Another road song...

The link on the right which says Jeroen's blog/website takes you to the website of my friend Jeroen Wilhelmus.
I haven't seen Jeroen in a while: he lives in Holland and my father has just moved from Holland back to the UK. On one trip to the Netherlands, my father took me to Scheveningen on the coast, on a wet day, a windy day, where I took this photograph:

I spotted this same pier-end in Andrew Brooks' (see link right) work, Sealand, when he came to talk to my HNC class last year. He creates hyper-real images in photoshop, built out of hundreds of individual images and a lot of patience.
I think I have this right, please correct me, Jeroen, if I'm wrong... Jeroen is the son of the daughter of the man under who my grandfather studied music in Amsterdam after completing his degree in Edinburgh and before the Second World War. There is more to it than those words imply, of course.

form, content: content form

Trying to think about how the Impressionists would react to the world today. What kind of art would Monet want to make if he were alive now? Would he want to paint his landscapes in the open air? Would he remove himself from politics and conflict? If he still painted as he did then, would his art end up directly on biscuit tins, diaries and in clip frames in cheap hotels? Or would it spend time in a gallery, get discussed on the Late Review?
My wife and I have conflicting views on music. She is a classically trained singer and appreciates the skill and craft that goes into creating a good vocal performance. Thus she can applaud the contestants on the X Factor because they show a vocal ability. She also detests Bob Dylan because he sounds like he's beating a bag full of cats and dogs instead of singing. I can't argue that his voice is beautiful like Pavarotti's. But I can argue that what he sings and the emotion with which he sings it makes his song more moving, more like art or poetry than Gareth Gates.
Content over form. Form over content.
So, going back to our Impressionist friends, art is about content over form, isn't it? It doesn't matter what form the art takes (it could be a painting, a sculpture or a disused unrinal) if it has something to say, some observation to make on the world, the human condition, sex, death, MacDonalds... If it has some contribution to make to how we understand the world and ourselves and if it isn't something that // Falling into the old trap of trying to define art here I fear. I keep forgetting I live in the post-modern age...

... looked around themselves, not behind ...

The Impressionists as a reaction to the modern world, their modern world. Degas, Monet, Cezanne - three artists with distinct techniques, passions and intentions. Yet they all come under the Impressionist umbrella. It isn't their technique, how they painted which unites them - Monet and Cezanne favoured working outdoors, Degas worked his canvases in the studio. It is what they painted, or what they didn't paint which unites them. It isn't this sort of stuff:

Ingres, Roger freeing Angelica, 1819.

What's that all about?
It's brilliant in it's own way, but what does it tell us of the world that Ingres was living in? Not that there is any imperative for an individual painting to describe the modern condition, but the collective, dominant outlook of painters leading up until the Impressionists took hold was based on the art, the culture, the stories of antiquity, the Bible and the medieval period.
(Forget that the Greeks didn't regard painting as an art at all. Forget that the Bible wasn't exactly keen on images of God.)
The Impressionists looked around themselves and not behind.

That don't impress me much

Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872). It was this painting which landed the group of painters who exhibited at Nadar's former studio in 1874 the monicker Impressionists. The critic Louis Leroy wrote: Impression I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it — and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Leroy

Forward rolling...

The contact strip for the medium format images I took of me doing a forward roll for the self-portrait project.

One of the photographs I took on the large format cameras at college. I'm a bit annoyed that I cut off the tip of the arrow, but it's tricky looking in the back of those cameras, in the dark, thinking you're going to be run over as you're standing at the tip of the arrow which is directing traffic into the college car park...

After a brief sojourn to look after Jo, my wife, whose appendix became infected and had to be removed - bearing in mind that she's four months pregnant so the operation was a little more precarious than normal - I can return to this blog...

My intention here is to use this blog as a resource and virtual workbook to hold some of the research and ideas I've had whilst surfing the digital world for things to do with the projects I'm currently completing at college www.tameside.ac.uk

I am researching the Impressionist - that lively band of Parisian artists who turned the art world upside down in the middle of the 19th century. Has any art movement been as influential as the Impressionists? Probably not. They were a disparate group without a singular objective and certainly with no manifesto as later art movements had, but it was their reaction to the modern world and their desire to place their work in the public domain as the equal of the art of the Salon that led to Impressionism becoming so widely known even to this day.

Controversy, everybody loves a good controversy. Art ever since seems to have wanted a bit of controversy to get itself noticed... from Surrealism to Damien Hirst, from Bauhaus to the Chapman brothers.