An Alternative Art and Art History. In the 1980s I put forward on an alternative art history. This was alternative to an academic/Courtaulds or a Kenneth Clarke art history which tends to see art history as purely the history of styles and forms. We see in Alfred Barrs flow chart of MoMA a similar linear attitude, art exclusively coming from art. However, history is not linear. With Barrs there is no reference to the First World War or the Russian […]

Boy Revolutionary   In painting, warm colours come forward and cold colours recede. Putting red in the foreground, green in the middle and blue in the distance was Joshua Reynolds’ rules for creating illusionistic space in painting. Essentially a crude and simplified form of aerial perspective. Gainsborough painted the Blue Boy in part as a snub to Reynolds. By putting blue in the foreground Gainsborough broke these academic rules. This brush-off to Reynolds showed that it could be done and […]

    Take an object, Do something to it, Do something else to it, Do something else to it.   Jasper Johns 1964                  

Originality   Nothing is original, everything has a history. Nothing comes from nothing.   [Thumbnail images – click to view]    In 1990 I began to photograph backs of heads. It was my way into photographing the body. Photography has always had a role for me in the process of making paintings, but only as a means to an end, information collection, a sort of snapshot sketchbook. This Back of Heads series was my first use of photography as a […]

Elements A student was working with the elements; earth, water, air and fire, but said that she no longer was working with fire as one of the lecturers said that fire was not an element. I said “neither are any of the f…ing others elements!” I reminded her of the Periodic Table which she must have encountered in science at school. When you go to art school you do not have to ignore science and embrace the irrational or fantasy. Science and Art are not […]

  What is mainstream?   The themes of 1960’s B movies become current A movies. Everything against Modernism becomes central tenets of Post Modernism. Side issues become dominant. The eccentric becomes the centric. The extraordinary becomes the norm. Cults become conventional. Subculture becomes culture. Anti-establishment becomes the establishment. Conspiracy theories become standard. Lies become facts. (Or, rather, alternative facts). Pluralism is mainstream.              

Notes on the Body and Fashion What we would consider overweight has, in the past, signified wealth and power, as in the famous images of Henry VIII. At a time of widespread malnutrition, thin would represent poor and weak. (As it still does in many so called ‘third world‘ countries in the world today). In contradiction in the developed west today, obesity is seen as a condition of the underprivileged. Henry’s diet, with its emphasis on quantity and meat, would be considered very unhealthy these days. […]

Adam and Eve Have you ever noticed that all the representations of Adam and Eve, and there are a lot of them, are depicted with navels? Of course they shouldn’t have navels, being the first human beings (well, there was Lilith, Adam’s first wife but that’s another story). God formed Adam out of “the dust of the ground” and causing “a deep sleep to fall on Adam“; God took one of his ribs and fashioned a woman, later to be […]

Dragged Up The artist Liz/Stephen Rowe, a cross dresser, once explained to me the difference between ‘drag‘ and transvestism. Whilst many ‘straight’ men are cross-dressers, drag was “something homosexual men do for entertainment“. Unfortunately, terms such as drag queen, female impersonator, cross-dresser, transvestite, even transsexual have become to some extent interchangeable today. However, the drag artist exploits the false dichotomy between the sexes. The drag queen’s performance is a parody of fixed roles of gender and sexuality. Some feminists have criticised the drag artist […]

Art and Sexuality At University I ran an Art History/Liberal Studies Course on Art and Sexuality. (I was going to call it Querys, but was never sure how to spell that, maybe ‘Queeries’.) Erotic art was something I was personally interested in; I hoped it wasn’t too limited a topic and that there was enough substance there to make a seminar series. A novel subject, but neither mainstream or everybody’s cup of tea. During my preparation I realised that in […]