Slow, slow progress, but the results are good

Two weeks ago I visited the Vermeer exhibition in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Just fantastic to see. The famous Dutchman is only too well known for his slow rate of production, but also his fine labour intensive way of working. I don´t want to draw parallels between Vermeer and myself, but it does make me feel a little better about how long it seems to take me to finish a painting. Today one reached completion, reason enough to share it.

The progress may be slow, but the results are good and do seem to be starting to form a quite rich and well-resolved series. There is undoubtedly more to be achieved in this area, so hopefully more will follow.

Vermeer in the Rijksmuseum

27 years after the last great Vermeer exhibition, on that occasion in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, it is now the Rijksmuseum with opportunity to draw an even bigger selection of the Dutch master’s work together.  This time twenty-eight paintings are assembled for this sell out show that runs through the late winter and spring in Amsterdam.

Even being incredibly familiar with Vermeer’s work, seeing it assembled and grouped like this throws up surprises.  The View of Delft held my attention in a different and perhaps better way than it does in its normal home in The Hague.  The lighting of the work was maybe better, and the overall luminosity of the painting just fantastic.

Having spent several years making work about the place that Vermeer’s work has gained in art history I try and see the artist’s work whenever the chance presents itself and booked my ticket early.  The museum has found itself trying to find the balance between wanting to give as many visitors the chance to see the work, without creating a situation where seeing the work once you’re inside is inhibited by the sheer size of the crowds.  I chose to visit in one of the later afternoon slots and as a result, heading towards closing time, often found myself alone I front of paintings, which if I think back to my visit to the Mauritshuis in 1996 was a huge improvement.

The Mistress and Maid painting from the Frick Collection in New York is a beautiful image.  Larger scale than most other similar works and a painting of contrasts, intense darkness and glowing light, crisp sharpness and soft focus, a whispered moment between the lady of the house and the servant.

Then there is the recently restored/altered Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window from Dresden.  Last time I saw this painting the cherub painting on the back wall was still hidden under a layer of paint that had been added later.  Compositionally it is a greatly altered image.  An unusual experience to have in front of such an icon from art history.

But yesterday, for me, there were three stand out paintings. A Woman holding a Balance, Woman with a Pearl Necklace and Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid.  All three share a delicacy that you find in most of Vermeer’s work but seem to just take it to a level further.  The extreme fineness of the rendering of the fingers, holding, writing, expressing, seems to be important here, at least to my experience of the work.  The exquisite restraint and stillness come to its absolute high point in the way the woman in the darkness of her interior delicately supports the barely visible balance above the luminosity of a row of pearls.  Just fantastic!

Night School – an online (and in school) exhibition of where I work

A few weeks ago, as a sort of trailer for this post, I published a single drawing I had made of the school where I work.  Now the full set……

Night School

I have worked at Maasland College in Oss, the Netherlands for more than twenty years. I teach, I paint in my own studio at home, I draw when I travel, and yet in all that time I have never made a drawing of my workplace. Time for a change! A few months ago I started with a first drawing. Happy with the result, I continued. It then became a series of nine drawings of different corners of the school, based on photographs I took early on winter mornings when it was dark outside and the corridors were empty, almost, you could say, a kind of Night School.

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Night School

The school community will be able to see the exhibition firsthand, everyone else will hopefully enjoy the digital version here.

They are a little different to the images that I normally make, but certainly form a good set.  You can find these drawings and other series of my studio work at my recently renovated website:

https://petersansom.art

Drawing my work place

I draw quite a bit.  Whenever I travel one of my drawing books travels with me. In my studio work I plan and prepare using drawings (on paper or digitally) to plot the way ahead.  Yet in we’ll over twenty years working in education I have never turned my attention towards my working environment in the form of drawing it.

A while back I decided it might be an interesting challenge to pick up, and so a series of drawings began.  I’m still working on the series.  I don’t think they are ever going to become more than a series of drawings; I’m not expecting to take them into a series of paintings.  But they are starting to become something of a ‘complete set’ in my view.

In many ways they are fairly detached from the paintings I make.  Although they do share a certain geometric quality.  The architecture of the buildings l work in have plenty of interesting angles and lines.  Maybe that’s what kept me interested while I have been drawing.

A full display of the series, online, and quite possibly within the school is likely to follow quite soon, but while I’m finishing things off, let me put this first on of the series out there as a taster

Vermeer and me

The biggest exhibition of Johannes Vermeer’s paintings ever opens this week at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  Twenty-eight pieces are being brought in from all over the world to present the most complete retrospective of the Dutchman’s work ever.  Like many others, I already have my tickets to visit the Rijksmuseum in early March.

For me though, this is more than just a chance to submerge myself in the quiet, stillness of the artist’s views of seventeenth century domesticity.  It is a chance to revisit the art that I was making when I first moved to the Netherlands.  At the time, Vermeer’s work was hugely important to me, and I was engaged with a visual and conceptual exploration of these icons of art history.

I was exploring the nature of the art object, the painting as it is found in the museum, the role of the reproduction of images in our experience of art and indeed the place that the re-presentation of art has in Vermeer’s work itself.

I made paintings, drawings, collages, constructions and even installation work.  It was, for me, a rich vein of work that seems on reflection a strangely perfectly fitting body of work for my own arrival in the country.

So, in the light of all the fanfare around the Rijksmuseum exhibition, my own modest online Vermeer display.  A small collection here.  A more extensive collection on my other site that can be found here: Vermeer series

Vermeer series

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? – The graphic novel, language and creativity combined

I have to mark a lot of reports.  I teach a unique Dutch cultural subject which translates as Cultural and Artistic education. It potentially touches on all sorts of cultural themes, visual art, architecture, film, theatre, fashion, photography, street art and design in all its forms.  A large part of the subject is giving the pupils (aged 15-16] a kind of cultural orientation.  As teachers we provide the class with cultural input, experiences and excursions and the pupils reflect on what they have seen or done.

It’s a subject that I love teaching alongside my more practical orientated art lessons.  However, with quite large classes, and multiple groups to teach, the reflection part does often mean that a significant number of reports are written and in turn, must be read and marked.

Recently I watched movies in class with three different groups, around seventy pupils in total and the plan was for them each to produce a 1000-word report.  I decided to offer an alternative, partly because pupils generally like have a choice, partly because I know I have creative spirits in all my classes who love to draw when they can, and yes, partly for myself to break the boredom of having to read so many reports.  The new approach was to make a more concise report (and in terms of text much shorter) in the form of a two A4 page graphic novel inspired design.

I gave those who chose this more creative route an extended deadline that stretched over the Christmas holiday, hoping that they would respond well to a less rushed time frame.  Did it work as I would have liked?  Yes absolutely, both in terms of content and design.  And oh, so more enjoyable to grade and give feedback on.

Educational aims

The purpose of the assignment is to require the pupils to think carefully about the film we watched and to reflect on how the skills and approaches used by the film makers have been applied.  Ultimately, they are required to explain their own opinions of the film involved, its strengths and its weaknesses.  Having looked through the resulting pieces of work I think I would say that by having to think about which images from the film to recreate the pupils have taken an extra reflective step before beginning on the creative work.

A second, and for me significant extra aim, is for the pupils to combine the use of language with image making and creativity.  My lessons are taught in English, which for these Dutch pupils, is their second language.  The graphic novel form forces a lean and to the point use of language in the text. This is certainly a skill worth learning alongside considering how image and text can be integrated and support one another.

I’ll certainly be using this graphic novel inspired work form again.  I find myself wondering if it could be applied in other areas, a book review perhaps?  Or could it go further?  A diary of a school exchange to another country as a graphic novel, a report on a biology dissection lesson as one?

Anni and Josef Albers – Kunstmuseum The Hague

When you visit a show that features Josef Albers you can feel fairly sure that the twenty year long Hommage to the square is going to feature. But the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague that is nearing its end now, offers a whole lot more.  Yes there is the room that features fifteen variations of the long running series, including a mesmerizing and large yellow composition. 

But Mr Albers is very much only half the story. There is Mrs Albers too. Anni, 11 years the junior of her husband is every bit as important in the display. Her textiles, graphics and drawings are every bit as eye-catching with their rhythmic repetitions and wandering lines that remind me of so many artists that were still to make there artistic mark in the second half of the twentieth century.

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The work of both artists has a modest scale, you are drawn in to stand close and look carefully. A scale that is not dissimilar to my own paintings and drawings. I wondered beforehand if I would discover anything during my visit that may find its way into my own studio, and yes, I think I have. I’ve been folding landscape spaces in recent paintings and drawings, maybe there is something I will be able to do with Josef Albers Steps from 1935.

Steps, Josef Albers, 1935

A Chess set and a social experiment

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post entitled Collaboration, social flow and a search for a school vision.  It was prompted by an afternoon of brainstorming by the teaching staff about the sort of school of the future that we wanted to achieve in the forthcoming years. At the table I sat at, with a group of five of us we found ourselves focussing rather on the social aspects of education.  Exam results are important, but the feeling we had was that a well-functioning social environment is also extremely important.  The sense of well-being, at all levels, of an educational institution also has a significant role to play in a healthy learning environment.

My own personal feeling is that the general levels of social engagement should be given more priority and we should be considering ways of facilitating interaction and in the long-term improving a feeling of wellbeing between pupils and pupils, staff and pupils and indeed also amongst the staff.

I left the discussion afternoon with the feeling that I wanted to do something.  I reflected back on my own secondary school days and remembered with fondness the inter-year football league that was played during the lunch breaks and featured a couple of teams made up of the teaching staff.  It did, back then, undoubtedly bring the school together. 

I’d been sitting on an idea, not unrelated to this, for a while.  A modest step that I could perhaps individually realize.  I decided I was going to make a large-scale chess board and accompanying pieces and then just one day leave them standing in the hall at school, take a step back and see what happened.

Two weeks later after many before and after school drawing, sawing and painting sessions I was finished, plywood pieces on a 120×120 cm board.  I carried it down to the hall after the lunchbreak.  A few groups of pupils were sitting around, taking it easy during a free lesson.  I set it up, took a photo for myself and withdrew to the balcony around the hall to look down on my handy work.  I really wasn’t sure, were the pupils at the school really waiting for a giant chess set?  Would they play?  Would there respect the pieces and leave them where they are meant to be?  Would it just become an ornament that nobody touched?  I had no idea.

I needn’t have worried, literally within two minutes the first game started. The early signs were good!

Since then, we’re a week further on, the board has been in virtually constant use, from early in the morning until the very end of the day. Serious players, beginners and everything in between, often with large groups watching and discussing the action.  It has been such a pleasure to watch.

Often it really hasn’t been the groups of pupils that I’d expected to see.  The problem cases, required to stay behind at the end of the school day have been playing, the youngest in the school, the oldest and yes, the staff too.  I really seems to be working the way I hoped, its fabulous to see, dare I hope that it will continue?  The signs are good, but I’m realistic enough to know that we will have to wait and see!

I find myself pondering what to do next. I have a number of possibilities, but perhaps first up is a sister board for the chess set, but this time the popular Dutch game dammen, comparable to draughts, but played on a larger board and a few small differences in rules. An extra job for after the Christmas holidays!

Contrasts in art – Labour of Love, By Wim Delvoye

Contrast is important in art.  An intense black and white drawing by Seurat, rice colour contrasts in a Van Gogh painting or a lonely or an isolated Anthony Gormley figure in the vastness of the Thames and London skyline.  But I have rarely visited an exhibition where contrasts of content have collided with such directness as the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye that is currently at the Noordbrabantsmuseum in ‘s Hertogenbosch. 

There are sparkling laser-cut steel used to rebuild Gothic cathedral architecture into the form of cement mixers and dumper trucks. Heraldic crests are displayed on ironing boards and gas cylinders decorated to make them look like they are constructed from Delftsblauw ceramics, and that is just in the first room of the exhibition. 

Throughout the show the work displayed is playful, at times mischievous but always immaculately made.  The collisions of content that Delvoye manipulates are carefully considered and combined visually is a way that captures the attention, draws you in to look closer and in doing so encourage you to give the work the time it deserves.  The intricately carved forms cut into heavy duty tires, tattooed and flayed pigs’ skin or the bent, reformed and twisted crucifixion sculptures, there is a great deal to see and think about. 

While I’m not sure that Delvoye’s work will find its way directly into my own creative practice, but I have previously used a little of his work in my lessons and I can certainly see myself extending that.  A series of lessons I give on surrealism and surreal combinations of two objects really seems to be crying out for his input and influence! 

Are these the best paintings I’ve ever made?

Yes, I’ve thought that before.  In fact, almost always the most recent work feels like it’s the best.  You are most in tune with the newest creative processes and the ideas attached to them.  But having said all that, these recent pieces to feel like particularly good ones.

I seem to be finding potential of the ideas and approaches that started to take an initial form back in January.  They paintings are slow and labour intensive to make, but the results are good.  Bringing together visually interesting compositions, with landscape, seascape, weather, and the disrupted effect we are having on our environment.

The result……elements of beauty and elements of fragmentation.