On October 1st, 2011 two friends came to dinner. Ami is a musician and Didge is a studying at Plymouth College of Art.
We asked them to take part in our art-video project Contemporary Art in the Community. Both of them agreed and were happy to do so. It seems both of them are into art in a big way!
Here is our 3rd video in the series:
Contemporary Art in the Community #3/n
Kasia's Studio; The Haldon Hills, Devon, South West England
In which Ami realises that art shouldn't be about "cutting us off from the fabric of our life experience. Art is about coming up underneath our life experience, and lifting us up".
I have a huge hangover after visiting yesterday the BAS7 Plymouth – British Art Show 7 in Plymouth, "In the days of the Comet". Nothing that I saw was actually good or blasphemous or new. It seems that our cultural horizons are shrinking. The exhibited pieces weren't optimistic or pessimistic, they were totally empty without any message. I heard one of the curators saying (in one of the speeches at the University) about the 39 brilliant, excellent artists who represent the best of the British art scene. No comment. What I saw was a collection of mediocrity and copies of the past. I am not angry, I am sad. The only funny thing that I liked it was the huge, orange Micky Mouse. Art? – no, but entertainment – yes.
Yesterday completely out of the blue a German couple visited my studio. They had just followed the yellow signs, not knowing what would be at the end of them. They not only loved my paintings but even bought one. We talked about modern art, especially modern conceptual German art. She lives in Essen and he is from Wuppertal. I absolutely enjoyed my time spent with those two very interesting individuals who really were into modern conceptual art.
Today is the second day of Devon Open Studios 2011. No visitors today. Yesterday a couple with a child visited me. They just saw a sign on the wall and because the child needed to take a leak they stopped and visited me. They were nice people but not really interested in my paintings or in what I am doing or why I am doing it.
The "Beautiful and Ugly" project has now been officially closed. The deadline has been slightly shifted in time. A few people could not visit me during the Devon Open Studios event itself, and asked me not to dismantle the installation but instead to wait until they had a chance to see it.
During the Devon Open Studios I am inviting my visitors to take part in the process of producing an installation. It is an Art Wall Installation in my opinion. It is a large wall board, painted in different colours from black to white and all the nuances of white-grey, grey-grey and black grey. I prepared lots of mini-art works- painted old CD's. They are painted in different colours and they have different surfaces. Some of them smooth, some of them rough. All of them unique. Some of them ugly and some of them very nice. I divided the Art Wall Installation – the board in two parts: the Beautiful one and the Ugly one. We all love judging. We don't like to be judged but we do love to judge other people and other things. We should not do it. It is very bad actually, but we just do it. In the case of my installation I am asking people to make a judgement about a small piece of art work I made. I ask them to make a choice between what they think is beautiful and what they think is ugly, between nice and not nice, between what they like and what they don't like. The reactions are very interesting, some of the visitors don't want to choose an ugly CD. They just refuse to do so. Some of them are saying that such a concept as ugly don't not exist in art. Others I guess don't want to be unpleasant to me, the artist. And me, I am just curious about the taste of people, what they do like and what they do not. What is ugly for them and what is beautiful. I don't know if I will be able to come to an eventual intelligent conclusion at the end of this experiment. But I do know that I am very curious about the final result.
Instead of the usual story about the inspiration for a painting, in this case for "As a winter night falls over Devon" and how it came to life, this time I present a poem. A poem about creation, art and the Tao. I think it fits perfectly together with this painting. "As a winter night falls over Devon" is a collage on board.
My new painting in the Metropolis series is called “Metropolis and its heart”.
Metropolis and its heart, acrylics on canvas; 90cm x 90cm
I have been thinking for a long time about what constitutes the heart of the big city. What could it be? The technology and the evolutionary progress and development in the education of homo sapiens? Or our nature, the fact that we are sociable, a social and collective animal? However this is inconsistent with the reality – people who live in a small village or town are more sociable and less anonymous than those who live in big molochs. Living in a big city makes us 100% nameless, more private and more secret.
From the Personalities series are the two new installations “Who is Who?” and “Broken Curriculum”.
It is really fun to use old CDs, seeds, some recycled materials and combine them with acrylics. The limited space on the old CD’s and the same form all the time forces me to be very creative with the colours and to think in a different way than usual when I am using canvas.
