Illuminations

Belkis Ayón, fountain pens, Black Friday.

It’s a hard frost, and heavy fog. I could go down to the lake and hunt for cormorants, but instead I cross the road and flag down a bus in the hopes it is the right one because it’s too foggy to see the number. I’ve been meaning to pop into Oxford to see Belkis Ayón‘s Sikán Illuminations since it opened at modern art Oxford. I knew the name Belkis Ayón because someone online recently said she was thier favourite artist, so I knew she was a printmaker, which is enough to get me to visit a free exhibition. I did not trouble myself with much more research; my intention is to look, and then research and come back and look again to see if there is a difference. I’m really very lucky to live so close as to be able to do this. I’ve been visiting MOA for years and it still blows my mind there are places that you can just wander in and look at impressive exhibitions like this for free.

It’s easy for me to relate to the work as a printmaker, the techniques. I am most excited to see the matrices, the blocks, she was printing from, and then felt guilty, because I am supposed to be looking at the work, not stealing ideas. I am impressed by the works, the size, the mythology, the effort of creation, but they are not entirely easy as a body of work. The tale of Sikán is an uncomfortable one; at least, I found it so. Undertones of sexism, colonialism, the slave trade; the human sized figures with eyes staring out at you from featureless faces. I have my thoughts and I decide to keep them to myself; who cares what it all means to me anyway? Everyone relates to it on their own terms.

Collograph print and a collograph block

I find the exhibition catalog hard to read in places. I’ve become hypersensitive to artspeak in my old age. It’s not that I lack the vocabulary, it’s that I do not understand why you would want to use words to obfuscate what you are trying to say. I am inclined to think the person is insecure, trying to make thier discipline seem legitimate by using big and proper words to intimidate the reader, but now, writing this, in particular writing obfuscate, it might just be that those seem like common everyday words to them that they don’t think twice about using. Still, when you speak to people who are not in your field you have to use more commonplace language and ideas. I think the annoyance is not that I have to put the extra energy into translating artspeak, but how it makes some people feel that they do not belong in art galleries. And I want everyone to feel that art belongs to them. Art works on nonintellectual levels, and that is its brilliance.

Also, they keep referring to collograph as the ‘easiest form of printmaking’ which makes me think they’ve never made or inked a collograph plate. I can think of at least 3 quicker and easier printmaking methods without trying (although as I am very talented, I can make even the most simple of techniques a challenge).

In the end I am not sure if what the experts think it means matters. I am not even sure how much Belkis Ayón herself knew what it meant, in that as artist, there are layers of our work which is not our conscious intent, we channel things we do not understand. I enjoyed the exhibition. I enjoy art and mythology but also, I am very used to seeing art that I can relate to in an immediate way because it was made by someone culturally very similar using a visual language I am fairly fluent in, whereas this exhibition made feel a little out of my depth. When I visited Vietnam in my 20’s, it was the first time I had been away from Europe experiencing a culture quite that different. Everywhere I’d visited previously had a shared alphabet, some words sharing the same roots, some cultural similarities to anchor myself to. I felt strangely adrift, unable to quite get my bearings, as if expecting to be able to find some correspondence but never being able to. This exhibition had a similar feel. It was from a different world.

Workings

I’ve been reading Kurt Jackson’s Sketchbooks which I picked up over the holidays, where and I learnt the Turner mostly sketched in black and white and put the colour in when he got home. I don’t know why but I found it a tremendous relief; as if everyone says you have to do everything insitu or you’re not arting right and then a great master comes along and says there’s no one true way; you get the job done the way that’s best for you and that’s enough.

Gouache painting of a tree

It was also a relief because it’s freezing and I don’t have enough fingers to last drawing in colour these days. I drew this in coloured pencil outlines and then added the gouache when I got home.

I also finished the solar magpie. I’d particularly pleased with the pearlescent powder because I had no idea if in would work when I put it on. Sadly all the photos are terrible due to only getting five minutes of natural sunlight every six weeks

He is listed here.

Findings

While in town I popped into my favourite art shop Broad Canvas to annoy the good folk that work there. I knew that they have the flex nib pen I have been eyeing up from Tom’s studio for absolutely years, and I thought I could have just a look at it. It’s actually on their website at a very good price, which I thought meant that I would not be allowed my 10% off that being a member of WOA affords me, but I was wrong, and after all the discounts I still couldn’t really justify the expense so don’t ask me to, because I bought it anyway.

Free note handwritten with my new pen for every Black Friday (and all the other colours and days). Unless I forget to put it in.

Look how nice it is.

Look how nicely it writes. I mean, it has transformed my impatient scrawl into beautiful calligraphy, I’ve seen how slowly calligraphers write so it’s unlikely to happen.

You can’t see that it doesn’t leak, but it doesn’t. I hate my handwriting without a flex nib, and cheap flex nib pens always leak, so you can’t carry them around with you lest you upset them and all the ink within them.

Black Friday Rant

I hate it more passionately every passing year. It used to be that the sales started Boxing Day, which made a great deal of sense as I had Christmas money to spend on the person I find it easiest to buy for (me). I do not have the money to buy myself slightly cheaper cardigans before Christmas. Not after buying that pen.

I hate that it discourages shoppers from buying early for Christmas in case they miss out on a good deal, I hate that most of the deals are actually not great deals at all, I hate that I will have hundreds of emails with Black Friday in the title until January, I hate its called that because what does it even mean? We don’t have thanksgiving here so it makes no sense, and I hate that Black Friday seems to last about 6 months. I am not having a sale but I might be tempted to give a free treat to any order that mentions that Black Friday is an absolute sack of shite.