Yan Pei-Ming – looking at monochrome and impasto technique.
Help…
The viewer reads in the context and is deeply moved to help… where… what… how… who… but also on the deeper ideas of charity, foreign aid… how we are numbed to TV appeals and conflict in distant countries.
Yan Pei-Ming: b. 1960 (Shanghai – Chinese)…
He was refused entry into Shanghai art college so enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in 1980, graduating in 1999. Therefore must have had money? Well off family? And took nearly 20 years to graduate so a part time degree while working?
From 1985, so before he graduated, he had several international group exhibitions, with his first solo exhibition in the United States at David Zwirner in New York City, May 2007. Which I take as a stamp of international commercial success.
His trademark style is that he paints rapidly with big brushes on giant canvases in black and white or red and white – his most famous for paintings are of Chairman Mao.
Although he is best known for his is portraits of famous figures of the 20th century he spends a lot of thought on the emotional and psychological context of these paintings in his exhibitions and they take on a different meaning because of how they are displayed. He works hard on how these paintings relate to the modern world, to each other… and to the nature of power; though he says the ultimate power is in the paintings themselves. So although his thick paint feels feral and his images visceral they are always framed by meaning as he refers back to famous paintings, relates them to other paintings in his exhibition, and to modern politics.
This is a video of his 2015 Salzburg exhibition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=synI5e1Y8II where he explains a little of his thinking.
And here he talks about his work in series… https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/050046-012-A/atelier-a-yan-pei-ming/
He says he is interested in ambiguities and emotion; wants the viewer to enter his paintings through imaginary (and slightly sinister) landscapes; and to feel the physicality of the paint. Which makes his work a really interesting mix between figurative, sculptural, emotional and ideas based painting.
His backgrounds are suggestive and intriguing – and while his figures are more real than real with personality popping out of their eyeballs, their features often emerge out of a melange of intrigue.
He uses black and white because he finds colour interrupts the image, and makes the paintings more powerful. I agree and think his black and white paintings are nakedly honest and emotionally powerful.
Black Selfportrait
2007
Oil on canvas
Image Size: 137.8 x 137.8 inches 350 x 350 cm
As a postscript he seems to use famous photographs and paintings as source images, which already bring heaps of meaning and status to his paintings. Today a lot of marketing is about visibility and these paintings do half his job for him as they are instantly recognisable. Even an unknown artist painting a famous person will get more interest than if they were painting somebody unknown. His ‘famous people’ paintings are by no means fan art and he does repaint rather than copy, but I think they are much weaker than his self portraits and verge on the cynical.
And in some paintings he lets his paint run which makes you aware of the painter and the vertical flat surface… for some painters I think this works really well but I think he’s much stronger in his sculptural work where the 3D paint catches the light and transforms flat images into living worlds.
What I think works really well and I can use in my practice is the indistinct and suggestive mark making which works so much better than spelling it out. And the power of monochrome.
Here’s a visual response in my sketchbook.
Final Assembly, ink on A3 drawing paper
It may be simplistic and was better when it was subtler but it captures something of the moment where a mum was looking at her child from the kitchen window before she had to turn away and get back to work.
This is a new way forward for me, painting from memory in a fluid way while trying to capture a significant emotional moment, and feels good.
I like his impasto work but am not working in impasto yet… it’s something I can store away and try out later. As is two colour painting – black and white, where unlike ink you can correct mistakes (once you’ve covered up the white paper you can’t turn it back into a highlight) but you can paint on highlights with your white paint.
Glenn Brown – for distortion and a play with media.
b. 1966 – British
The Hinterland, 2006, Oil on panel, 148 x 122.5cm
This is useful because I very quickly found his work derivative, boring and utterly pointless…. decoration passed passing itself off as art.
But, jaw droppingly skilful.
As I was walking the other day I saw a home decorator and this got me musing about the skill of traditional plasterers. Plastering is not a DIY job. I had an artist friend who supported his early career by working as an occasional plasterer (he ended up as the youngest ever head of Dublin art school) and another who had a five year apprenticeship as a carpenter, who could do anything with wood.
Painting as trompe l’oeil, it struck me, is a craft skill, which is why many classical painters started as apprentices. Making a flat surface look like a window is nio different in essence than a master craftsman making a chair. But neither, I would argue, are art: at least in the sense that they don’t deal in the world of ideas, emotions or concepts. One is functional in that it captures a likeness and the other provides you with somewhere to sit.
So painting, per sé, is not art. But painting can be art… it’s the added value, where the subject is the vehicle for something else that makes a painting into art rather than a window or human camera.
Coincidentally, the real economic value and status has always been in art rather than painting… the great masters were so much more than masters of ‘window’ painting, they used their skill and subject matter as a vehicle to examine the world.
So I learned something very important… that I don’t want to be a painter as window, or a painter as thief using other people’s work. And although skill is very important, of itself it’s not the end point because here is somebody who is blissfully skilful (and no doubt commercially very successful) but who’s work has no passion, no connection and no ideas… it’s pure cleverness.
Interestingly, having had a strong gut reaction to his work I then researched him and found he is known for the use of other people’s work, and has been accused of plagiarism. He takes famous paintings or photographs and digitally manipulates them before meticulously painting the results to create a flat, almost digital ,surface.
I’ve also learned I like movement and texture in my work.
The Day The World Turned Auerbach 1991, Oil on canvas, 56 x 50 cm
This looks more like a forgery more than an appropriation.
Daydream Nation (2017)
This looks as though a painting has been put through a computer programme to change the skin to wallpaper. For me it has no soul, even with added cloudy eyes.
Edvard Munch – related to German expressionism.
b. 1863 – d. 1944, Norweigan
As I know a little of Munch I didn’t want to be biased so decided to research him first before looking at his paintings.
My research gave me a tingle as I could see so much of me in him, though I never had his bohemian lifestyle, heavy drinking, mental instability or fear of insanity.
Melancholy 1891
I get this, it’s meaningful to me, without words.
Munch spent a lot of time on the edge of penury and was supported by his dad. As an actor only ever having signed one non acting contract (for three months) in over 40 years I know what not having a good stable income feels like. He also came from a religious household… and my dad was a vicar, who died when I was 13, but my mum was very religious and my brothers both became religious leaders.
When he went off to art school Munch was influenced by Hans Jæger, a leading bohemian, who pushed him to paint his own emotional and psychological state. I missed the bohemian bit but am very interested in capturing emotions.
Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec were big influences in Paris and they are all artists I love, and who’s colour work I find moving.
Wikipedia says… He wrote his goal in his diary: “in my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.” This is at least part of the reason why I paint, to capture meaning (cage it) on canvas so I can examine it.
His friend Christian Krohg said:
He paints, or rather regards, things in a way that is different from that of other artists. He sees only the essential, and that, naturally, is all he paints. For this reason Munch’s pictures are as a rule “not complete”, as people are so delighted to discover for themselves. Oh, yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is complete once the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and this is precisely the advantage Munch has over painters of the other generation, that he really knows how to show us what he has felt, and what has gripped him, and to this he subordinates everything else.
Beautifully put.
Munch was inspired by Gauguin’s work and philosophy, and I love Gaugin’s work too; his colours, his print like quality and blocky composition. And Gaugin reacted against realism, which I do, and said that “art was human work and not an imitation of Nature”.
I’ve just experimented with prints and found them captivating and Munch really liked printmaking and woodcuts too.
He formulated the Synthetist aesthetic, and The Talisman, by Paul Sérusier, a principal works of the Synthetist school (below) was my favourite painting for many years.
Munch’s mature style includes a simplification of detail, shallow pictorial space, minimal background to his up front figures, and an almost static theatrical pose that signified emotional states which are all elements I connect with. He wanted his people living and on fire, but they were symbolic rather than real people.
Ashes, 1894
For some reason this has the same feel as Peter Doig’s work which I also love… magical realism?
My take for my practice is that I (when I get the technical skill) I can make stuff up and paint imaginary people and landscapes filled with my imagination. There are other things I want to do, but that’s definitely one of them.
I’d like to create worlds that I and my viewer can get lost in and where I can (metaphorically) dance on the canvas… in the moment and fully connected. Like when a director says action, if it’s really working, I don’t know what’s happened till he says cut… I’ve been in a different reality.
Leon Kossoff – use of impasto.
b. 1926 – d. 1919, UK, London
I’m starting with a blank canvas as I only vaguely know Kossoff’s work. A quick search threw up that he was mates with Frank Auerbach (who had a similar impasto technique and local London subject matter). And they both studied under David Bomberg who birthed a lot of similar artists, so was obviously a very influential teacher.
His other artist friends included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Keith Critchlow; so he was a child of his time and I might expect similar concerns.
Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon, 1971
This is very different from Frank Auerbach, as though the paint is impasto it is brushed much less fractured and figurative.
I have seen this in the flesh and it’s much darker, so I don’t know if this has been photoshopped or he did several versions.
Reading on the Tate website about his working methods is revelatory. He scraped off the paint and repainted continually over several weeks. This feels like the equivalent of correcting my lines in life drawing… or making multiple oil sketches for a finished piece. In effect he is working in series like I did for my last assignment, being open to chance (seeing what works and doesn’t work) and really understanding his space – the canvas – and how his painting works inside it.
After this process, when he was ready, he painted the final image in a few hours.
What this meant was that he combined process with freshness, looseness and spontaneity to produce seemingly effortless and stunning paintings.
This is a good pointer for me and reinforces what I learned with my last assignment, the value of working in series and evolving a painting over time till you really understand it. Then being able to spontaneously capture it in one creative splurge.
I think this is a working method that would really suit me.
At t he moment, to work on scale, and sacrifice so much oil paint at £5 a tiny tube, is too expensive… but there will be ways I can come close. Maybe work small… do one big mock up… then paint the final canvas?
Booking Hall, Kilburn Underground,1987
The Tate goes further into his working methods and explains how he took direct sketches from site (charcoal) and pinned these round his studio. I painted my Mother-in-Law’s Tongue solely from sketches – no photographs and no access to the real plant while painting.
Though I launched straight into the final piece and it’s tight it still has a quality missing (as my relationship was with creating an image from inside me not copying a photograph from outside me) from all my other work from Practice of Painting. It’s like the plant has a soul, and I really like it.
So, working from on site sketches is definitely something I would like to do. My life drawing is helping me with figures… I just need to get a bit braver in public spaces.
With Kossoff the physical and visual sensation is more important than representational accuracy, and that’s how I want to paint too.
Self-Portrait, c.1952
This is particularly interesting as he painted this while a student and was first being influenced by David Bomberg’s (he took extra classes) loose style, as different to the tight academic brushwork he was learning at Sty Martin’s Art School. And I’m a student too… so it gives me hope.
He painted wet on wet which is something I’ve tried and like, but was worried about the blurring of pictoral forms with my remnants of ‘this has got to look like what it is’. Here I can see how it works and that, though I can’t do it yet, it’s not something to be scared of. So, is another technique I can use in my practice.
Another technique which would be great to play with is that he painted straight from the tube and mixed on the canvas… I’d love to do that.
This unit has set me thinking about the tools (both surface and mark making) that I use to make a painting and it’s interesting how Kossoff used the brush handle to scrape the paint away on his neck, and use line on an expressionistic tonal painting. Something else for my toolbox.
The Tate comment on this painting is particularly useful. It says that this is not a likeness based painting, but an ‘intense evocation of a young man’s expression and emotion, devoid of any social contact or context.’ Which is what I was I did when I was painting back in to my prints, or at least that’s what I ended up with. Not me per sé (though if you know me you can see me in here) but a universal yet specific man.
At least, that’s what I liked about my final image.
Finally, there’s a quote from Leon Kossoff that is very resonate for me now on this course as it echoes how I am feeling… just substitute Understanding painting Media for Bomberg.
In 1995 Kossoff said that ‘Although I had painted most of my life, it was through my contact with Bomberg that I felt I might actually function as a painter. Coming to Bomberg’s class was like coming home’ (quoted in Paul Moorhouse, Leon Kossoff, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1996, p.12).
Understanding Painting Media 