Voyeurism and surveillance (New York City) I

Jocelyn Wildenstein (New York),  2008

 Untitled (New York), 2008

Untitled (New York), 2005

Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera

Perivale, London Underground, 2010

Voyeurism, surveillance and the camera was the theme of the 'Exposed' a show at the Tate Modern in 2010. It is a subject that interests me. Over the next following days I will post my own photographs that explore this theme. . They are moments in lives, fragments of stories. They are also invasive as all of the photographs have been taken without the subject's permission. Together they 'explore the uneasy relationship between making and viewing images that deliberately cross over lines of privacy and propiety.'

Northanger Mansion

Carnival of Souls, 1962

There’s a lunatic in the attic
And he’s smiling to himself.
His mind is quite distracted
With dreams of faded wealth.

Below him in the ballroom
The guests in grim embrace,
Shuffle unsteady dance steps
In gowns of rotted lace.
Their threadbare evening slippers
Trail dust on rotting boards.
The music stopped long ago;
The clock is left unwound.
Empty eyes and wordless mouths,
They orbit without a sound.



There’s a lunatic in the attic
And he’s happy to be king
Friends of his imagination
Pay court and laugh and sing.

And all the while his mansion
Is shuttered to the light.
The world within is closed without.
The locks are rusted tight.
A forgotten world, the world forgotten,
Northanger stands neglected.
There’s only dripping water
To mark the slow decline,
And in half –remembered ritual
The guests mark out their time.

There’s a lunatic in the attic
And he’s smiling to himself.
His mind is quite distracted
With dreams of faded wealth.

There’s a madman in the garret.
He agrees with all he says.
He’d love to be your friend
If only you would stay.

John Steed, 2011

Life drawing

Life drawing, 2007, charcoal on paper

Standing nude

Standing nude, 2010, 35cm x 28cm, pencil on paper

Reclining nude

Reclining nude, 2009, 65cm x 59cm, pencil and charcoal on paper

Now Gone Was

Now Gone Was (installation) 2011, 2 minute video with sound

Time travelling

Time machine: one direction, no reverse (I) 2011, chair, books, clocks, dimensions variable

Time machine: one direction, no reverse (II) 2011, chair, magazines, clocks, dimensions variable

Time travelling in both directions 2011, chair, books, magazines, clocks, dimensions variable

Peake's painting

Seated figure, 1939, Oil on board, 107 x 55.8 cm

For many years this painting by the author, poet, illustrator and artist Mervyn Peake hung on my office wall. Now it is on the Your Paintings website created by the Public Catalogue Foundation in partnership with the BBC. The website is part of a project to catalogue and photograph every oil painting in public ownership.

The myth of photographic reality

Cathy, 2010, oil on canvas, 60 x 60cm.

‘Cathy’ is a painting of a photograph. More accurately it is a painting of a cropped printout of a colour-adjusted scan of a faded colour photograph taken around 30 years ago. In this work I set out to explore the myth of photographic truth. Patrick Heron said[i], “The primary purpose of art is that it determines, or dictates, what we see.”

In the linked text I argue that in representing the conventions of the photographic image in a painting, the viewer can see photographic realism as a style, that whilst so dominant that it appears natural, is in fact as artifical and arbitary as any other representational convention.

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[i] BBC documentary ‘Henry Moore: Carving a Reputation’, 1998

London building site

Manipulated inkjet print, 15cm x 10cm

Manipulated inkjet print, 15cm x 10cm

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Hans-Peter Feldmann. Una exposición de arte from Museo Reina Sofía on Vimeo.

I first encountered Hans-Peter Feldmann at the Reina Sofia, Madrid. I found his work exciting, inspiration and absolutely in tune with my aim to create a practice that is

• based on observation of the everyday,
• and is fun, playful and humorous.

  

Manipulated inkjet print

Gloucester Warehouse, 2011, Manipulated inkjet print, 12.2cm x9.6cm

This dilapidated 19^th century warehouse in Gloucester Docks awaits redevelopment. The exaggerated colours are produced by a long night exposure. The inkjet inks are manipulated after printing though a process of wet brushing and heating.

Flick

 2011, Oil on canvas, 100cm x 100cm

Flick is a study of a still from a feature film (La Double Vie de Veronique). At twenty-five frames a second, each image is bracketed by blackness and only fleetingly lingers on our retinas. The fleeting moment is paused and becomes meditative and takes on a narrative that is different from the original narrative of the movie. Influenced by the 2007 Hayward Gallery show (London, UK) 'The Painting of Modern Life' and by the work of Wilhelm Sasnal, Johannes Kahrs and Judith Eisler in particular.

Woman In Red

2009, 30cm x 40cm, Giclee print on German Etching paper.

Taken from an apartment in Montmartre, Paris late on a spring evening. I like the dynamic blurring of the image that has created an abstract expressionist quality to the photograph.

Life study

2010, 59cm x 42cm, charcoal on paper

I'm not trying to imitate a photograph

Cathy, 2010, Oil on canvas, 60cm x 60cm.

Painting of a cropped print-out of a scan of a faded colour photograph. Influenced by Gerhard Richter who said, "I'm not trying to imitate a photograph; I'm trying to make one.

Toxicbaby

2010, Oil on canvas, 98cm x 121.5cm.

I am interested in the images we present to our children through their toys and how this may vary within societies and cultures. This painting is of a plastic doll seen in a street fair in Cuba.

21st Century Pox

2011, Oil on canvas, shopping trolley,  canvas 80cm x100cm, assemblage dimensions variable

The ubiquity of brand logos in our environment today can be seen as a form of epidemic (dictionary definition: ‘affecting or tending to affect a disproportionately large number of individuals within a population, community, or region at the same time’).
The work references Ed Ruscha’s work Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962)  depicting the 20th Century Fox logo.