STUDIO<>VISIT (or what I did on my holidays)

Thanks to everyone who showed up at the PITT gallery for the Garden party that was the culmination of my summer micro residency, the unveilling of work for the Nu Contemporary English Landscape Painting (NuCON). And a massive thanks to Nat for being a consummate curator and gallerista!

Beer was drunk, stuff looked at before we retired over the road to the Chestnut pub where we enjoyed the fruits of the Worcester Music Festival.

Also my first foray into reviewing should be in this months SLAP magazine, a write up of the Worcester Open. Hope it reads ok.

Today is also the sort of moving day into exile in Bath – the boss has gone on ahead to open the shutters and shake the grits out of the bedding, just as long as I get the drums down all will be fine. Nephew should be in situ to take over the reins at some point this week.

And tomorrow is my birthday – with a spot of life drawing pencilled in first thing. Start as I mean to go on.

The red dot = 'sold' 

What a nice chatty post this has been! 

The Rokeby Venus's Arse

Just one day to go before this weekend's Garden Party show at the PITT Project Space. here are a few words about what I've been up to. 

The Nu School of Contemporary Landscape Painting (NuCON) draws inspiration from the Microsoft screensaver depicting a somewhat nondescript hill, possibly somewhere in the United State of America.

For some kids, hardwired into online status recognition, their head in the cloud in some inner city urban ghetto this might be the first hill they ever see; Mount Para for the digital age, the meeting point where nature impinges on a virtual world. For the older, casual browser however, this green unpleasant mound might have become the point at which, the laptop having pinged into life they are forced into a decision, to choose between googling leisure wear and/or an evening browsing t&a through dead eyes, glass of Merlot in one hand, unresponsive mouse in the other.

This is a conventionally sexual hill, a gently undulating yet threateningly tilting tit or belly, the latest in a line that links the Rokeby Venus’s arse, Courbet’s Origin of the World and Andrew Wyeth’s Christine’s World, minus house, barn and girl. It might even be called Depilation Valley, shorn as it is of trees, shrubs, not a bush in sight. Nothing to spoil the view: everything revealed, all concealed.

We wonder what is the other side of it, what lurks just out of sight to the right, over the brow of the hill, those hills in the distance, menacing, inviting. Silent.

How did this seemingly ordinary image become arguably the most recognisable landscape in the world; more famous than a Constable hedgerow, Turner Wheat field or Stubbs’ pony, in leafy arbours languidly resting?