OEHLEN AND KEITH MOON’S MAGIC
I’ve been a fan of The Who since I was 12 or 13 years old, when my best friend at the time came back from his holidays with a copy of Quadrophenia for me as a gift, because I had told him I wanted to be a Mod. I had never heard anything by...
HOPPER IN WRITING / HOPPER POR ESCRITO
Since I’m on the topic of Edward Hopper I can’t resist talking about a book that a friend recommended to me a few months back and make the recommendation extensible to anyone interested in Hopper, hoping maybe that I can continue the chain of contagion of what gave me a much better understanding...
BOY SCOUT ART
I was already familiar with Andy Goldsworthy’s work when a friend handed me a DVD of Rivers and Tides saying that I would truly understand this artist once I’d seen the documentary. She was right. Filmed documentaries about artists are usually boring and misleading, often going to extremes to create myth out of...
THE BLANK GALLERY / LA GALERÍA EN BLANCO
Some months ago while I was in the early stages of Of Canyons and Stars, my art project that’s just gone on show, I wrote about the implications of the blank canvas, and as I worked on the installation of the exhibition a few days ago, shuffling the paintings and sculptures from one...
VANISHING PAINTINGS
In Fellini’s film Roma, after a hilarious succession of autobiographical youth anecdotes, and just as the movie begins to get a bit long-winded as Fellini films do, something breathtaking happens: His film crew is called into a half burrowed metro tunnel because the tunnelling machine has broken into something unexpected, and purely by chance...
BUKOWSKI SAYS JUST DO IT!
When I was a student you had to read Bukowski, so I did. I envied the directness and the ‘I don’t give a shitness’ of his writing but didn’t really relate to it until I came across Ham on Rye, his sort of early years memoirs where teenage angst is illustrated...
OLIVIER MESSIAEN: MY MAN IN THE SAINTE-TRINITÉ
Olivier Messiaen was a devout Catholic who for sixty years played the organ at the Sainte-Trinité Church in Paris and who loved birds and their songs to the point of often referring to himself as an ornithologist rather than a musician. He was also one of the most original and radical...
TRON, LEWITT, GRIDS AND I
I reached my friends house and pressed the doorbell button knowing that it wouldn’t work as it hadn’t since I had known him, though I always insisted on myself pressing it as if renouncing to do so would mean something like accepting an imperfect world. The fourteen year old me entered the dark...
OILY JOY / OLEOSO GOCE
Photo: Simon Zabell _ I haven’t painted seriously with oils for years and a few weeks back, when I mentioned to an artist friend that I was thinking of perhaps going back to oil colours for my next project – which I will be writing about shortly – she said she was no longer using...
ALBERT OEHLEN: PUNK ON CANVAS / PUNK SOBRE LIENZO
Albert Oehlen, Abstract Painting. Image: www.artwelove.com _ I’ve wanted to be an artist since my late teens and haven’t changed my mind since. But before that, like so many teenagers, I wanted to be in a rock band, a punk rock band of some description as that is what we considered to be most radical...
KAPUSCINSKI ON THE BEACH CHAIR / KAPUSCINSKI EN LA SILLA DE PLAYA
Photo: Simon Zabell So there I was late this morning, lying back on the beach chair in the studio, trying to chill from the frustration of not being able to straighten my ideas regarding what I want my blank canvas to turn into, by reading something totally unrelated to art, as I often...
All schools should be art schools.
