Sunday, 28 October 2012

Sunday ramble about art and stuff


I am painting with watercolour today so my view of, my view of, the world looks a bit like the picture above.

Anyway a question about modern and contemporary art here, the answer (which I will get to in a bit) is which Thanet art gallery is displaying art by the following artists during 2013, Francis Bacon, Ian Davenport, Richard Hamilton, Damien Hirst, Katherine Le Hardy, Ben Nicholson, Piers Secund, Henry Moore, Cedric Christie and Andy Warhol?

It isn’t The Turner Contemporary, apart from what’s on now running into 2013 I only know of Rosa Barba, JWM Turner Selected by Rosa Barba and Carl Andre, exhibiting there next year.

With the blog and technology the whole situation has changed so that the process of adding pictures to posts is much quicker and easier, as I said in the previous post the pictures I take with my mobile phone automatically save to the internet now, so I don’t have to wait for any uploads I will probably be adding more pictures to posts.


Here is the watercolour I painted while having my breakfast, perhaps influenced by a dream I don’t know really, just that I woke up with the thought of a long person putting on a pair of stripy trousers.
     Tentatively wondering what Francis Bacon would have made of Ramsgate I have bent the lighthouse a bit  but don't think watercolour is the right medium here.


I guess I would have to buy a rigger brush for doing even stripes to get anywhere near  Ian Davenport's view of Ramsgate

I don't think I could get anywhere near Richard Hamilton with watercolour.


There is a point to what may look like rather frivolous nonsense here, whether we like it or not Thanet’s tourist economy is becoming linked to art, a large proportion of the visitors to the local area who are reasonably wealthy are visiting Thanet at least partly to look at artworks.

I guess this means that those of us local who like me have to deal with visitors on a daily basis can enhance their ability to do this by understanding art better


The Damien Hirst didn't go so well, also apologies for the shiny patches caused by photographing and publishing each watercolour as soon as I had finished them meaning they were all pretty wet. The bogging was all done while waiting for paint to dry, so I could turn over the page in my sketchbook.

Anyway here is the answer


UPDOWN GALLERY
Satis House, 11 Elms Avenue, Ramsgate, Kent CT11 9BW
Kent's Newest Gallery Opens with:
Sir Peter Blake - 6 Decades in Print. Nov 17-Dec 22.

4 comments:

  1. I wish I understood art but then I would say the same about life and death and while we are at it my MS. People will never understand, it is not like geometry or algebra there is no ANSWER and the Understanding of ART is not tangable concept. But condemning art out of hand because it is ART is not going to achieve anything. I dont understand quantum physics but I dont condemmn it. Art and the Turner is an easy target one I feell we should be embracing

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    1. Don I don’t think the point of art is to understand it, I do think having a reasonable chance of recognising which famous artwork is by which famous artist, at least at the level of being able to differentiate between Beethoven and The Beatles, has its points.

      The Turner Contemporary is a bit of a tricky one because it is mostly funded out of the public purse and a fair old chunk of this, about a million pounds a year, out of our council tax.

      Personally art interests me particularly visual art and out of this especially paintings, I tend to respond to painted visual art with painted visual art, obviously I don’t normally publish the what I paint in my sketchbook on any one day, as presumably it would bore everyone to death, but I have today, but it isn’t intended as a condemnation, far from it.

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    2. The extent to which an approach to understanding Art my be made is to try and cultivate ones aesthetic sensibilities and Art education, both historic and practical. It may well be that some works remain enigmatic mysteries, but we should not have to pretend our understanding. Most works are decipherable if we put in the effort, that presupposes that the works are worthy of that effort in the first place. Maybe that is the question we should be posing in the first place.

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    3. I believe that art should make you want to look at it, think and feel something. If it fails to do this for me then I pass it by.

      Having said that. I still do not understand Keats's,"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" since the days when I first read it at school. But it still makes me stop and think; it makes me feel and I cannot pass it buy. Therefore to me it is art.

      In addition I believe that we humans have an intrinsic need for art. Perhaps this is because it helps us to understand all the strange, bad and good things that assault us in this world. Art is necessary if we are to thrive.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.