perhaps they deserve both the vertical surface which traditionally accomodates painting and 2D artworks, and the horizontal, chest or eye level surface onto which would otherwise be displayed a small sculpture.
Two 5"X4" stretched canvasses have received the remaining acrylics, before I took my flower shaped ceramic palette for the wash. They are miniature stories in themselves. I must move away from this desk and prepare for the walk, wait, train journey and bicycle ride home. It is already late. 19.30 X XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX The artworks mentioned above are available for viewing and purchase from my online catalogue http://www.joycesart.co.uk XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX