Garageland, The Nature Issue

The new Garageland is now out and I have spent the last week touring all of the London galleries and art bookshops delivering magazines. The theme this time around is Nature and in particular man's relationship with the natural world.

So if you have any interest in nature and the most exciting new art and art practitioners I advise you to get down to one of our many stockists (not all in London) or buy a copy online. We also do a really great subscription deal - 3 issues for £10 and if you subscribe before the end of November 2006 you might just win a copy of insanely kitsch Alfred Hitchcock, The Master of Suspense by Kees Moerbeek.

Oriole

A new show has just opened at Transition - it is the second in the Supernature series and is Annabel Dover's Oriole: The Birds of the British Isles. The show features a papier mache tree full of cute plaster birds. The birds have a distinctive folk art look to them, they could almost be part of some elaborate rural ritual. Annabel is particularly interested in the folklore which grows up around the birds and has made a series of vivd ink drawings which highlight various bird myths. The whole thing is accompanied by the plaintive song of the nightingale (the nightingale sings to attract a mate, the better the song the better the mate). The Oriole in the shows title is an amazing looking golden coloured bird that stops off in East Anglia enroute from America. Apprently one of the ultimate audio experiences is to hear the Oriole singing at the same time as the Nightingale, this is something which happens very rarely because the Oriole generally arrives when the nightingale has finished its courting.

Vacuous Vyner

In this week's Time Out Sarah Kent reviews Vyner Street. Almost inevitably the review annoyed me, it is so easy for her to bluster over the whole of the London contemporary art scene call it vacuous and compare it to the eighties before the stock market crash. This is not the art scene I recognise where we struggle to afford to put on shows by really interesting artists. All those spaces should be applauded I thought. And then this afternoon I had to go to Vyner Street for the first time for ages and I think she is just about right. Although there are good individual pieces of work, overall the street has a really nasty air, a kind of how dare you come into this gallery, who do you think you are attitude about it.

So my advice this weekend is to have a quick look at Vyner Street but then come over to the spaces where the real excitement is. At Transition it is the last week of Laura White's fabulous 'Into the Cold Light', a magical installation of discarded electrical goods and phosphorescent sea creatures, whilst upstairs from us is MOT which has a really interesting sounding Casper David Friedrich show on, oh and then there is Cell + Flaca and it looks like there is something going on in Ada Street and so many others.

Publish and be Damned

Transition Editions took part in Publish and be Damned in Shoreditch yesterday. It was the third time for me and there seemed to be more participants than ever. All the ususal suspects were there Tangent, Sarah Doyle, Rachel Cattle, The High Horse, Interlude and Pin Up. The archive will now be at Canal on Vyner for the next few weeks.

The Guardian

I was in the Guardian on Monday, I wasn't going to tell anyone as it was tucked away in the office hours section and its a bit rubbish but what the hell.

Before that I spent a fab birthday weekend at the gorgeous Gravetye Manor pretending I was an aristocrat and then a Sunday morning carbooting at Greatstone.

Also have just had this Saatchi associated blog pointed out to me - I think that Cedar is trying to do a Russell Herron type thing but without the wit. A teeny mention for Rosy Wilde and Vignettes on this entry check out Saturday.

Russell Herron Was There

I urge everyone to check out Russell Herron's blog which documents artworld happenings and openings. It is amazing that he manages to get to so many things I am in absolute awe. I am particulary drawing attention to it now because of course my show - Vignettes has just opened and Russell has done a fab write up

Little Mary

Rosy Wilde

Vignettes opened at Rosy Wilde on Tuesday. It was a really great private view, lots of people and Stella organised trays of gorgeous Patisserie Valerie canopes which gave the whole occasion a touch of class. I'm really pleased with the way the show looks and if anyone hasn't seen it or the space it is on until 29th July, Thursday, Friday and Saturday 12-6pm. Rosy Wilde is at 79 Wardour Street (above the Anne Summers shop - entrance in Tisbury Court), London W1

Vignettes
Cathy Lomax

Sad stories of beauty, exploitation and prestige



Rosy Wilde 79 Wardour Street, Soho, London


4th -29th July Thurs, Fri & Sat 12-6pm
Private View Tuesday 4th July 6-8pm


"The women that I always wanted to look like. Sweet little Mary Bell, forever faded in inky newsprint and reproduced again and again. Marina Duchess of Kent, mid century Beatonesque icon, now slipping out of relevance. The Royal Sisterhood, bound by duty. Impossibly beautiful ballerinas

My vignettes are groups of characters fading in and out of history, in and out of my consciousness. These little snippets are brief scenes from a bigger picture, tiny clues that when pieced together make a story. The women inside the paintings are freed from association and regrouped. They cluster together, receding or rising from the frame.

The romance of popular culture is a powerful thing."

Goodbye to the Old, Hello to the New

The recycled weeds have been packed away and the Paperworld show is over. But hey ho life goes on and this week we are installing Things We Lost in the Fire, a beautiful looking show curated by Gordon Dalton. The show opens on Friday evening so why not watch Germany v Argentina and then come along to Transition.

This image is of one of Merlin James's strangely atmospheric paintings

Vignettes

I have a show opening on 4th July at the new Rosy Wilde which is above the Ann Summers shop in Wardour Street. The show is called Vignettes and features a series of paintings which contain either groups of disperate characters or bits of people slipping out of frame.

This painting - Peeress - features the moment from the 1930s coronation where the Peeresses all raise their coronets.

Thumbs Down for an
There is a review for the last show at Transition - Baroque My World in the new June issue of an magazine. Following on from the reviews in Metro and BBC Collective it isn't exactly good but as they say all press is good! So I will refrain from any anti-an talk because it just isn't worth it and just say thank you for the mention. Incidently one of the artists that comes off well is the fab Petros Chrisostomou whose Bigwig illustrates both the an piece and this post.

What would really cheer me up now is for someone, somewhere to come and review our current show - Paperworld which is going down very well with the everyday gallery goers and really deserves a bit of attention.

Paperworld

Paperworld opened at Transition this weekend and the initial feedback is really good. On Saturday a coach party of Serpentine Gallery patrons decended upon us and although I wasn't there the very capable Sarah Doyle gave them a little talk about the show.

Sarah has been fantastic in the run up to the show and as well as designing the flyer at a moments notice made a window display and a huge Paperworld sign for the back of the 'faux shop'. The most impressive thing however was that she had no fear when I needed to assemble an IKEA cabinet and showed me how to do the whole thing (the trick is to look really carefully at what the men with closed eyes are doing in the instruction drawings)

One of the big hits of the show is Leo Fitzmaurice (Julia Peyton Jones underlined his name on the press release she took away with her) with his modernist town plans, cigarette packet football shirts and rolled holiday brochures. You can read more about him in his profile in the current Garageland magazine.

As well as artworks the show also includes a curated selection of artist made publications including many from the artists participating in the show. I will describe them more in a future post.

The picture above shows the end of the private view and includes Russell Herron, Karen D'Amico and Arabella Lee

Garageland Baroque

The new issue of Garageland has arrived. It's even here in time for its own launch which will be at Transition Gallery this Sunday between 4 and 7pm (7 May) . It looks fab even if I do say so myself and is themed around the Baroque. There are numerous highlights including a fantastically crazy painting of Chantelle by Stella Vine and a short story by Paul Gorman whose new book 'The Look: Adventures in Pop and Rock Fashion' is launched this week.

You can even buy a copy online

Good and Bad

The last few weeks have not been good (mainly because my laptop got stolen and of course hardly anything was backed up) but despite lots of little disasters there have been good things happening. Transition is now settled in to its new home in Regents Studios E8 and our first show here has been great. The private view was massively busy and there has been lots of press - I have put links in at the bottom of the Baroque My World home page. You can read the entertaining account of this private view and many others on Russell Herron's blog

Lots Of Art in Chicago

If anyone reading this lives in Chicago they must immediately go along to Art Chicago www.artchicago.com (it is on until tomorrow) because Rosy Wilde are there and there is some fab stuff on show.

Also in Chicago are The Clapham Art Gallery who are at the NOVA Art Fair at the City Suites Hotel, 933. West Belmont, Chicago. They have a good selection of artists on show including some of my Alleyoops series.

Becks Futures at The ICA

Very good this year. I like loads of it but my absolute (surprise) favourite is Seb Patane. His was the first work I saw as entered the lower gallery. It consists of a large monitor on the floor, a set of proper, big speakers, a large drawing of a mountain (which has some kind of occult connection – one of the themes of the moment) and one of his Victorian photos with ink blot type drawing obscuring part of it. The video and the soundtrack are the big hits for me. The video shows two men wearing old fashioned, Tyrolean mountain climbing gear against a white background. One of them is leaning on the other and neither of their faces is visible. Although it is ostensively a series of still images they occasionally wobble and sway with the physical effort of leaning and supporting. There is an impression of painful endurance about their performance. To accompany this there is a loud soundtrack of what I would ignorantly describe as mindless dance music but which I have since been told (thank you Russell) was Hardcore. For some reason this whole thing is ridiculously moving.

I also liked Daniel Sinsel a lot, his delicacy and precision is really gorgeous and I love the idea of painting on an eggshell.

So in agreement with all the other reviews I’ve read Beck’s Futures knocks the Tate Triennial into a cocked hat.

Oh and Seb has a solo show at Bureau in Salford until April 29th

Openings and Closings

Since my last post lots has happened:

- I have been on a very short holiday to the Scilly Isles where it mostly rained.

- Godwottery has finished and Transition in Lauriston Road has pulled down its shutter for the last time. Everybody who has told me that they really loved the space and its such a shame that we are moving should have 1: told me this while we were open, 2: try sitting in a freezing cold garage for 5 hours in sub zero temperatures with no punters, 3: open their own gallery.

- Stella Vine is well on the way towards opening the fab Rosy Wilde mark 2 in Soho. She is brimming over with exciting new ways of doing the gallery thing. It is fantastically refreshing and a real antidote to all that art world subfusc intellect, shark like commercial dealing and basically nasty backstabbing. Check out its progress at her always entertaining blog.

- Very excitingly me and Stella are going to be doing a show together in September called Sweet Love and Romance at a venue yet to be confirmed. Watch this space for more details.

- I have a solo show opening at LANGE GASSE 28 artist studio in Augsburg Germany on 7th April. It is called Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary and features a series of obsessive, repeated paintings of Mary Bell.

- I went to a very exciting party for the launch of GQ Style with Stella. We had a great journey to the Bond Street venue, winding our way through an Absolute Beginners esque soho and stopping off to check out the new Rosy Wilde. The highlight at the party was the appearance of Chantelle and Preston accompanied by legions of bulb flashing paps. They looked really cute and like they were really loving it.

- Everything is coming along nicely at the new Transition venue and hopefully it should all be ready for the opening of Baroque My World on friday night (7th April 6-9pm in case you wanna come along).

Andrew Mania

Went to see Andrew Mania's show at the weekend at Vilma Gold - it is fantastic, my absolute favourite thing of the moment. Mania's show at the Chisenhale was great but I think that this one is even better. The show is billed as a collaboration between Andrew Mania and Carl Van Vechten but is really more Mania's homage to Van Vechten who is an American photographer who died in 1964. Van Vechten's photographs have that slightly campy, aesthete, early 2oth Century look and interestingly all of the works in the show are from Mania's own collection.

So to the show... The gallery is dark and Mania has placed the photographs in little shrine like groups, some propped up on shelves, surrounded by bits of his own work and other found objects. The light that there is in the gallery is supplied by different coloured light bulbs, which are clipped on to various gallery objects. The whole show has a faded, nostalgic, decadence to it, when you leave the gallery you are left with a real sense of something that is hard to put into words, something akin to a romantic mood or a seductive smell that lingers in your nostrils.

Vilma Gold don't really give a whole lot away about the show on their site so I'm afraid that the image I've pasted in doesn't really describe the experience at all.

I first came across Andrew Mania when Annabel Dover wrote about him and how she wanted to marry him in the Our Idols issue of Arty and then again in Arty Greatest Hits, Lady Lucy named him as one of her great Bristolians.

Godwottery

I'm invigilating today and tomorrow at Transition where we are showing the zany, Godwottery a show by Jacob Cartwight and Nick Jordan. The show is made up of a series of small pieces which are like bits of a jigsaw which don't quite fit together. My favourite pieces are Minotaur - a speaker from an old gramophone fixed on to a miking stool which croaks like a bullfrog, Edgar - a creepy black and white film about a magpie and a crane which references hanging and gallows and The Last Dream of Francois Mitterand - a triptych of paintings by Jacob Cartwright which is jam packed full of references, including stories about the little bird that appears in painting c. Jacob has sent us a whole ream of stuff about it and I am pasting in a bit below -

"When François Mitterand, the former president of France, realized that he would soon die of prostate cancer, he engaged in a stupendous act of abligurition; that is, he squandered a small fortune on a lavish and bizarre meal for himself and thirty friends. The meal included oysters, foie gras, and caviar, but the piece-de-resistance was roast ortolan, a tiny songbird that is actually illegal to consume in France. Traditionally, the two-ounce warbler is eaten whole, bones and all, while the diner leans forward over the table with a large napkin draped over his head. The napkin, according to food lore, serves two functions: it traps and concentrates the aroma of the petite dish, and it conceals the shameful exorbitance of the meal — the abliguration — from the eyes of God. In origin, the word abliguration derives from the Latin preposition ab, meaning "away," and the verb ligurire, meaning "to eat delicately." Even further back, ligurire evolved from lingere, meaning "to lick," which is also connected to cunnilingus and linguine. As for the ortolan, the tasty object of Mitterand's abliguration, its name means "gardener" in Provençal, and it derives from the Latin hortus, meaning "garden." "

There is more about Jacob and Nick in the current issue of Garageland magazine which is available at Transition, and all good bookshops!

Tate Triennial



I have been to see the Tate Triennial today and it has made me very depressed. I saw the review of it on Newsnight Review on Friday night and Mark Kemode and Ekow Eshun remarked that it was impenetrable and it surely is that.

It is curated by someone outside the British art scene and although the overall theme of appropriating and reusing material is fine, the artists that she has chosen are bizarre. I have never heard of loads of them and what Cosey Fanni Tutti has to do with the current art scene I really am not sure... blah blah blah.

As far as I'm concerned London is the most exciting art producing place in the world at the moment, there is a whole new movement afoot that combines making and thinking. So why the Tate has chosen an outside curator I'm not sure and maybe because of this the show is all about that old style thinking art, that same boring old conceptual "I don't need to make any work myself its all about the ideas" stuff (yes I know there are painters in it but they are mostly so tight, there is none of that 2006 exuberance). How much more exciting would it have been to see the inclusion of artists such as Zoe Mendelson, Stella Vine, Sigrid Holmwood, Andrew Bracey etc etc.

The image I have included is from pretty much my favourite piece in the show and is by Jonathon Monk. However when you read the show notes everything is ruined when you find out that "Monk has pinned a different coloured drawing pin to the ear of each woman depicted in these anonymous portrait drawings from the 1930s, found in a flea market in Berlin. Through this simple act he attaches the work to the wall and claims another artist's work as his own, questioning notions of authenticity and authorship." - I only have one word for this - Lame - this has been said and done before so many times. He should just make some beautiful drawings himself or display these and make apparent their origins. The drawing pin authorship debate is nonsense and cliched.

I may well write a proper review for the new issue of The Critical Friend. So look out for that at The ICA etc, soon.

DARK ARTY

Finally after what seems like months the new Arty has arrived back from the printers. It is very different from before because it is now A4, it is printed rather than photocopied, it has an extra colour and it is what I am calling more 'practice based'. By this I mean that each issue will have fewer contributers but that they will each have more space to develop their themes. Contributors will be chosen because their work in some way adds to or clashes with the chosen theme of the issue.

It is good for Arty to have a change and now that Transition Editions publishes Garageland which contains some of the forthright and opinionated writing that was the old Arty it gives new Arty a chance to develop a different identity. I am also trying to link Arty a lot more to my own interests and painting practice. Putting it together is such a personal, labour intensive thing that it makes sense for it to join up with my other work. So fear not it still has that undesigned haphazard look about it!

Anyway it looks pretty good and I am quite pleased with it but printing rather than photocopying raises all sorts of different problems (not the least of which is the cost!)

So... please get out there and buy a copy. It is already in Transition and will be at other stockists over the weekend (some maybe not until next week)

Contributors for this dark issue are Rachel Cattle, Annabel Dover, Sian Emmison, Alex Michon and me

Garageland Magazine

Transition has a new magazine - the fantastic Garageland. It is available at all the usual places and a few more.

The magazine takes themes that arise from shows at Transition and expands on them to create a reference book about the chosen subject. The current issue no.1 is all about Machismo. Issue 2 (due out in May) is Baroque and issue 3 is Nature.

My contribution to issue 1 is a series of paintings and texts about skinhead girls.
So Macho

I know, I know I haven't written anything for ages and I have slagged off blogging, but I felt like revisiting at least one more time so here I am.

While I am here I guess I may as well mention the new show at Transition which just happens to be myself and Alex Michon and is called The English Museum. It is on until 11 September and will be featured (hopefully) in a forthcoming edition of Time Out and The Independent.

Arty Greatest Hits - Still Going Strong

There is a nice review of Arty Greatest Hits on the April 13th entry on the Art in Liverpool weblog written by Ian Jackson.

So here is a drawing from The fore mentioned publication by Jamie Clements and if you haven't bought a copy yet (why not?) you can find a list of stockists or buy online at the Arty site.

I'll be Your Mirror

The latest show at Transition is I'll be Your Mirror by Emma Talbot. It features a group of paintings inspired by the magazine collection at The Women's Library in Whitechapel, London. Emma has also made an animation inspired by graphic love stories which takes the form of a little book with the drawings floating across the pages and dissapearing down the spine.

The image below is one of the paintings in the show which seems to be a favourite with a lot of the audience and is called Leathers.

The show is on until May 1, you can read more on the Transition website. Also don't miss the fab publication that goes with the show with Martin Coomer interviewing Emma and an essay by Rebecca Loncraine.

San Sebastian

I went to San Sebastian last week to talk at a seminar called 'Mutations in Feminism'. Everyone was very nice and I got shown around the town - here is a snap showing pollarded trees and the 'Belle Epoque' roundabout.

New Show at Transition Shock

Soul Mining opened last night with two fantastic performances. The first was a short experimental set from Sharon Gal this was followed by a storming set from Esther Planas's Dirty Snow which included a noir version of The Beatles Day in the Life. The show itself includes the work of three artists, Ruth Calland and the already mentioned Planas and Gal. All the work is very different but hangs together really well, there is a curious tension between it all which fits very well with the show's psychoanalytical theme.
The image below is of Sharon Gal's opening night performance in front of Esther Planas's Happiness is a Warm Gun installation and was taken by Transition regular Marc Vaulbert.

Continuum

I have just written a beautiful, pithy piece about Conrad Shawcross's Continuum, the fantastic Queen's House and the crap National Maritime Museun Greenwich and somehow it has dissapeared into the ether. I am very upset and I may give up blogging altogether.

I will just give you a summary as I can't possibly write it again. The Continuum is brilliant and is perfectly site specific. The museum is bland and has no character. Too may visitors is bad, interactive is bad, engagement is good. the Continuum has now finished.

Tate Tales

Finally the Tate Modern have said yes to stocking ARTY GREATEST HITS. So on Wednesday I wheeled 20 copies in my trolley over The Millenium Bridge. If you don't have a copy yet shame on you, there is no excuse as it is available by mail order or from numerous stockists. Also look out for the review in the March issue of AN.

So Anyway, while I was there I had a look at the show Pin-Up - Contemporary Collage and Drawing. The show is in the space previously occupied by the small shop at the river entrance to the gallery and feels a little cut off from the main space as you can't now get in by that entrance. Really this is no bad thing as it makes it seem like an independent gallery seperate from the great institution. A factor I suppose in staging this show which is the first in the series Untitled - Exploring New Ideas in Contemporary Art, which are dedicated to showcasing recent or new work by international artists not widely exhibited in the UK.

Pin-Up includes the work of a couple of artists who have shown at Kate McGarry - Dr Lakra and Matt Bryans. Dr Lakra has also had work at the Saatchi Gallery, so that seems fairly well exposed to me, but maybe I am being pedantic and Dr Lakra is actually my favourite in the show. He is apparently a Mexican Tatooist and his work consists of vintage magazine covers with added tatoos. They are really clever and I would look great on my wall at home. Matt Bryans is also very clever, he rubs out newspaper pictures leaving only the eyes and then puts all these scraps together to make a huge blob of discolured paper and staring eyes. It looks a little like a dark wood with creatures staring out at you - very sinister. The other stuff was less interesting but the concept is good and it is about time some contemporary art got into the Tate.

Doll

Doll
Originally uploaded by CathyL.

Now that we are through the Christmas treacle, thoughts inevitably turn to spring and the unknown treasures that the new year will bring.

Blog Off

God, blogging is sooo bourgeois. I have been reading through a selection of blogs, linking from one to another. It is all just a load of middle class twittery, smart alec, self congratulatory stuff. Why don't you all just stop it and stick to your day jobs.

Independent Art Publishing

Yesterday I went to a symposium at Tate Modern about Independent Art Publishing. It was actually quite good especially the fantastic Michael Bracewell who spoke about the eighties and their importance in fusing mainstream and independent cultures. This was the second time in a few days that I had heard the name Kathy Acker. Bracewell put her forward as someone who has been unjustly forgotten - an eighties embarresment. The day before the artist Esther Planas mentioned her as being the most important influence on her work, especially the book Blood and Guts in High School which she discovered when she first came to London. Esther also pointed out that Tracey Emin's work owes a huge debt to Acker.

Also at the Tate thing were Matthew Higgs (the chair) who showed us a photo of himself at 14 in the same room as Joy Division (very impressive) and the amiable Sina Najafi the editor in chief of the American magazine Cabinet. There is also a Bookworks book called Put about that deals with the same stuff. The cover of the book shows the famous Mark P thing about here's a chord...now start a band. I had always thought that this was in Sniffin' Glue but I can't find it in my Sniffin' Glue book and Put About just credits it to Mark Perry. If anyone has any idea where it was first published I would love to know. I'm particulary intersted because I have quoted it in a piece I've written in the forthcoming Arty: Greatest Hits which will be available soon from Transition and all good shops. The drawing of Twiggy below is from the cover.

Dark Covers

Dark Covers

Playing at the Goth Moth private view was the fantastic Esther Planas with a short set of Dark Covers. These highly individual versions of Beatles songs were sung sitting on a blanket in the corner of the gallery in her very own Nico-esque style.

The show is on until 19th December so check it out.

Goth Moth

Ghost World

Goth Moth has opened at last at Transition and the weeks of preparation have resulted in a kinda creepy domestic gothic. The image shows work by Tobi Deeson (White Dresses - Non Biological), Shane Waltener (Web Doily), Myself (It's Me, I'm Cathy) and Mimei Thompson (Untitled). I think that it's a brilliant show but I suppose I am biased.

The Clash

The Clash

There is a new book out about the Clash by Arty contributor Pat Gilbert
called Fashion is a Passion. Although I haven't read it yet I
have heard bits of it read by Alex Michon (who features heavily in the
book as she made the now iconic clothes that the Clash wore back in the
day). One of these pieces, Joe Strummer's jacket was featured in the
show Sense and Sensibility at Transition.

The Last of E9

The Last of E9

This weekend is the last of E9 at Transition and alongside the work of the artists we have work by children from Lauriston School's Junior Art
Club. They have done a fab job and have made a whole load of different stuff from t-shirts to clay models. There is also an E9 shop where you can buy lotsa E9 stuff. Next Friday (19th November) sees the opening of Goth Moth at the gallery. This is going to be very different from E9 but just as fantastic.

Precinct Deborah

Attack on Precinct Deborah

I have some work in a show on at my studios this weekend. Attack on Precinct Deborah, Deborah House, Retreat Place, London E9. The show is on 30 & 31 October 10-5pm.

This picture is from the private view when the 'Russian folk singer' performed in front of my two paintings of Joe Orton. There were also some people watching but they were less photogenic.

Acting Painting

Art, Art, Art

I went to a whole bunch of shows last weekend in the galleries clustered around the Vyner hub. The main reason I went was to see The Horizon of Expectation at the Empire in Wadeson Street. This show has had some of the most intense publicity ever with emails arriving independently from most of the artists involved. It is basically a show of landscape painting, not I hasten to add the sort of watery landscapes beloved of provincial galleries but cutting edge, Royal Saatchi, landscape paintiing. A lot of the work was very nice - Mimei Thompson, Peter Lamb etc. But I particularly enjoyed Jost Muenster's Campsite and Stripes, they had a nice homemade, humourous left field approach to the subject.

Next on the list was the newly refurbished Vilma Gold which is showing Marc Titchner's 20th Century Man. All very slick and shiny but I just can't ever be bothered to read the text on his pieces so that probably means that I am missing the point.

Further along Vyner Street at Modern Art there were some nice paintings by an American whose name I don't remember and there was no press release to take away so I haven't got any idea who he was. They were of people like Abraham Lincoln and had lots of colourful firework like explosions in the background. They reminded me a little of Alex Gene Morrison's paintings.

Lastly I visited the new (well to me anyway) SSAI Space at 45a Tudor Road. This tiny space (its almost like a cupboard) has a show called Acting Painting whch features a group of small paintings. I really liked Gaston du Pape's cheval paintings (see image above).

enough art for one day

E9

E9
Originally uploaded by CathyL.

Here is one of Tania McCormack's pieces for the E9 show

The Art Zoo Versus E9

So once again its ages since my last post blah blah blah. I think the problem is this new all singing all dancing blogger format. I can't do things that I used to do easily like upload pictures. I am probably being very stupid but thats how it is.

So here in London at the hub of the art world lots of things are happening. This weekend is the number one weekend in the artworld calender (if you are a wanabe corporate/commercial gallery or an unadventurous collector who just likes artfairs rather than real exhibitions) Friday sees the start of the Frieze art fair in Regents Park and Saturday see the start of the Zoo art fair in um Regents Park. The difference is that Zoo is for under 3 year old art organisations (a kind of arbitary figure used so that the Keith Talent Gallery just fits the bill)

Over at the sharp end of the London art scene in the East End, Transition has a new show opening on Friday night - E9. It doesn't contain any 'big' name artists but it is a really fab show about the area that the gallery is in and engages with. This specificity curiously has spawned new work which is beautiful and has a wistful universal appeal. There is also a brilliant publication to accompany it partially funded by The Arts Council and with a new piece of writing by novelist Tony White. You can buy it from the gallery and various local outlets and online at theTransition Website

As soon as I work out how to upload pics I will post some!

I'm Back

Yes just like the Elvis' '68 Comeback Special I am returning from a long Blogging break with a fantastic new entry. My excuses are that I've been on holiday and it's been the summer and well I just haven't gotten around to it.
There is a new show opening tonight at Transition called Hans in Transition. It a self exploritory kind of show by the artist Hans Schriel featuring a series of recent and not so recent paintings that examine issues around gender politics from his very personal viewpoint. One of the paintings has one of my favourite ever art titles - Rabbit Picture on Skis.

Lost Kitten

Its been a very eventful week. On Thursday whilst I was invigilating at Transition someone came in and stole one of Stella Vine's paintings off the wall. I called the police who told me there was little chance of ever finding it and that was that. It seems crazy to me that a piece of art can be stolen and an image of it isn't circulated to specialist painting theft squads around the world, I mean that's what would have happened in the movies. At least The Hackney Gazette, The East London Advertiser and Flash Art have expressed an interest, so you never know.
The stolen painting was 41.5 x 33cm and called Kitten and was of... Kitten, the loveable anarchist from Big Brother. There have of course been numerous conspiracy theories including my favourite which is that Kitten herself got someone to steal it for her.

Stella has issued the following statement about the event:
"I am sad as Kitten was one of my favourite paintings, and also
because it had been promised to a young American couple, who had been
waiting for a painting for some time. I hope that whoever stole it,
stole it because they loved it, and not because of all the hype."

If anyone does see the painting please email or call the gallery

Prozac and Joffe

Prozac and Private Views has been great and you can now buy your own copy of the limited edition signed and numbered catalogue from the Transition web site! You can also still visit the show which is on until 4th July and see among other highlights the Sylvia cooker.

Despite all the extra work involved in putting on this show I have managed to visit some other stuff including Chantal Joffe at The Bloomberg Space. This is a great show. Joffe has painted a series of huge, towering women in her trademark painterly style. Upon entering the space they tower over you, their long architectural legs stretching up and up. Joffe says that it is all about the paint, there is no narrative. I feel that this is disingenuous, if it were so why paint people at all. For me all these women have a story.

Prozac and Private Views

The next show up at Transition is Stella Vine's first solo show - Prozac and Private Views. It is promising to be really special and I have started to put images up on the Transition site. The latest one is called Katie and is of that new feminist icon Katie Price aka Jordan.

Antony Gormley and Morton Bartlett

I wandered into the Antony Gormley show at White Cube the other day because I had a bit of time to kill and was pleasently surprised. Upstairs are some figures made out of little rectangular pieces of metal which are ok but it is the 3d metal scribble that is really nice. The whole space is filled with a twisted piece of metal like a giant doodle which you can enter. The best thing is that it feels really dangerous, the whole thing shudders and vibrates if anyone knocks against it and you constantly have to be aware of what you are doing in case you trip which takes away that art gallery self conscious "I'm looking a art" feeling. It's so nice to be able to touch and engage with a piece of art.

I also wandered into the excellant Bookartbookshop and bought a book about an artist called Morton Bartlett. He spent his whole adult life making perfect half life size children which he made clothes for. He's a kind of Hans Belmer, Henry Darger type. Its a really good book and if you ever see it anywhere I recommend you have a look, it's called Family Found: The Lifetime Obsession of Morton Bartlett by Marion Harris

Heavy Metal Kids

I'm in a show at the James Coleman gallery in September called She's No Angel with a group of other artists including Damian and Delaine Le Bas, Stella Vine and Iris Palmer. We did a group photo for the invite card last week which was really funny, made me feel like I was in a band again! The weird thing is that the name of the show comes from a really obscure song by a really obscure band called The Heavy Metal Kids and they were on Top of the Pops 2 last night singing you've guessed it She's no Angel. The singer of the band was a guy called Gary Holton who went on to act in Auf Wiedersehen Pet before dying of a drugs overdose in the 80s. Another really uninteresting (to you not me) fact is that when I was about sixteen I met Gary Holton in a pub in Guildford (he was in a play at the theatre there) and he was really nice. I've just had a search around on the web and apparently The Heavy Metal Kids are still gigging around today, with a different singer of course. It seems like every band reforms, I think it is a kind of mid life crisis thing where they desperately want to recapture their youth, examples off the top of my head - Stiff Little Fingers, The Pixies etc. etc.

The Libertines

I have a new scarily teenage obsession in my life to fill in the Arsenal less summer months - The Libertines. Pete Doherty is a kind of cross between the self destructiveness of Kurt Kobain and the tunefulness of Beatles era Paul McCartney. Their music is powerful and catchy, think The Jam, The Kinks etc. etc. and best of all they have this real thing about Englishness. Albion, Arcadia, dead war poets and the like mixed up with a smattering of homoerotica. A Potent mix. Their live performances totter on the edge of falling apart and then come back together with all the excitement of that sex and drugs and boys in the band stuff. (I must confess now that I have only seen them live once but it was at The Cafe de Paris and it was brilliant!)
They have a new album due out soon produced by Mick Jones who has said that "a record as good as this only comes along once in a generation". Wow! The downside to all this is that Pete is at the moment holed up in The Priory trying to beat his longstanding on/off drug addiction. You can if you are so inclined follow his progress via his Babyshambles website where he posts rambling acccounts of his state of mind, the minuitae of his treatment and pleas to various fans to come and see him and bring him supplies of stamps! Look out for postings by Heavyhorse.

Transition Update

Wow, its all changed at Blogger. There is all this new profile stuff and they want me to answer weird random questions about spiders and China. Anyway enough of all that, cut to the important stufff. At the moment there is a fab painting show at Transition called Faith . It includes Claire Pestaille's sensationally scary Black Madonna (which needs to be seen in the flesh as it is almost impossible to photograph) and Simon Leahy Clark's fab untitled, bubble gum on linen, abstract.

Next up at the gallery is the long awaited first solo show by Stella Vine - Prozac and Private Views. Things are skipping along nicely preparation wise and I'm putting together a really cute little limited edition catalogue which is hopefully going to be sold by a glamorous 'cigarette girl' at the private view. Read all the latest stuff about the show etc. on Stella's blog .

Painting Rules at The Whitechapel

I saw the new Whitechapel shows Raoul De Keyser and Edge of the Real a couple of weeks ago and was quite dismissive about Raoul. I just thought that his paintings were boring abstracts. This weekend I went back and saw the show again and... I have to admit that I really liked it. It is quiet and reflective and the canvases are refreshingly distressed. The colours are quite beautiful, layered to create chalky backgrounds with semi abstract motifs, quite a few of which are flowers and leaves. I read in the gallery leaflet that he is rated highly by Luc Tuymans and I can really see the connection, that quiet, intense Belgian thing. In the bookshop there is a beautiful book with Tuymans and De Keyser juxtaposed which I would love to own but I couldn't quite justify the high cost. The other show Edge of the Real occupies less than half of the upstairs gallery and is a survey of new British painting. The first time I went I preferred this, the second time I wasn't so sure. The new circular Gary Hume is really horrible and David Rayson's contribution is not the best thing I have seen of his. The highlights are Artlab's intriguing Eight Part Cluster Type, Vicken Parson's quiet, little paintings of corridors and corners (which I think I have seen before at Tate St. Ives) and Michael Raedecker's beautiful stitched painting of a little house with a coloured lighting grid above it (I wonder if this is on its way to The Saatchi Gallery)
I think that overall it is one of The Whitechapel's best shows for a while and of course there is a great cafe and the fab new Artwords bookshop to check out (where you can buy the latest Arty - The books Issue). So well worth a visit


Come On, Play It Again Number 4 - Raoul de Keyser - 2001

Like Beads On An Abacus Designed To Calculate Infinity

Now there are some of you who are probably quite justifiably yawning and thinking what a load of pretentious artistic rubbish is going to follow a title like that. Well I can’t really blame you. Although in its defence this line seems perfectly alright in the context of the book it was taken from, the fantastic The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (which by some strange coincidence I have just finished reading)

In this instance though Like Beads On An Abacus Designed To Calculate Infinity is the title of a show at the achingly trendy Rockwell, 230 Dalston Road, London, E8 until 16 May. The show is curated by Andrew Hunt and contains work by 43 artists some of whom are fairly well known and quite a few who aren't. The theme of the show is unsuprisingly work about or inspired by The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald. The book describes a journey by the author through East Anglia. It is a slow situationist drift of a journey and along the way he is sidetracked by almost everything he sees. It is engaging, moving and illuminating.

The show is also a rambling kind of drift, each artist has contributed a small piece of work that in some way or another they or the curator has decided fits the brief. One piece is by the nineteenth century, Norwich School, water colourist John Sell Cotman. So it is an eclectic affair. Some things I quite liked (a list of which follow along with descriptions from the excellent gallery notes) but no artist seemed able in the allotted space to expand on anything, so it was a stilted affair. Overall it left me with an empty feeling, which added nothing to the book, in fact most pieces were hard to relate to the theme at all. It was not engaging, moving or illuminating.

This kind of show sounds good in a proposal to the Arts Council, but it is lazy and pompous. Please just give me a little more conceptual emotion, a little whimsy, a little romance. I want to be moved.

Work I Liked
1: Elizabeth Wright – Dalston Lane, Amhurst Road, Pembury Road, Pembury Place – Removed –
An architectural model of the junction in Hackney near the gallery where four roads meet. A response to The Rings of Saturn where Sebald talks of a spot into which memory collapses
2:Eleanor Cherry – Projections 1, 2, 3 –
Beautifully crafted sculpture from everyday plastic materials*
3:John Russell – Purple (Guitarist) –
A collage showing Peter Frampton with a giant bird’s head

*these were little pretty flowers made from plastic lolly spoons

E9 Art Alert

Two new ‘galleries’ have opened up in close proximity to me this weekend.

Front is at 174 Victoria Park Road, E9 in an old shop and is showing work by Emma Bennett, Marion Coutts and Anna Lucas. The space is small but atmospheric and although I can’t quite work out the connections between the three artists' work apart from them being women, I quite liked the show and especially Emma Bennett’s quiet paintings. They are called Don’t Look Now and “extend her preoccupation with the language of Cinema and Dutch Still Life”. Paul Murphy (currently showing APU150 at Transition) thought that they looked like the Joy of Sex, which is a fair comment although I didn’t see any beards.

Cassland, is at 5 Cassland Road, E9 and is a house which has temporarily become a gallery space. The show called View From the Sitting Room spreads throughout the house and includes a sound piece in the sauna, a fountain in the living room and a piece called All the Little Dickybirds Come Home to Roost at the top of the stairs! Impressive you may think, however this Deutsch Bank sponsored show didn’t supply any press releases or artist lists to take away, so I can’t name specific pieces or remember any of the names of the artists.*
The show was ok in the way that lots of shows are, although nothing particularly stood out

Anyway its great to see all this art being shown in E9

*I have just been contacted by the show organiser who has told me that there were plenty of press releases upstairs. So this was my mistake, she also told me the full name of the Dicky Birds piece which is how I've been able to include it (I love dicky birds)

Yeh, Arsenal are the new Premiership Champions

So they could have done it a little more stylishly but what the hell they still won the league at White Hart Lane. Lets hope that Thierry Henry also wins player of the year tonight.

You're Stuck, Stuck, Stuck

I’ve really been trying to just let it lie but I can’t any longer, I have to speak out about those pesky Stuckists and their contemptible leader Charles Thomson.

The latest gossip on their site consists of an attack on the East London gallery MOT. Why? Because MOT’s new show Russian Doll has a nice name but dares to include conceptual work. They actually say thet having Martin Creed in a show means that you should hate it and then go on to describe the press release as vomit

It is sad to see that this so-called art movement is based entirely on putting down other artists and types of art. Do they not realise that reactionary is not a smart thing to be? It is almost as if they hate conceptual art because they are not clever enough to understand it. Also why the vendetta against Charles Saatchi, he is one of the few serious collectors of art in Britain.

Grow up Stuckists and maybe, dare I say, concentrate on your own art rather than slagging off other peoples. Is it any surprise that people leave Stuckism in droves and don’t wish to be associated with it? Stuckism is all about being bitter and nothing about fresh exciting new work. On their site they have included a quote from the Feb 2004 issue of Arty, but they've missed out the important bit, let me fill in the missing words "work here is a wonder to behold if you can side step the Stuckist manifesto lecture/conversion attempt"

Painting with an emotional bias (which is basically what the Stuckists are about) is not something that I disagree with but the Stuckists are putting me off it. Charles Thomson should be ashamed of himself, far from promoting painting in the modern world and encouraging young painters he is alienating and if my case is anything to go by making people think twice about painting at all

As long as this terrible attitude continues Stuckists have no place on the contemporary art scene and they will be given the little attention that they deserve.

P.S What happened to Stella Vine’s Honeymoon? Was this desperate attempt at exploitation a step too far for even the Stuckists?