The art is to hide the art. Peter Angermann is a supreme master of painting, a concentrated skill he has honed gradually over 40 years to express his wicked, impish delight in the folly of mankind, his sheer joy at being alive (he's the most superb plein-air landscape painter I know working today), and his growing, troubled perception of humanity’s inhumanity.

Taub in Bischofsheim depicts a horrific incident which took place in a Bavarian town - the murder of a woman by drunken thugs in broad daylight and full view of passers-by. He has painted the cyclist as a self-portrait to show that he sympathises with the people who were in this terrible situation. Who else could paint such a tragic dilemma?  But he has - from the cyclist's regulation helmet, the bike's shaky wheels and the silhouette of the church in the distance to the crouching hoody watching, the spurts of blood and drunken cheers.

The energy that sears through his work is the spirit of our age.

Tower of Babel   1986-88
painted wood, metal, motor 300 cm high
Sharmanka Theatre, Glasgow

Circle of Victims from Millennium Clock Tower  1997-99  
wood, metal, glass, motors  3000 cm high
Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh 

Eduard Bersudsky is the most interesting of all the Russian underground artists.  He developed his original, immensely complex carved and kinetic art in St Petersburg, during the grim, oppressive post-war Soviet years when it was still Leningrad.  While working as a naval engineer, he created his art in comparative secrecy, within a shared apartment, almost mute with despair. 

Those Communist officials who were aware of him dismissed him as a harmless toy-maker, just as the contemporary art officials of the West continue to do today, neither realising that within his fairground lurks one of the most incisive and hilarious critiques of human nature and society, not just for now but for all times.  He is one of the few artists who have revealed to us the contemporary face of death.  Bersudsky is today’s Hieronymus Bosch.

There is a distinct tradition of painting in Scotland, vibrant with colour and brushwork.  This might owe something to the brilliance of the light, so often reflected back up into the sky from the sea and lochs, especially during the drawn-out daylight hours of summer.  But equally, this tradition might be a reaction against the darkness of winter, when on overcast days the sun barely seems to rise above the horizon, and there’s hardly enough light to see colours by.

Fionna Carlisle was brought up in the far north, on the coast, in Wick, and has had a love affair with radiance ever since.  A naturally gifted painter, she never questioned for a moment what she wanted to do with her life, and she was lucky enough to born into a culture where such an ambition was not just respected but welcomed. Conceptualism has since eaten the heart out of Scottish painting, a cancer spread by the subsidised sector (see BOOKS – The Eclipse of Art) but Fionna Carlisle is one of the few to have kept its flame alight. Her heroic determination has an Olympic dimension, for she spends half the year in Greece, on the island of Crete, where her art soaks up sunlight.  She paints people, flowers and landscapes.  Her paintings all spring from the same source: they’re imaginative explosions that fill the white spaces in which she works, whether it’s the dark, sultry, angularity and nervous ease of youth (Alpin) or the late-summer sumptuousness of sunflowers.

Black, Green and Yellow c 1969 
paper collage, 121 x 515 cm
Sheffield Art Galleries and Museums Trust

Brilliant Black 1982
paper collage
Tate Gallery, London

Francis Davison is, in my estimation to date, the pre-eminent British abstract artist of the second half of the 20^th century.

He worked in isolation, within the passionate confines of his marriage to the artist Margaret Mellis. They kept poultry on their smallholding to make a living.  Gradually, over many years, he developed his extraordinary language of large collage.

He never added pigments, but only used the given colours of the paper. What look like brushmarks are actually the remains of previously glued, torn-off sheets.  He increasingly recycled old collages, for he worked incessantly, in the small front room of their house which he used for a studio, hardly selling anything, making his work richer and richer and bigger and bigger.  

Davison was a modern-day equivalent of the illuminator of the Lindisfarne Gospels.  I know of no-one else who could make hues, tones and shapes dance together in the mind’s eye in such a life-enhancing way, in a purely abstract visual equivalent of song.  The collages may look thrown together, but they’re not. The colour-space relationships are absolutely exact.  Every nick and tear tells in the raw-ragged, furious, utterly unsentimental but glorious beauty he gave to the world. 

I put on a show of Francis Davison’s work at the Hayward Gallery in 1982.  A young student from Leeds called Damien Hirst had the nous to be bowled over by it, and he then tried to do his own versions of Davison.  His attempts revealed his barren visual creativity and, like Duchamp before him (who suffered a similar impotence), he subsequently took his pathetic revenge on art. Neither Francis Davison nor I can be held responsible for the subsequent debacle.

Francis Davison’s estate is in the care of Telfer Stokes.  The remarkable Goldmark Gallery in Uppingham, Rutland - a beacon of excellence in art - promotes Davison’s work.

Purple tulip with turquoise stem and black/blue background 
14 March 2001 
gouache on paper 150 x 75 cm
National Museums & Galleries of Wales, Cardiff

Two leaves: New Zealand flax VII  
18 November 2000 
gouache on paper 285 x 155 cm
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Old Transformers – Iron Master and Miner 199X
Consett, Co. Durham

from the Garden of Plastic Delights, including the Hanging Baskets of Basildon 2010
(work in progress)

David Kemp is one of the most brilliantly inventive sculptors working in Britain today.  His Old Transformers were created out of colossal scrapped engines from the demolished Consett steelworks, which at its peak had 6,000 employees.  Like two great Easter Island statues, they stare across the empty green fields where the factories once stood, mourning the passing of industrial Britain.

They are uplifting, moving and magnificent, but little-known because they are off the beaten track - unlike the Gateshead Flasher, designed by the hollow man of British sculpture, which casts its grim shadow over the A1 and the Great North Eastern Railway line. (For a full critique, see Books – The Eclipse of Art.)   ‘I’ve seen a miner and a steelworker round here,’ said one local wag, ‘but never a fucking angel!’

David Kemp’s masterpiece, which he has been working on for over 30 years, is his Botallack Hoard.  Projecting himself into the mind of an archaeologist of the future, he has discovered a  group of relics from our civilization; from these precious fragments he attempts to reconstruct the images of the gods and goddesses we once worshipped. Echoing the artefacts of ancient history, of which he has a vast knowledge, Kemp’s treasury is at once beautiful, inventive, funny, moving and hauntingly telling about the true motivating forces of our times. It deserves a permanent gallery of its own within the British Museum. 

The Bottallack Hoard is almost impossible to photograph. Visit David Kemp’s website to get a glimpse of it, and of his inventiveness throughout the land.

Letters Mingle Souls
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The Ruskin Gallery by David Kindersley and Lida Lopes Cardozo
Sheffield

Most people hurry through the wet.  Henry Kondracki can’t stop looking at it.  His eyes shine with attentiveness. No-one has painted a wet city so well.  It isn’t just the city that Kondracki paints, but this shining attentiveness, his conscious enjoyment of a moment of living.  This attention is what makes his paintings come alive. The flickering brushstrokes – he’s a modern Magnasco – make everything in the damp atmosphere appear to shimmer and move : nothing is still. Every inch in his paintings is felt.

But Kondracki’s pictures go deeper than that. He isn’t just a latter-day urban impressionist – thought there’s nothing wrong with being that. His paintings have a darker resonance.  There’s almost always a figure in his pictures, often solitary, frequently a child, sometimes with an adult, or a figure-substitute, an isolated car, bollard or traffic light. These figures are usually placed somewhere in the middle distance. They draw you into the scene. These paintings are not flat but deep. The atmosphere they create is essential to their meaning.

Drawing and painting for Kondraki are ways of expressing a full sense of being alive, and, at the same time, this is what gives his pictures their darker undertow, a search back into memory.  His paintings are about today - the roadworks, street lights and cars - but they give you the impression that a ghost has just walked along the street. It’s not a frightening ghost, but a friendly one, though a little mournful because it reminds one of a world that’s gone. This isn’t just the towering, spectral presence of the old buildings, but something more personal, as if Henry was looking back on a scene remembered as a boy.  This isn’t nostalgia, but the reality of memory in our lives – Proustian, not picturesque.  How this elusive, subtle feeling is caught – as it is again and again in his work – is difficult to describe. It’s something to do with the way the space and light in his paintings open up inside but remain enclosed.  These paintings are above all contemplations; that is why their presence holds one’s attention, and this is what gives them their lasting quality.

Kondracki cannot remember when he didn’t draw. Seeing things has always fascinated him, and he still finds the process of drawing and painting magical mystery-making. He never wanted to be anything other than an artist, though his family warned him that he’d never make a living at it.  He has, but not without continuous hard work and a long struggle, buckling down against the trendy productions of his time, building on his determination not to give up looking and feeling, which for him meant drawing and painting. He draws on the spot and takes snaps – these are his research and reference points - but the paintings are always done in the studio, attempts to dig into what triggered his interest in the scene. He spent his childhood in Edinburgh, hardly ever going very far away.  His father worked for thirty years as a waiter in the then highly respectable Beehive Inn in the Grassmarket.  Kondracki left Edinburgh for a decade, to study at the Slade School in London (he’d been rejected by the local art school), and hang about in Copenhagen, before returning to Edinburgh to paint, and bring up his children. He didn’t intend to depict the city, but found he was doing so, when memories flooded back as he saw his own kids growing up in the city of his youth.  His driving ambition has been to make these feelings specific, and in the process, he has given life to streets and stone, amber lights and falling rain.   

         

Peacock, Red Admiral and Painted Lady  29 August 1996
watercolour and ink on paper

Short Sharp Showers  October 1994
watercolour and gouache on paper

David Measures is the Audubon of butterflies. For over thirty years he has been painting them on the wing (rather than from dead specimens pinned on a tray) - an extremely difficult thing to do. He observes the behaviour and different characteristics of all the British species in the same way that Audubon studied the birds of America, travelling the country to search for them and paint them as they would appear in their natural habitat. Measures celebrates natural life threatened with extinction.  He became, without in any way intending to be, one of the leading artists of our time. (He eschews art: it's always the by-product of a pursuit.) His work inspired Darren Woodhead (see below).

When he isn’t painting butterflies, hares and other animals, David Measures paints landscape. What can one do with all these eyefuls of delight that nature slops out everywhere, like a water carrier with a pail too full?  His solution is to capture them on sheets of paper, bright colours brushed, rolled and shoved about, smudged, stained and run, shades and lines and streaks of light, till he carves out a space that is luminous and full, mirroring out there the radiance embraced within his retina. The painting stops when the mind’s eye opens, like a butterfly’s wings, and the leaf of light-filled space looks startlingly complete.  A moment has been caught that goes on living.

Isn’t Shopping Murder! 1990
photographed installation
Private Collection

The Scotsman 1987
photographed installation
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

Ron O’Donnell began as a sharp, obsessive photographer of the seamier and crazier sides of life on and off the streets of Edinburgh. Then he realised he didn’t have to hang around and wait for things to happen - he could create bizarre incidents and photograph them himself. Slowly but surely creativity took over from observation.   The situations he created got bigger and bigger and so did his photographs, until he was able to incorporate all he wanted to say about the Scotland he saw around him, the illusions Scotland creates about itself, and how we kid ourselves about the implications of our lives.  His politics are the politics of a searching realist; his art a saga of human hopes, foibles and fantasies.

Giardino dei Tarocchi (Tarot Garden)  1979-98
Garavicchio, Italy
Julian Spalding and Niki de Saint Phalle talking

Giardino dei Tarocchi  (Tarot Garden)  1979-98
Garavicchio, Italy
general view

The Rock Garden   1958 – ongoing
Chandigarh, India
heavenly field populated with people and animals

The Rock Garden   1958 – ongoing
Chandigarh, India
view from the air

In the 1950s Nek Chand Saini was a road engineer working on the planned city of Chandigarh, which was being built to house the huge influx of Hindus driven out of the new Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. He so hated the regimented modernist city designed by Le Corbusier - where everything from the sewers up was designed on a grid system – that, in 1958, he started to create a secret garden, illegally, in a wooded wasteland on the edge of the town. It was to be a place where people liked being, full of animals and fountains, gods and swings.  It wasn’t until 1975 that officials finally discovered what he’d been doing, by which time he’d already covered 12 acres with terraced fields full of sculptures! The authorities were so surprised and delighted that they released him from his duties, gave him a team of workers and told him to get on with the job. He’s still creating one of the wonders of the world.

Immediately I saw Errol Sawyer’s photographs I was surprised by their compositional completeness - which lifts them out of time, and gives one the feeling that they are held forever (that ‘hold it’ moment)  – and by their utter naturalness – that gives one the impression that life is flowing through them and nothing in them is forced, arranged for show, or in any way artificial.  Their authority as artistic expressions lies in this confluence.  Errol Sawyer is that rare thing today – a classical black and white photographer in the Henri Cartier-Bresson tradition, using the camera at its simplest and most challenging, as a trap for catching time. Looking at his pictures, I feel more fully in tune with living today, and my guess is that people in the future will continue to look at them, and by doing so, get a glimpse of what it was really like to be alive today.

Errol Sawyer was born in Miami in 1943.  He was brought up by his mother, part African American and Cherokee Indian, first in Harlem, then the Bronx, where he learnt to survive in the city jungle. He became a brilliant chess player, and then took to photography in 1966.  He became famous in the seventies as a fashion photographer, but withdrew from this world in the late 80s to return to his roots in the streets. He has written beautifully about what he is doing. ‘A good picture results from a subconscious dance between being present and not being present.’  ‘I measure myself as a craftsman in proportion to the degree of consciousness I bring to bear upon a given event at its inception, not at its conclusion!’  And on the subject of politically motivated photography, he asks, ‘While I applaud the efforts of many photographers ... to raise our consciousness regarding the horrendous plight of those who are confined to the third world, I’m nagged by the question: whose interests are actually served by the process?’     

http://www.artreview.com/photo/photo/listForContributor?screenName=0mzwxgqvdtj3z

Tim Stead wanted to be a sculptor but didn’t like the preciousness of the contemporary art scene, so he started to make sculptures people could sit on.  So began his love affair with wood.  He became a superb furniture maker, using natural, local timbers (at first storm-blown), and letting the grain inspire his chiselled forms. His masterpiece – or rather his love piece – is the home he created for his wife Maggy and their family in Blainslie, Scotland. You have to go into it to appreciate it, an embracing cave carved out of wood – seats, fireplaces, alcoves, bookcases, beds – all interlinking forms, a celebration of mutual living.  Giles Sutherland’s book Explorations in Wood – The Furniture & Sculpture of Tim Stead gives an idea of the wonder of this place. 

Towards the close of his tragically truncated life, while suffering from terminal cancer, he began making pure sculptures again. These small, haunting carvings are impossible to photograph, for their full resonance only begins to operate in three dimensions as your eye explores their cavernous dimensions, and your mind hangs in their miniature, perilous immensity – in stature these small works are on a par with the best of Henry Moore.

Tim Stead wrote about these pieces in 1998:

These sculptures relate to ‘layers’ in the landscape. I feel that they are concerned with much larger scale activities, quarrying, temples, cities cut in rock. They are more visual than tactile and have a feeling of emptiness, deserted and their function lost. They are focuses for contemplating time and space. With all my work I seem to be continually going around the relationship of man and nature. I am an incorrigible optimist and like to celebrate the fact that man can make an input which reveals nature in an altered beauty. We are natural and represent a vast natural force of change.

Hock-Aun Teh hockaunteh.com

Beijing in Autumn 1995
acrylic on  paper  61 x 66 cm

Title to come
details to come

Chinese art is at a crossroads; after Soviet-style realism, and hosts of happy smiling peasants, it doesn’t know which way to turn. Some artists have returned to traditional Chinese landscape painting – misty mountains, bamboo and boats, as if the nineteenth century had never happened, let alone the twentieth!  Some have picked up European art as it was before the Communist era, and returned to the now safe and saleable haven of Impressionism.  A few have leapt on the ghastly, mindless bandwagon of conceptualism, attracted by the high prices charged by the con-artists of the west.  Others have tried to build on American Abstract Expressionism – a natural homecoming, for this art originally had its roots in oriental art, philosophy and calligraphy. Most of these artists, however, incorporate landscapes into their abstractions: the Chinese have difficulty with pure non-representation. 

One of the few Chinese artists to develop Abstract Expressionism in Chinese terms without reintroducing representation is the Malaysian-born, Western-educated Chinese artist, Hock-Aun Teh. He managed this by looking East as well as West.  In particular he was inspired by the wild, almost totally abstracted, ‘Mad Grass’ calligraphy of the Tang Dynasty,  reinventing it in 20th century terms and in full colour, and proving that genuine, exuberant modern art can flower on China’s ancient tree.  This is indigenous Chinese art that points the way forward to China’s cultural future.  All great artworks give you a kick on first sight, but few with more punch than the paintings of Hock-Aun Teh, who is also a brilliant master of martial arts.  All art at its best suspends energy for our contemplation and delight.

Theaterbrunnen – Fastnachtsbrunnen (Theatre Fountain – Carnival Fountain)  1975 –77
1600 x 1900 x 19 cm  
Theaterplatz, Basel, Switzerland
My wife, Gillian Tait, poses elegantly to give scale

Mengele – Hoch-Altar (Mengele - High Altar) 1986
iron, wood, plastic, hippopotamus skull, motors 
300 x 440 x 420 cm
Tinguely Museum, Basel, Switzeland

Alfreton Road  1979
acrylic on canvas  120 x 120 cm
South Bank Centre (Previously Arts Council Collection) London

Viuva de Panque – Sra Torres (Widow from Panque) 
acrylic on canvas  60 x 40 cm
Private Collection

Bimbo Town   1995 – ongoing
Leipzig, Germany
A sofa that eats people

Luna-Luna
Performance/Installation 

I was once in a taxi with Jean Tinguely when it took a wrong turning into a building site.  Suddenly we found ourselves trapped inside high wire fencing, surrounded by working cranes, among piles of rubble and dust, with a colossal digger driving directly at us, its driver out of sight behind its great descending, Tyrannosaurus-toothed maw. The cab driver panicked and reversed rapidly and chaotically. Tinguely was very excited, bouncing up and down on his seat. ‘It’s Jim! It’s Jim Whiting!’ he cried. 

Jim Whiting is Tinguely’s craziest successor – though his art is very different.  It’s an unforgettable concatenation of his response to the madness of modern urban life combined with elements from his dysfunctional Catholic upbringing in Africa.  In his nightclub Bimbo Town, the extraordinary creation of one extraordinary mind, human beings hunt and are hunted, drink and devour, fuck and get fucked, kick and get their kicks, all amid bucketfuls of laughter. Whiting is, without doubt, one of the greatest sculptors of our times. 

He’s never had, nor sought a grant – he thinks they’re the death of art. How can an artist know in advance what he’s going to create?  That’s why his art is so profound, and its content so radically and imaginatively exposed.

Thrush Fledglings   2009
watercolour on paper

Knots and a Dunlin  2005
watercolour on paper

Darren Woodhead paints the wonderful sights of the natural world on a large scale in watercolour.  He works in the open air, in all weathers – sometimes as his brushes freeze – while his dog sits patiently by. I know no-one living today who can handle this immensely difficult medium with more glorious spontaneity, letting the white of the blank page dance with life as he flicks and washes in the forms of gulls flocking to feed in the sea, plovers pecking in a field or mountain hares sniffing the air from their hiding places in the snow.  

Here, among the rocks at low tide, knots and a dunlin busily peck for food, the light glowing through and under them.  Fledgling thrushes, now much too big for their nest, shuffle one another out of the way, a fluffy, feathery, endlessly shifting brown jumble that no-one else could make sense of in paint.  

Darren Woodhead’s art is a celebration of the world we have to save. That’s why it’s so urgently contemporary.

APPLICATIONS

If you would like me to look at your work with a view to its inclusion on this virtual global gallery, and if you have a website, simply send the website address – nothing else, please – to art@julianspalding.net.>

You will receive an acknowledgement of receipt. If I’m interested in your work, I’ll contact you with a view to selecting the two works I’d like to include. If you don’t hear from me again within two months, it means that your work won’t be included at this stage. As you will see by glancing through the gallery, I’m interested in any language of art, from abstraction to detailed representation to pure invention, to mixtures of everything – but I have to be able to see the art, and artistic development. What I’m always on the lookout for is art that adds something fresh and personal.

Long experience has taught me that art can’t be predicted;  art isn't thought – it’s felt.