shaun belcher

Nottingham Open submission successful

These the only three pieces of work this year and they were all submitted.

The selectors took the two drawings..have to work harder on paintings 🙂

The full list of exhibitors here: http://nottinghamcastleopen.com/

Bit of a shock to system this. I knew my artistic output had ‘slowed’ but as I can only find one canvas and two drawings from the whole last year it not slow it slithering to a stop.

Mostly the result of the gradual wind down of the Multimedia course and its attendant crap ( not from students I would like to make clear) and the failure of NTU SAD to recognise anything else I did..and an attempt to bury me in graphic design…

I did not have much time to paint I was too busy trying to save my job until I gave up trying and did something I enjoy instead i.e. creative writing which fabulous…and such a relief at least for a year….I due to return in June 2015..we shall see…

July optimism…back in the studio…

Always happens around now..taught content ends (in this case so did the course) and I manage to get some quality time in the studio.

Slightly different this year as my future isn’t what it used to be. Can’t say more for now as things have started to move in a certain direction.
Meanwhile trying to get some paint on canvas and some writing done in studio.

coloured

Here the first coloured drawing from a couple of weeks back and a new three part 12′ x 4′ canvas.

This connects directly with my mid to late 1980’s work…..especially the Record Sleeve paintings.

https://shaunbelcher.com/painting/

Plus ca change…

Moogee rides again..Lady Bay Art Week

The Moogee show ready for taking to Lady Bay for the weekend. This is my third time in the Lady Bay show. First time was in 2003 just after I had moved here and was a kind of retrospective. Then again in 2005 (I think) when I showed in the Church Hall and revealed the Curse of the Moogee.

Now it is going to be all Moogee in one form or another culminating in the M.A. illustrations for James Elkins.

I have decided to go with an all black and white theme as the room is decorated that way so it kind of makes sense.

The show starts Saturday 12-6pm and Sunday 12-6pm. Look forward to seeing some of you there :-). Woof.

I am showing here in my oldest friend…almost as old as me ..from school Stephe Hitchman’s house : The house overlooking the allotments 11
Mark Green (Drawing workshops) Hannah Hitchman (Illustrations) Shaun Belcher (Illustrations)

Further details here: http://www.ladybayarts.org.uk/festival-2014.html

All works inspired by the great Roger Price

I am the future of painting….in Lady Bay

Silly blog post title of month. it amused me to write that especially as I just wrote that the future of painting is behind us…a smidgen of irony here.

At 55 years old and with a back catalogue of failed projects, dumb moves and shit jobs behind me (before I shipwrecked on to Academia Island) I have decided to once more ride into the valley of death armed with nothing more than a paintbrush and some blank canvases. Why? Why not everything else is shot to bits so might as well tilt at the greatest windmill of all….the painter of modern life.

I spent the day clearing out the cobwebs in my too often deserted studio and discovering that I had actually painted a few canvases in the past few years. Not many because I remain unconvinced that it an honourable occupation or even a perfectable art..see below. If I am like Will Self trapped in a Guston led Gutenbergian brain then so be it. I think paintings matter. I think they can change the world and that’s it really. Sod the consequences….life too short.

So here the sweepings from the last few years soon to be revealed at Lady Bay in my old schoolfriend Stephe’s front room. Not quite the Tate but you got to start somewhere:-)

p.s. not the big ones they aren’t finished…

Perfect and Rae

The last entry in this ‘painting’ blog was October 2012. At that point I had the fragments of a broken multimedia M.A. degree and some paintings and not a lot else. From there on things improved and I have spent the last two years on a ‘research-led’ investigation of drawing that has taken me to London and New York and a set of subsidiary concerns with sequential art and technology that have led to Amsterdam and Paris. I have ‘done’ research quite well but deep down it didn’t really affect my longer term interest in returning to painting. Ironically as I am being pitched at ‘Graphic Design’ I will have to wear the designer mask a little longer but deep down I am a painter always have been always will be.

Will Self wrote an excellent piece in the Guardian last weekend about how he felt the ‘grand design’ of the modernist novel was falling apart and I feel similar concerns for painting. Despite the thrill of seeing the Dan Perfect paintings in the show with Fiona Rae at Nottingham Castle I still feel that we are at the thin end of a wedge of modernist painting not at the start. Like the novel maybe the best is behind us and we are collecting the fragments?

Perfect’s paintings straddled the post-digital and modernist divide beautifully but a nagging doubt remained that as effortless as they were the process of mapping up from smaller digital drawings whilst echoing Christopher Wool also lost something visceral in the process. The buzz of a Bratby-like density was over-ridden by the knowledge of the perfection (sorry for pun) of the execution. They were visual feasts perfectly constructed on finest linen but maybe lacked a grittier flavour? Fiona Rae’s work left me cold a lukewarm salad of tropes I’d seen before lacking the intensity of her early work. maybe that the devil’s deal gone sour. Early fame followed by a lifetime creating perfectly packaged show-pieces.

I purchased the catalogue in support of the organiser Tristram Aver. The catalogue disappointed being too showy and too many perfectly shot close ups and little real detail. Martin Herbert I am unfamiliar with I really don’t spend much time perusing the art press. His articles were pretentious nonsense but at least we have a contemporary Brian Sewell to amuse us. I learnt more about what Herbert thought of his own reading than I did of the work a sure sign of narcissistic writing. I am sure he is quite loud at dinner parties. Silence is sometimes golden. Perfect said more without saying a word.

Drawing or painting?

Spent the afternoon in a not too cold studio (it has basic radiators thankfully) as starting to come out of over two weeks of severe chest infection. After looking at the neo-primitives below I thought I’d try black acrylic paint straight to canvas and compare it with other methods. Pencil and chalk, paint this was because I forgot to take some Sharpie pens to the studio. So I could theoretically call this an experimental artefact led methodology although I can only gain ‘qualitative data’. I have posted on facebook so be interesting to see what reaction I get.

I was vaguely thnking of the kind of memory painting Arshile Gorky did (most of his major works refer however subliminally back to his Armenian childhood) but after I’d finished the last piece I realised that today’s news about Hurricane Sandy and the associated imagery had leaked into my sub-conscious. I therefore named the drawing ‘Sandy’.

The smaller image in the gallery of two ‘badges’ is from 1987 and were a couple of examples of laminated drawings that I sold in aid of Greenpeace at my show that year in Hornsey Library. Proving that nothing changes and I was doing Burgerman before he was knee high 🙂

Looking closer other influences which I can see in the drawings include Leger, Mariscal, and Miro all major influences on my late eighties work so it feels like I have somehow carried on from a point then of semi-abstraction before I went more figurative and lost some of my spontaneity. I picked up a book from my library at studio called ‘Arshille Gorky: The Breakthrough Years. Which I will examine along with my present reading. I was heavily influenced by a book I subsequently lost by Harry Rand called Arshile Gorky: the implications of symbols ( I have now found it as paperback on amazon although out of print). The Gorky fascination is not so much in his application of paint but far more the way he created ‘memory symbols’ analogous to Miro. These repetitive symbols came from his childhood. I repeat similar motifs from my past almost like an alphabet and maybe analysing where this came from would be productive. In fact at one point I did try to make a pictorial alphabet of simple symbols. I will try and find the examples I drew. We then stray into both semiotic and literary territory. I will leave the deeper examination of this to the research pages.

Abstract Comics?

I have started looking in more depth at the idea of ‘abstract comics’. There is an anthology assembled by Andrei Molotiu called ‘Abstract Comics’. He also has a very interesting blog at : http://abstractcomics.blogspot.co.uk/

This anthology includes work by Mark Staff Brandl.

It made me look again at the ‘Suit of Nettles’ work I produced for the Connect Course and exhibited at Lincoln. Although ostensibly a series of illustrations for a suite of songs the interesting thing was that as a non-linear series of unrelated images they could be hung together in any order.This leads in a strange way to some experimental work I have been doing in the studio with ‘abstract narratives’. This is why I was so interested in the series of drawings displayed on Guston’s studio wall…almost in a comic strip fashion.(see post below). I have played with a comic approach before as can be seen in these paintings (all sold or destroyed) from 2005. It is not a big stretch from these works to the paintings from September 2011 when I first had a painting studio again. https://shaunbelcher.com/canvas/?p=28

Pre M.A.: Practice based research?

Ok so here I am back in the studio at the beginning of the second year of my M.A. by registered project and after a summer of drawing related ‘research’ I am standing in front of a very old work on paper (c.1988) and two new canvases done over the summer in the time not spent researching Frayling’s Categories (which wasn’t much). So what do the canvases have to do with research if anything?

I am struggling already to codify or analyse the works from any kind of methodological perspective. The ideas ’embedded’ in the paintings are intuitive, visceral (acrylic paint applied to canvas) and come from a half-formed naive idea of ‘comic’ forms from looking at various comic and graphic novels and studing Philip Guston’s work in some depth especially his drawings. I did read the book ‘Night Studio’ by Musa Meyer which I remember was quite a harrowing account of how his depressions and rages affected his family ( Musa is his daughter). It did however convince in describing the sheer effort that went into his work.

I suppose if I mined back into other works on him I would find material relating to his genesis of the comic forms that replaced his earlier ‘abstract expressionist’ period. I also own the book ‘Sweeper up after artists’ by Irving Sandler which I was half way through and which is very telling in its depiction of the fraught nature of post Abstract Expressionist careerism in New York in the early 1960’s. But is this research…it is art historical research for sure but unless it impacts on my physical creation of an object could it be said to describe anything but ‘contextual knowledge’. To impact on the creation of an art object surely it has to be more profound than that?

I am just asking questions here as at the start of a difficult journey. Turning ‘intuitions, feelings and observations’ into theoretical research is a hard task. I am not convinced as I start this ‘Studio Diary’ that it at all possible but I may learn something else in the process.

I am standing looking at the works. Day One. I photograph them so as to show the similarity in pieces created nearly twenty years apart and in very different locations and circumstances. Maybe that affects how I create images. Maybe the context is more important than I thought.

I am also awed by the quotation from Dickens that I discover Guston had on his wall, which he held to, about complete devotion to the cause. I have never liked ‘sunday painting’ but never had the means to devote my life to painting and this the reason I have stopped painting for long periods. I found an interesting article online by chance detailing Guston in the studio by Dore Ashton.

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4x0nb2f0;chunk.id=d0e2683;doc.view=print

This appears to be completely available online at:

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4x0nb2f0&brand=ucpress

Now here’s some art history to get my teeth into.

Quite a start…..but is it research?

Painting Practice examined by Graphic Research

Before I started on the Nottingham Trent University M.A. by registered project I already had three fairly well-defined practices or is it PRAXIS. I had painted in oil for ten years and drawn regularly, I had written poetry which published as ‘Last Farmer’ (Salt Publishing 2010) and I had spent ten years or more writing songs and performing as my alter-ego Trailer Star, By the Lincoln Collection show of 2008 this morphed into a strange amalgamation of songwriting and painting in the Suit of Nettles project.

However none of this work was ‘research-orientated’ I just did it in a foolish Picasso/Miro-esque way you know like people had done for thousands of years before Research Exercises were even invented. BUT….as my M.A. was funded by my venerable institution and was supposedly part of ‘continuing professional development’ I set to on the chosen path for me of ‘MULTIMEDIA’ by registered project.This made sense to my peers and bosses and sort of made sense to me that was until they closed down ‘Multimedia’ department and informed me that the reason for that was the word ‘multimedia’ did not mean anything. This came as a bit of a surprise as we had done well to survive the mis-management from above and indeed our employability was nearly 80%. Indeed it had more to do with managerial self-promotion than common-sense but this was not apparent at the time. Whatever, it will be over soon (2014) but the M.A. carries on. I am now in a process of rationalising how my M.A. proceeds and alongside it I have created a separate ‘research’ praxis which uses cartoons to examine in detail the whole justification and deployment of postgraduate study in the arts. I now call this ‘GRAPHIC RESEARCH ‘ and a blog details all the work I am doing in this field.

https://shaunbelcher.com/research

Meanwhile the first year of M.A. ‘TRACK’ blog details all the work I did during my first year of ‘development’, all of it in the area of MULTIMEDIA AND ‘new media’.

https://shaunbelcher.com/rpt

I also started to paint again (at a low level) and this detailed in my second year M.A. painting related blog ‘Blank Canvas’.

https://shaunbelcher.com/canvas

So as it stands I have three simultaneous reflective journals done during the past two years..I wonder if any or all count for my M.A? In my opinion the cartoon research alone should qualify for a degree let alone the rest. I am going to stretch my examiners and supervisors patience to the test now by suggesting that I revert to PAINTING as the sole focus of the final year and use it to test theories of what research is and what practice is against each other. As the whole dichotomy of practice V research is what I questioning then physically separating the two and attempting both separately looks like a valid way of testing my ideas. This makes sense to me and in conversation with James Elkins I think makes sense to him. We are both examining the apparent contradictions in postgraduate fine art delivery, he from a theoretical ‘research on research’ angle, and myself from a physical practice versus research theory angle.

Simples Meerkats. If you are confused by all of this just try reading Pessoa whilst standing on your head…..