Kasia Turajczyk » conceptual art

Contemporary Art in the Community #3/n

Kasia — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 22:19:44 +0000

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".

More on Contemporary Art in the Community #3/n

British Art Show 7 in Plymouth, "In the days of the Comet"

Kasia — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:21:13 +0000

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.

It seems to me that art scene at the moment is best to describe as exhausted and recessive. Anyway, what is presented in the modern art centres. The 'average' people don't understand what the modern/ temporary artists do, they don't like the avant-garde of our time, they don't like it, do not appreciate it, they don't see it as art. I don't blame them. I think most of the artists presented in museums are talking to themselves, have an inner dialogue with their empty mind. Most of the 'Art' isn't art any more. Nothing is art and everything is art. And I blame Duchamp for that ))

Fountaine - Duchamp

Devon Open Studios 2011 – third day "Out of the blue".

Kasia — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:20:35 +0000

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.

She loves my weird stuff, like My Brain

A conversation with my cosmos, 2010 from the Series My Brain

and all my collages but also my more representative work. They thought about buying my Tree.

The Decrepit limbs of Mr Elm

At one point we went to my Summer Studio (I only paint there between late Spring and middle Autumn). When he saw my Blueberry Biker he decided to buy it. So my lovely Blueberry Biker has left me. Now I have to paint his next adventure and his beautiful lover.

In the late afternoon I had another visitor, a lovely lady who visited me a year before.

The third day of Devon Open Studios 2011 wasn't so bad after all!

Blueberry Biker on his way to his lover hidden in a golden cage.

The Devon Open Studios 2011 – second day

Kasia — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:54:21 +0000

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.

I have created a new installation in the garden. It is about my insomnia. I got the inspiration from my own problems with sleeping and from a book I received from my 'art fan' in Brussels. If he is reading this post, he will be happy to know that I found the publication about Narcolepsy very educational and interesting.

Here is a photo of the installation:

Insomnia - Narcolepsy - Installation 2011 by Kasia B.T.

I am starting to think about my dream to make it as an artist as something very irrational, utopian and pathetic. Who needs art, who needs my art? If you have finished an art academy and if you don't "make it" within the next three years then you will never make it. The talent, ideas, originality, whatever it is of no importance after that. It is just the significance to being discovered by a very important art dealer and some luck. Then the marketing machine will start to work for you. Otherwise it will not.

Here are a few images of my work in progress:

Landscape in gold and blue

A bird in colours of Devon

The Gravitation of the Clown - painting in progress

We are born alone, we die alone together

Garden Art Wall Installation – CD's – Part II

Kasia — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:12:23 +0000

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.

Here are the images of the final result:

The end result 2 October 2010

Ugly - final reslut

Beautiful final October 2010

The installation in the Garden of Lyalls Cottage

Unused CD

My conclusions:

Brown, yellow-brown and red colours predominate on the "ugly" side.

Emphatic resistance to the colour red. The CD's in red on the side of "Beautiful" are only in combination with other colours.
They are lots of CDs on the Ugly side that I personally like a lot.

And last, but perhaps the most important conclusion:

De gustibus non est disputandum.

"In matters of taste there is no dispute" said the Romans a long time ago and they were right. Any opinion on the topics of taste is futile. Objectively and logically it can be concluded that there is no good or bad taste. You cannot say that someone is wrong or that someone is right only because he or she likes something different than you. What I like you don’t have to. One should not judge others just because they feel differently and/or think differently.
To recapitulate, in general humans are stupid if they surrender themselves to the pressure of public opinion, newspapers, magazines, fashion designers, critics, art critics and so on. The implication is that the media prey on our stupidity. But this is a different discussion and a subject for another long debate!

Thank you very much to all of you who took part in making this installation.

It will now be dismantled and moved to Poland where I will have a solo exhibition later this year. I will post about the Polish results after the close of the exhibition in Poland in December.

Contrariwise – The Hatter of white&black

Kasia — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 21:06:12 +0000

This is one of my weirder paintings. Experimental. White and black. Glue and tea. Really? That's right.

Garden Art Wall Installation – CD's

Kasia — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:00:50 +0000

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.

Here are some photos after a couple of days.

TWO and "As a winter night falls over Devon"

Kasia — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:39:35 +0000

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.

TWO – THE ONE FOR ME

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know the good as the good only because there is the bad.

Therefore creating and not creating arise together;
Dark and light complement each other;
Large and small contrast each other;
Realistic and abstract follow one another;
Colour and structure harmonize each other.

Therefore the artist goes about feeling and seeing not judging
Creating not reproducing
The ten thousand artworks rise and fall without finish,
Making, yet not possessing,
Working, yet not taking credit.
Art is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.

Based on Two from Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tsu

As the winter-night falls over Devon by Kasia Turajczyk

Metropolis and its heart

Kasia — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:07:51 +0000

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.

Our planet, our Earth can exist without us, maybe better than with us. But what about the Metropolis? Metropolis is a human creation. Without homo sapiens there will be no Metropolis. After 100 years, maybe even less than that, the Metropolis will be trash, in ruins, a great source for fantasy art paintings and illustrations.

The Metropolis is such a big thing and the order within it is not constrained during its development to repeat the things that exist in one part in any other part. Even if we reflect that the big cities were made by and for people, some order exists in it without our knowledge. There is also a lot of order in the creation of Metropolis which we humans have put there, like a string in a maze, so that we shall not lose our way. However the living system that is Metropolis has its own order, but the brain is separated from the heart. This amazing, ill and degenerate body, also beautifully ruthless and always sleepless, can’t exist without us humans. Therefore the heart of the Metropolis is us – PEOPLE.

If you see the painting in the flesh you can spot lots of creatures inside the central part of the work, and also lots of small creatures all around the suburbs. We are the heart!

red paintings

"CDeens" from the Series Personalities

Kasia — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:35:11 +0000

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.

I can make 100 absolutely different CDeens (a new word for painted CD’s) and then from the 100 small pieces of CDeens I can create lots of new art works. Vertical, horizontal, round, square – the bases could be very diverse.

Who is who? 48 cm x 12 cm on wooden panel

What do you think about this idea of using old CD’s to create an artwork?