Open and
Shut
New work by
Thom Gorst
Anise Gallery
March 13th to
April 13th
Private View
March 13th
My work is
concerned with Ruination, and it is concerned with the Maritime. The ways in which I have responded to
these has evolved over the last six years, since I started painting as part of
my doctoral research at the Glasgow School of Art. This exhibition, my second in the wonderfully appropriate
warehouse setting of the Anise Gallery, features entirely new work that defines
where I am at present, and the point from where I continue to develop.
These two
themes are especially apposite today, as major exhibitions currently address
them both:
At Tate Britain
from March 4, Ruin Lust is a
transhistorical exhibition that covers our interest in ruination from its roots
in the eighteenth century up to contemporary work by artists including Keith
Arnatt and Rachel Whiteread. It is
clear that, whilst the Romantic artists found beauty in the remains of past
greatness such as medieval monasteries or classical Rome, contemporary artists
- myself included - situate beauty in the remains of modernity: in the
Edgelands that Farley and Symmons Roberts wrote about; in the derelict London
that John Savage photographed, in the abandoned mental hospitals and factories
that urban explorers photograph and post on 28days later, and in the recently
abandoned ships that I wrote about, and now paint.
At the same
time in Southampton, two parallel exhibitions called Ship to Shore: Art and Lure of the Sea run from February to May, features "paintings, artists’
films, photography, sculpture, prints and archival objects, evoking the
vastness of oceans, the romance of sea travel and ship-to-shore communications". And, the late photographer and film
maker Allan Sekula, whose writing and photography about maritime life was
deeply influential on my own research, has also had a show at Tate Britain
until late March.
My new show at the Anise Gallery condenses all these
themes in a collection of works on canvas which, through their colour show how
futile are our attempts to paint over the ravages of decay, and through their
stillness evoke the dynamism of decay in dangerous places.
This new show
is called Open and Shut, after two paintings
that will be on display. I have
become increasingly fascinated by opposites. Perhaps it is inevitable that, as a university professor, I
try to resist the easy explanations
that students so often want. It
seems to me that, alongside every idea that has shaped culture, there is also
its apparent opposite - quite visible when you look for it, and ready to spring
out at you.
In a recent
lecture on the Bauhaus, I was surprised and gratified when a student asked how
Feininger's woodcut, so suggestive of the medieval symbolism of light, could be
used for the fronstispiece of the Bauhaus' 1919 manifesto. Nothing is pure; nothing is easy;
nothing is binary. It's both-and, not either-or: or maybe I prefer neither-but.
My work
reflects these complexities: I need to paint representations of distressed and
derelict metal on clean, primed canvas.
I need to encapsulate what is rough and abrasive with varnish, which
halts the processes of decay. I
need to work with colours that are alien to my subject: fizzy lemon or candy
pink for a fo'c'sle chequerplate; or duvet-green for a sheet of unspeakably
mutilated ship-side.
My earlier work was photographic, capturing real scenes
and transferring them through the agency of the knife and the pallette onto
canvas. I now begin to leave the
real scenes of dereliction, such as the old Mersey Ferry Royal Iris rotting away in Woolwich, and imagine more awful sites
of tragedy and dissolution. Take
as an example my work Trip, which is
also in this show. I feel that the surface I am representing is
metallic, and I feel the action of the corrosion upon it. This is certainly in some harsh place,
and I have captured it and I have varnished it. The tragic line
that crosses the work horizontally and appears to be dividing it into two is
due to some violent agency that I can't explain, and what are those four brass
plates that are fixed to the surface, and which appear to have evaded the decay
that is elsewhere? Are they hinges to something beyond? - I honestly
don't know.
And, as
my work progresses, I have become interested in the way accidental
juxtapositions of colour take place when commercial paint schemes which are
applied, for example to the sides of ships, become corrupted by the colours of
ageing. So, the vivid palettes of ship owners' house-styles designed to
be recognised from far away become progressively challenged and eventually
vanquished by the reds and oranges of oxidisation, the greens of vegetal growth
and the whites of salt, as well as the re-eruption of colours that had been
overpainted long ago.
There is
a great temptation to get out the colour wheel and map out combinations of
saturated colour for aesthetic reasons alone. As a way of countering
this, and of visiting the opposite extreme, I set out to explore how I could
use colour as economically as possible - what would the minimum amount of
colour I would need to use to be able to communicate what I wanted to say?
If I could answer this, then subsequent work would be building up in
saturation, rather than toning down.
The idea
of achieving as much as possible with as little as possible (economy of
artistic means) is an essential tool of the artist, and has been explored
thoroughly throughout the twentieth century. I admire Malevich's
Suprematist paintings (Black Square or White on White), and I
also understand the necessity for someone to have scored 4 minutes 33 seconds
of silent music. But there is no such thing as silence, nor whiteness -
and for the same reason, I could not entirely suppress a slight glimpse of rust
appearing on my all-black beast of a painting called North.
I chose
the title well after I had finished it: my original intention had been to put
myself in the position of a shipyard worker a hundred years ago, chipping
rusted paint off the side of an old ship in a dry dock. This is an activity of which I had some
experience: When I was seventeen I was serving as
an officer cadet in the Royal Navy on the frigate Scarborough. We were
in some godforsaken harbour at the other end of the evaporating British empire,
and I was sent over the ship's side on a plank supported by a rope at either
end, and told to repaint it: first, chip any rust with a hammer, then brush on
the paint. I dipped my long roller
in its bucket of paint, the rolled it, up - down, up - down. It occurred to me that whilst I was
painting with vertical roller strokes, the sea's action on the same surface had
been horizontal. Vertical paint
strokes were being over-worked by horizontal abrasion, which was then being
re-erased vertically. I was struck
by the criss-crossing of human and natural actions.
My work is
becoming obsessed with lots of things - but not least by this criss-crossing:
horizontal lines are the lines of a ship and its colour scheme: vertical
strokes are used by painters on their hanging planks to apply these colour
schemes; the sea works horizontally, whilst rows of rivets or welds are both
horizontal and vertical. In my
paintings, I think about this all the time: my palette knife moves in both
directions; sometimes mimicking the sea, and sometimes the painters with their
rollers.
I have been one
of those painters; I empathise with their work. I then struggle to understand the sea and its relentless
horizontal passage, as it engraves the paint with salt.
But once the
work was completed, and I had lived with it and begun to understand it, I
realised this scene was more tragic than I had imagined. As I touched the black paint and the
rivets, I realised I was the only witness to this old tarry ship's sinking. I don't know why this was happening -
maybe it had hit an iceberg, or it had been torpedoed in war, but it's already
up-ending; its bows underwater, and its stern in the air.
Thom Gorst
www.thomgorst.com
Anise Gallery
www.anisegallery.co.uk
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