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City of Glass 11 - (StillmanStillman) 80x120cms
City of Glass 11 - (StillmanStillman) was selected for the 2013 Ludlow Open
MON 3 JUNE 2013
Today, with this piece and the excitement and strength of the resolution, I was reminded 'what painting is, what it can be, the possibilities in painting...', words I use whenever I teach. When I put those canvases together, there was electricity- one of the best moments of my career. I knew. As artists, we should never be passive with the world we see: we have to do something with it. We should be ambitious for our piece and strive for something new, something we have never done before of seen before: the trick is to recognize that 'different' thing, however you get there, whether by chance, design or hard slog. This is the excitement we crave.
Earlier, as the two canvases were not working together, I separated them - during the day the gap became wider and wider....The canvas with the red figure had no New York context: the grid of the streets was imposed time and time again, blatantly and subtly, horizontal, vertical, avenue , cross-street, none right but each contributing and enriching the paint, colour and surface.
The final painting is more about the idea and the center-line more powerful, with this criss-crossing of the figures and glorious ambiguities and tension created by who is in front of who. The figures are fighting for space - like rutting stags - but it is not a space 'out there': it is a painting space, an ambiguous space, so difficult to find with the human-figure...the painting now has the clarity of last friday, but with much more. The New York context is there, with the calmed-down horizontal green band of Central Park and Columbus Circle. I'll be starting a new painting tomorrow with the same idea of the two Stillmans but on a single large canvas so there is no option of switching the canvases. I'll have to find my elusive, ambiguous space within the canvas...figures jammed up against the Manhattan shape perhaps...
City of Glass 11 and City of Glass 6 in 'The New York Trilogy exhibition at Plough Arts
Many thanks to Janie M McDonald, my fellow artist during Open Studios at the Shire Hall. For a couple of days she had been questioning my brown figure - i was being too literal, one of the Stillmans at Grand Central in the novel has a brown overcoat. Janie reminded me of the blood-reds I had used in our last two stints together at the Shire Hall and suggested reversing the canvases as I had done in my last painting. Sometimes you miss the obvious: when I made the switch...
SATURDAY
SAT 1 JUNE
Like 'City of Glass 10 - StillmanStillman', this painting explores the idea of author/detective Quinn's dilemma about which Stillman to follow at Grand Central Station: one goes left, one goes right. The viewer becomes Quinn, flitting from figure to figure, forced to choose...My only niggle about City of Glass 10 was the absense of location and its disconnection to the other paintings in the series. I thought that instead of forcing location onto City of Glass 10, if I did another painting that had two figures and location, the link would be made. On reflection , the painting was possibly resolved on Friday (see below). Midtown Manhattan (where Grand Central is located) is hinted at, with the Hudson indicated by the two parallel lines behind the blue figure and the thick band of grey behind the brown figure.
Today, I tried to make the location more explicit and introduced the lime-green horizontal to indicate the bottom of Central Park, with the canvas-divide as 5th Ave. I also introduced a grid which confused the painting even more. Lots of Problems with the right figure: either too graphic or too subtle or too heavy or too brown! The figure disappeared at one point which confirmed to me that it had to be there. I agreed with Janie's comment today, that the left painting works on its own. Splitting the canvases is an option but may make the idea weaker. Perhaps a small gap might work. While it works in the left canvas, the green band doesn't help the diptych - I'll try a new colour on Monday and extend it into the right-side or even take it out. The band weakens the power of the divide. Need some clean brushes first!
FRIDAY
* from 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster
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City of Glass 12 - (W107thSt, E69th St) 150x120cms
SAT 8 JUNE 2013
Went deeper and deeper into the painting today and found my answers. The orange is immense. I was painting in my sleep last night and went into the studio with a bunch of ideas. Firstly, I felt the left side/west side of Manhattan was too soft, not tough enough. The drawing was strengthened by filling, with flatter paint, the fantastic shape of the Hudson between Manhattan and the left side of the canvas. I found a green that set off the orange/reds. A warmer green line was added to the edge, running in parallel to the now straighter line of the West Side and connecting to the vertical drips of the avenues. I'm still looking for more, for something else - I realised that the grid of Manhattan needed a horizontal or two to break up the verticals so i introduced W107th St and E69th St, the green lines flanking Central Park and the streets where author/detective Quinn and his client Peter Stillman live* Already, there was a subtle scaling up of the street-grid on the right side of the painting, so taking the main horizontal of E69th St, I introduced the image of a tiny ziggurat-topped apartment building, illusionistically three dimensional not flat, so I could repeat the angle of the lower West-side. The building went in and went out: all the painting needed was the tiny angle.(below)
detail
E69th St
FRI 7 JUNE
Janie told me about a thing on TV - 'What do artists do all day?' My seven hrs today were spent moving the painting from below to above. Forwards? Buildings went in and went out - they complicated and cramped the space. I enjoyed the freeing up of Manhattan and the emergence of emptiness. With that came the refinement of proportion and the very special bottom right corner. But it all seems very familiar - does this piece need more? It still may be the left half of a larger piece - we'll see tomorrow. I still think there is a painting somewhere that links my last two 'StillmanStillman' paintings with the other paintings in the series, a painting that contains the island-shape of Manhattan and the figure of Stillman.
The obvious problem is that if you put the two side by side, the figure becomes a giant, which I don't want: it is the new Tower of Babel that is giant. One solution was to make the Manhattan-shape a painting of Manhattan within the painting (referring to Matisse's 'The Red Studio') with the figure of Stillman disapearing behind. Another idea was to have Manhattan on the extreme left , and the figure of Stillman on the extreme right of a very large painting which is why I rushed home for a second canvas on Thursday. The idea was to have the Manhattan shape and the figure the same-size but to make the figure appear smaller by gradually scaling up the grid of the streets as you move left to right. At the end of the day, I put one of StillmanStillman canvases alongside this painting and saw that the paintings are linked: they are both shapes in colour, connected by the paint handling, composition and the subtle horizontals. And of course the shape and proportions of Manhattan suggest the human-figure.
beginnings
* From 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster
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City of Glass 13 - (Entrance) 120x150cms
SAT 9 NOVEMBER 2013
This painting began in June with three Manhattans side by side (of increasing scale from left to right). In COG 2 & 9 I had two Manhattans in the same piece so why not three? A New York Trilogy? The idea was to explore space by moving the Manhattans around, touching or tucked behind each other or placed apart to see what works best. The three shapes were connected visually by each having 42nd St on the same long horizontal. Once again the idea was stronger than the execution - there was no space, the painting was cramped and claustrophobic so I made the decision to keep the strongest, the Manhattan on the right. There are ghostly traces of the other two in the swirling paint on the left side. I'll go back to the idea with a wider canvas.
A friend described the shape of Manhattan as ugly - can't argue with that! - but throughout the series I have made a point of isolating and highlighting the island-shape and seeing in it the curves and proportions of the human-figure.
In this painting, Grand Central Station is a door, the entrance to the implied tower - the new Tower of Babel in New York*- in the surrounded streets, emphasized by shape and a narrower grid, with fake streets and false avenues. I toyed with the idea of calling the painting 'False Avenues' - I love the dual meaning: avenues that don't exist out there and the faklse avenues we find ourselves travelling down, in life, as artists, as detectives....I'll save the title for another painting. The almost-solid orange Hudson River also suggests architecture, a building 'there but not there', the top cut-off and open and the left-side deliberately straight. The colour, flatness and physicality of the paint all help create space, with the purple tucked in behind, and the large curve leaving the canvas and popping up as a purple stripe in the bottom right corner.
detail -architecture implied in the streets around Grand Central...
early days- COG 13 on right
*From 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster
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City of Glass 14 - (Dialogue) 120x80cms
City of Glass 14 - (Dialogue) was painted during a two week Residency at Bude Castle, alongside a solo exhibition 'The New York Trilogy' at the Willoughby Gallery.
SUNDAY 8 DEC
It's done. And so, finally is my application to the Pollack-Krasner Foundation - ping, there it goes. Twenty years in the making according to Denise.
THURS 5 DEC
Possibly, maybe...'Dialogue' refers to the dialogue between left-side and right-side, in particular the perspective line of the roof that 'talks' to the angled spike of the Williamsburg Bridge. It seems to lift Manhattan and make it vertical. .The last acts were tuning up the orange, making it warmer with the introduction of Indian Yellow and warm orange glazes and increasing the tonal shift from top to bottom. 'Dialogue' of course has a literary reference...
The grids are in harmony, verticals and horizontals, powerful intersections. All along I've tried to integrate the different grids: the grid of the streets, the physical grid of the painting itself with the canvas divides, the process mapping-out grid, the grid of the facade of a building. The canvas divides are along streets critical to the story* W107th St and 42nd St. The new Tower of Babel, the building that emerged with the removal of the paint on the right - the beauty of the revealed - is giant, corporate, sinister... it appears transparent, made of glass.....
Upper West Side
detail
*from 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster
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- Ashley Hanson
City of Glass 15 - (Stillman walks...) 50x40cms
City of Glass 15 - (Stillman walks) was selected for the 2014 The Discerning Eye by colector Chris Ingram and the image was used for the advert for the exhibition in Galleries Magazine
The smallest painting yet in the City of Glass series. It's always a challenge going from big to small - there is no room, no space! - but I think that problem has been resolved.
In this painting I returned to the idea of how to place both the figure of Stillman and the map-shape of Manhattan in the same painting, without Stillman appearing giant. The painting started with Stillman in a gallery, walking past a painting containing the Manhattan shape (City of Glass 1) but the verticality, which has been a constant throughout the series, was missing. I think the solution is far more ambitious and intiguing. The vertical grid on the right is a specific section of the Upper west Side. As 'detective' Quinn discovers, Stillman's daily walks (where he invisibly writes the letters that spell THETOWEROF BABEL) are all within 'a narrowly circumscibed area, bounded on the north by 110thSt, on the south by 72ndSt, on the west by riverside Park, and on the east by Amsterdam Avenue. No matter how haphazard his journetys - and each day his itinerary was different - Stillman never crossed these borders.'
Next painting: 'City of Glass 16 - (1 block= 1 brick)', investigating again the enormous scale of the new Tower of Babel, which would be 'large enough to hold every inhabitant of the New World'