A busy week in the Academy

This was a hectic week here in Zagreb.  Our tutor, Kisenija Turcic advised us to submit a proposal for our work for an upcoming exhibition, a collaboration between Zagreb Academy of Fine Art and Galerije Klovicevi Dvori in the Upper town.  My proposal is entitled Blackberry-Picking, based on the poetry of Seamus Heaney which is the inspiration of my work  here.  I doubt that I'll be successful but I'm happy to have made the effort.

 Regards sur le Sommeil by Veronique Dalmasso -  23rd  November 2016

On Wednesday evening, I attended a talk given by a visiting French lecturer, Veronique Dalmasso, based on her recently published book, Regards sur le Sommeil, written in collaboration with Stephanie Jamet-Chavigny.

Ms Dalmasso outlined the background to her research on this work, which explores the representation of sleep in Western Art, from the Renaissance period to modern day.  Works of art from distant eras are presented alongside contemporary pieces in diptych format, which provides an interesting juxtaposition of concepts and styles. 'For instance Bellini's Drunkeness of Noah [1515] is printed alongside Francis Alys' Sleepers 11 [1999/01].  Two works with different ambitions on behalf of the artist but when seen together, initiate an interesting conversation.   I was somewhat disappointed to
discover that this lecture was not based on a discussion of the importance and relevance of dreams in art generally but it was, nonetheless, an intriguing topic.

The Use of Stencil in Painting by Dulce Osinski, assisted by Iriana Vezanni -  24th and 25th November 2016.

This was a series of two three hour workshops organised by The Academy of  Fine Art in Zagreb in conjunction with the Fine Art Department of the University of Parana in Brazil  where Dulce is a lecturer in the History of Art.  She began the workshop by discussing the techniques of artists who used stencils in their work - Piet Mondrian, Matisse, Roy Lichenstein, Sigmar Polke and introduced us to her work and that of other Brazilian artists, Paolo Sister, Alex Fleming and Adriana Tagalipa.

We were then asked to create our own stencils
using x-rays provided by Professor Turcic, possibly attained from her personal collection!
I chose to create the word FEAR and it was
a steep learning curve to cut this out without losing the interior of the letters.  It was my response to the recent catastrophic outcome of the US presidential election.  [In my opinion, of course, not everyone would agree!] I also cut out images of stars, a reference to the American flag. We used acrylics, foam rollers and paintbrushes to work with the stencils.  I worked with just three colours, blue, red and white.  I didn't get this work finished but I will return to it later on and will use the stencil and its negative format in future paintings.

For the second workshop on Friday morning, I wanted to explore the theme of presence/absence and drafted a stencil of a hand and coffee cup and circle.  I wanted to curtail my palette but was also interested in creating neutral colours, so the work below evolved.   Orange, pink, dark blue.   It was kind of freaky working with these images of someone's interior body parts and I feel I should explore more of this type of work but using the actual imagery in the x-rays.  This reminds me somewhat of my work with cyanotype a few years ago.  A good session with plenty of food for thought for incorporating these stencils in other work, not just painting but with drawing and illustrations.  It was lovely to work with Dulce and Iriana and their work is really unusual. Back in my studio, I worked on the palette of left over acrylic paint and some interesting imagery evolved from it.

Some done.... a lot to do....!!

Just a sample of some of the work I've been doing in the Academy over the last two months.  Works in oil on canvas, acrylic on paper and canvas, pencil and charcoal.  

Life drawing class - acrylic on paper

Battlefield - Oil on canvas - 175 x 135 cm.  

Life drawing class - Charcoal and watercolour pencil

Between Heaven and Earth -  Acrylic and oil on canvas 50 x 50 cm [unfinished]

Dream - Oil on canvas - 70 x070 cm

Life drawing - Waterolour and charcoal on paper

Life drawing - charcoal on paper

Life drawing - oil pastel on paper

Life drawing - acrylic and charcoal on paper

Life drawing - charcoal on paper

Life drawing - quick sketches - pen on paper

Life drawing - charcoal on paper

Life drawing - charcoal on paper

Life drawing - charcoal on paper

Dorothy Cross in Zagreb 10-11th November 2016 - Part 1 Thursday Lecture.

I had the great privilege to be able to attend a number of talks/meetings with internationally acclaimed Irish artist, Dorothy Cross who visited the city this week.

Dorothy Cross  in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb,

 She gave an illustrated talk in the Museum of Contemporary Art  on Thursday evening with an insight into the inspirations for and processes of her work.  She discussed a number of past projects beginning with Ghost Ship [1999].  This involved the painting of an old lighthouse ship with phosphorous paint and anchoring it off the coast of Dun Laoghaire in Dublin. The eerie image of the ship could be seen best at nighttime from the shore and eventually, the paint faded. I witnessed this work.   Memory and recollection was the theme she explored in this piece and it was a poignant moment when she revealed that her father had photographed this very ship years beforehand in Cork. There it is, synchronicity, but more of that later.

Her work is well documented online so there is no need for me to go into detail about each individual project but what I would like to express in this blog is my reaction to some of the work.  I am familiar with Cross' oeuvre and I am a big fan but some objectivity is also required when discussing certain elements of it. What struck me about this artist is her willingness to share her ideas and sources of inspiration and techniques.  She is honest and straightforward in her delivery with none of the obfuscating  'art speak' that can be a feature of many [though certainly not all] artists lectures. I find her work to have a clarity and accessibility that is refreshing.
Sharks are an ongoing motif in Cross' work and she displayed a number of images of various projects with this much maligned animal. The train of her themes relates to memory, loss and transience and this emerges in particular in the work with this animal.  I am struck with the continuity of theme in her projects and I think of Borges belief in the Stoic theory where everything in the Universe is linked.  Cross' oeuvre reflects this.  Buoy is a particularly poignant piece. A ragged Blue shark skin, the remnant of a once vibrant and potent entity,  has been treated and gilded with pure white gold leaf and is attached to an eighteenth century easel, bought from the Royal Academy in London.  Beneath this, resting on the easel is a  thin slab of transparent Italian alabaster.  I am struck by the contrast here between the frailty and vulnerability of the shark, juxtaposed by the sturdiness of the thick easel and offset by a thin sheet of alabaster.  The image jars the senses on many levels.  As it should, perhaps.  
Shark Heart Submarine also involves the use of the easel on which rests a small man made submarine, painted in white gold in which is contained, in a glass jar, the heart of a shark.  Cross relates the story of the initial plan for this project when she proposed the concept as an installation in Chichester Cathedral some time ago, albeit with a different emphasis on elements.  The original concept was to use a dead human heart and she explained to the selection committee that the work was about the necessary obliteration of this organ, a symbol of love and desire, in order to gain access to the 'other side' through death, using the vehicle of the submarine, a motif that represents adventure.   The proposal was rejected although it was acknowledged that it was theologically sound!  The work was adapted to contain a shark's heart instead.
The connectivity of theme extends then to the showing of an extremely emotive and heart
rending scene filmed during Cross' visit to the New Ireland island in the South Pacific where she investigated the ritual of shark calling.  The natives of this island believe that the shark fishermen, vested with magical powers they believe,  are guided by their ancestors to find the shark through rituals and songs.  She interviewed one old man, Saalem Karasanbay [interviewed thirty years ago by Jaques Cousteau] and what is very sad is that this fisherman is believed to have lost his magical aura possibly because he was filmed.  He sings a song but cries during the rendition.  It is heartbreaking to witness this.  Cross tells us that he sang this song at sea, as a thanksgiving to his ancestors,  whenever he caught a shark.  This was the first, and probably last time he would sing it on land.  He cried as he was aware of the impending loss of this ritual in the future due to 'developments' on the island.
Connemara, an installation that was shown recently in Margate  was a culmination of many sculptural pieces that reflected many of her marine concepts and  and was linked to her working environment and home in Connemara, Galway on the rugged west coast of Ireland.  Themes of vulnerability, religious belief, loss and transience abound in this work.

I walked away from this lecture feeling inspired, refreshed and longing to see the wild, wonderful west coast of Ireland.









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Metaphors and Stranger things!

As part of our project in the Illustration module, we were asked to consider our response to De Chirico's Melancholy and the mystery of the street and to create images which reflected our own thoughts on this work.  This research on art, metaphor is creating more questions than answers, but maybe that's the point!  This blog will eventually lead to discussion of my encounters with mysterious occurrences here in Zagreb,but that's for another blog.  Laters, dudes! [Wouldn't you know I was watching the Big Lebowski last night!]

In researching this work and the life of De Chirico and metaphysics in general, I stumbled across the work of many intriguing and fascinating artists and commentators on this topic.  De Chirico was well versed in the classics and references to ancient Greek and Roman culture is evident in his work.  He studied the writings of many philosophers  - Schopenhauer who, in brief, believed that all truth in itself escapes us, the essence of it is unassailable; Nietzsche whose Doctrine of eternal Recurrence impacted deeply on his work and Weinninger who explored the significance of geometrical shapes and proposed that the arc represents an element of incompletion that needs to be fulfilled.  De Chirico was   influenced by the Symbolists who proposed that ancient symbols should be understood, not as cultural archetypes but as vocabulary of an elementary language of fear, longing, desire. The symbol became their motifs and they rejected mathematical perspective. They interpreted the imagery of folklore and legends as indicators, as such, of the experience of individual's life in an existential manner that reflected feelings of loneliness, yearning and love.  De Chirico developed what became known as Pittura Metafisica or Metaphysical Art movement [the term metaphysical taken from Greek language and meaning, beyond real things] between 1911 and 1920 and this style was a seminal influence on the Surrealists who hailed De Chirico as their muse and hero. [His crown slipped somewhat when he took to recreating copies of his earlier paintings later on in life].  So, as we say as ghaeilge - tarraingionn sceal sceal eile or as bearla, one thing leads to another! 
We were directed to read about Jose Louis Borge whose talk on Metaphors as part of the This Craft of Verse series, was intriguing and it led me further down the road to an interview  Ronald Christ conducted with Borges [www,theparisreview.org] where the author revealed that good metaphors are always the same -  time as a road, life to dreaming and death to sleeping and that they follow a pattern.  He was particularly fond of old Norse and Celtic metaphors where for instance, a battle is described as 'a web of men' and makes a link to George Eliot's metaphor in Middlemarch - where society is a web and one cannot disentangle a thread without touching all the component parts. He believed in the Stoic theory where everything in the universe is linked and he has been influenced in this by Schopenhauer [like De Chirico] and De Quincy. [I suspect there's something to be researched on this] 
Sometimes, in the middle of an article, one idea/thought strikes me as particularly relevant to my own journey.  Borges feels that with writers of fiction, it is not the idea that is so important but the enjoyment or emotion that one evokes in the reader that is paramount.  He stresses that many famous and well known writers are competent, even brilliant in their craft but that they lack the ability or curiosity to enquire about the poetry and mystery of life.    The same can be applied to painting, I think.  Interestingly, he was an admirer of Yeats, Frost and Sandburg.
George Lakoff is another very interesting speaker on metaphor  amongst other topics. His explanation of  the term 'fiscal cliff'  with reference to stock markets clarifies the importance of the use of imagery that can convey the message.  The image of a cliff being a dangerous place with a downward direction is universal.  
[Where Big ideas Fest 2012 Half moon Bay Ca Fora Tv George Lakoff] YouTube link to George Lakoff.

Jane Hirschfield's animation on Metaphors is deliciously simple yet manages to convey the complexity of the importance of a good metaphor which allows us to experience, feel and know the world we live in differently.  
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0edKgL9EgM ]  You Tube link to Jane Hirschfield.

That's it for now on metaphor and ending with the familiar phrase - 

'There's no shortcut to anywhere worth going'.

 Just as well I have my monthly transport pass so!

Zagreb – End of week One.

A hectic week but highly satisfying and much achieved.  After a great start in airBNB apartem Petra in the centre of Zagreb where we were lucky to encounter the lovely and kind hosts, Petra and Pavle,  who gave us information on phone networks and local services, we managed to find an apartment where we hope to live for the next eight months.  Thanks to Ivan for sending me accommodation links which led to us getting this lovely place,   just 20 minutes walk from the Academy – Yipeeee – no commuting!!  Thanks also to Katrin who also gave sound advice on network providers.  So, new home, new phone, new beginning!

We spend this last week just sorting out all of the above whilst familiarising  ourselves with the centre of the city of Zagreb, and what a town!   First impression – a lively,  busy city with a diversity of architectural styles.  So far, I’ve been exploring the northern part of the city  – along the long street, Ilica, it’s commercial heart, and up towards the Upper town,  Gornji Grad and parts of Kaptol.  We have experienced the lovely markets both on Ilicia, in Britanski Trg

and a more craft oriented one the very central area of Trg Bana J. Jelcica.  There is a stunning array of fresh fruit and home produce available in these markets with a pleasantly bewildering array of choice!

Zagreb seems to be a truly socialised city, with cafe bars and restaurants lining almost every street. Our favourite, so far,  is Tkalciceva Ulica  {or, my ref. Social Street] where you can eat and drink for a very reasonable cost and either stroll up and down the street or just   

and enjoy the vista.

A great introduction to what I suspect will be a very interesting and enjoyable year.

Related

Transformation of Image - Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 28th October 2016

I went to the launch of this wonderful exhibition, Transformation of Image,  last week in Zagreb's amazing Museum of Contemporary Art.  This is the culmination of a collaborative venture between nine academies of art throughout the Balkan states where students from all these college exhibit their work.   The hosting of the annual exhibition rotates each year and Zagreb were this year's hosts. Students from the Academy of Art here were responsible for the planning, layout and installation of all the work for the exhibition.  It was an incredible show with work from a wide diversity of disciplines.

 

 The colleges involved were Univerity of Arts, Belgrade; National University of Arts, Bucharest, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul; University of Ljublijana Academy of Fine Arts, Ss Cyril and Methodius University Fine Arts faculty, Skopje; National Academy of Arts, Sofia; Aristotle University Faculty of Fine Arts, Thessalonkia; University of Arts Tirana Faculty of Fine Arts and the University of Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts.

                        

Paintings 

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I'm just getting to grips with this new blog format so having difficulty uploading further images.  To be visited again with more images.

Skica Launch

Skica magazine

 I went to the launch of the college magazine Skica on Thursday, 27th October in a small bar near the Botanic Gardens in Zagreb, not far from Gunduliceva Street.  It was a strange atmosphere outside with dimly lit streets all around this area.  The street lanterns are the traditional gas lit ones  which are ignited every evening by one man who walks approximately over 6 kilometres to manually activate the flames.  The poem, The Love song of J Alfred Prufrock cames to mind....

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,	15
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,	20
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep...

Ivan Barunowsky on the left introduces proceedings

But I digress!  The launch of the college magazine, Skica was held in a small club and was really well attended.  It was a lovely evening with editor Ivan Barunowsky [who was an Erasmus student in Belfast last semester] responsible, with other students on the editorial panel, for organising the launch this evening.  Although I don't understand the language here, it was a very impressive publication.  Well presented and the illustrations and graphics were extremely professional.  Well done to all concerned.  Ivan told me that there will be a number of copies going to Belfast. I have promised him to write an article for next Spring's edition of Skica.  Included in Skica is an article from a number of Erasmus students from Zagreb who studied abroad, including one from Laura Martinovic who studied in UU.  There was so much hard work put into this publication and indeed Ivan was working on it while in Belfast.  Trojan work.

A view of the proceedings with a full house attending the launch.