The following blog post is an 'outtake' from the October issue of IN&AROUND, the free magazine distributed throughout the Chester-le-Street, Durham and Derwentside areas of England. 

University art collections frequently hold unexpected treasures, and many readers of IN&AROUND will be unsurprised to read that the collection of the region's most distinguished higher education institution lives up to exactly that billing.  

From 30th September until 6th November, visitors to Durham University's Oriental Museum will be given a rare glimpse of a selection of works from the university's significant collection of 20th century and 21st century prints, the existence of which will be news to even many of the North East's most ardent art lovers.

So, what can we expect as far as the actual works are concerned? That largely remains to be seen, although many of the names to have been teased - including Andy Warhol, Peter Blake, Eric Gill, Barbara Hepworth and Sandra Blow - read like a Who's Who of the story of western art over the last century.

Furthermore, with the exhibition promising to ask visitors "how the collection should be used in the future", it seems that the works won't necessarily just be left to languish back in the 'vault' once the exhibition concludes, instead potentially becoming as familiar to County Durham and North East art lovers as they surely should be.

Who are the artists that visitors will discover?

While for many IN&AROUND readers, the aforementioned names will hardly need much introduction, it's nonetheless instructive for us to remind ourselves of some of their stories.

Certainly, Hepworth and her central role in the development of modern sculpture - as well as in the post-war St Ives group of artists also including such luminaries as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo - will be familiar to great numbers of you, as will the still immensely ubiquitous and influential Warhol.

Eric Gill, meanwhile, emerges as a deeply contradictory and controversial figure, his much-talked about indiscretions in his personal life greatly at odds with his religious views. However, there can be little doubting his fundamentally important contribution to the fields of sculpture and typeface design, which will at least make a closer look at his printed work an interesting diversion.

We suspect that most of you will know much less about Blow, whose childhood largely spent at her grandparents' fruit farm while suffering from scarlet fever led her to spend time painting. She went on to study at Saint Martin's School of Art in the 1940s, and having died in 2006, is now remembered as a pioneering abstract artist on account of her use of collage effects and unorthodox materials such as liquid cement, chaff and charcoal.

What else can exhibition visitors expect?

There are several events connected to the exhibition, including Awesome Art!, which takes place on Saturday 8th October from 1pm to 3pm, and allows children aged 5-11 to celebrate the exhibition's opening by creating their own lino print to take home.

Meanwhile, at 1pm on Saturday 15th October, a curator's talk will explore the works on display and their backstories. You will need to book a place on this talk in advance, by calling the museum reception desk on 0191 3345691 or emailing [email protected].

The exhibition is part of the International Print Biennale, a wider North East celebration of printmaking that we have covered in more detail in the Beyond Chester-le-Street/Durham section of this issue of IN&AROUND.

Meanwhile, those of you who would like to learn more about Durham University's modern art collection may be interested to know about a guided tour of various other highlights - including printed works by Victor Pasmore, Sir Henry Moore, Hepworth and others - at the Palatine Centre on Stockton Road, Durham at 2pm on Wednesday 5th October.

This tour, Opening the Door: Art tours of the Palatine Centre, is repeated at the same time on Wednesday 12th October, and you can find out more about it by contacting [email protected].
 

Where can one start on the subject of Romanticism? First things first - I'm not about to break out the Valentine's cards. This piece is in relation to the cultural and historical phenomenon of Romanticism with a capital 'R' - the movement in public life that effectively transformed the role of the artist and the persistent popular image of what artists should be and do.  

What is Romanticism?

A quick gander at the usual popular online sources reveals some interesting definitions. We are told that it was an intellectual movement - even a state of mind - that embraced all manner of areas of creative activity, from painting and music to architecture and literature. It spanned roughly the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which should give you a clue as to the conditions that brought about its rise.

That period, you see, was that of the emerging Age of Reason - one in which rationalism and Classicism held sway, in which Royal Academy darling Sir Joshua Reynolds delivered a famous series of lectures - known as the Discourses - that with regard to painting, sought to "lay down certain general ideas, which seem to be proper for the formation of a sound taste".

The Romantic response

What may now appear to us a dry, academic approach to the determination of "taste" seemingly contrasted with a group of artists who to many contemporary observers, were about anything but sound taste: the emergent Romantics, although a few caveats should be inserted here.

First of all, Romanticism was not a cohesive art movement in the way that we have come to understand it in the 20th and 21st centuries, of being spearheaded by a formal manifesto, a la the Surrealists or even the Stuckists.

No, Romanticism was in many ways defined by its very inability to be defined, with even some of the artists who have come to be most strongly associated with the movement in today's popular imagination - such as the self-identified Classicist, Eugène Delacroix - denying any such link.

Nonetheless, he - and other artists widely acknowledged as 'Romantics' today, from Joseph Mallord William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich to Théodore Géricault and William Blake - played their part in establishing an artistic sensibility that we now see as inherently Romantic.

As for what that sensibility was...

Well, it was one that prized the idiosyncrasy of the creative act, the supremacy of the artist's imagination, the awe that one feels towards a nature that is infinitely more powerful than the human race that may aspire to suppress and control it.

At the risk of contradicting myself in beginning to more exactly define it, I consider the Romantic approach to art to be about spontaneity, expression, occasional ridiculousness and an embrace of the human being as they truly are.

The 'original' Romanticism certainly had no resort to the mechanisation or authority that was being railed against in the case of the emerging 19th century Industrial Revolution, or outright overthrown in the instance of the French Revolution that saw the beheading of a King.

But don't let such references to historical events mislead you into thinking that Romanticism is something for the dusty bookshops and museums - the mood remains very much alive and relevant, its thread continuing through present-day contemporary art.

Being a 'Romantic' artist today

Step into the Clore Gallery at London's Tate Britain and make a beeline for the Turners. Do you see those violent paint effects, those visible brushstrokes that seem to clash against each other, as if to create actual waves and storms? Those are a brilliant embodiment of the Romantic stance. The same goes for the overwhelmingly sublime 1852 John Martin painting The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or engraver Blake's dazzling 'illuminations' that accompanied his poetry.
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For more recent examples, you might look to the use of nature as an inspiration by artists like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, or the foreboding feeling of George Shaw's otherwise humdrum-seeming depictions of the Tile Hill estate in Coventry, created in Humbrol enamel paint.

The Romantic artistic sensibility most certainly survives - which might lead you to consider how it can do so in your own artwork, too. 

I had to write at some point about a cultural happening that was actually going on in my (new) hometown of Stockton-on-Tees, and last weekend, that 'happening' finally happened. I am, of course, referring to the Stockton International Riverside Festival (SIRF), a long-running event around these parts, but which I hadn't previously experienced, what with my schedule usually being occupied by arty events in other parts of Teesside. 

 Anyway, I'd missed an exhibition of lithographs of Matisse cut-outs in Newcastle to stick around in Stockton on this particular weekend, so this local 'happening' needed to be a good one, and it was. I admittedly didn't attend a huge proportion of the immense four-day events calendar, but those that I did get to were impressive enough. In fact, as the offices of my employer, Precise English are based in Green Dragon Yard, SIRF's productions provided a pretty decent soundtrack, allowing me to turn off Spotify in the office for a little while.

Described as a "street arts extravaganza", this year's running of SIRF was officially opened by Chairman of Arts Council England, Sir Peter Bazalgette, and it took little time for the carnival atmosphere to take hold - much of it just outside my office window. One highlight was an installation in the Yard itself, BEES! The Colony, where a pair of apparent beekeepers turned up and plonked half-a-dozen hives in the yard for visitors to peer in. Of course, I was so busy taking photos of the darned event that I forgot to get in the actual queue to survey what was contained within, although I'm informed of "a hilarious sting in the tail" by the accompanying brochure.

The second big highlight among the SIRF events that I actually had some direct experience of was the Trinity Fire Garden, a quite spectacular set of displays that transformed Trinity Green into... well, precisely a 'fire garden'. With ordinary residents of Teesside and various curious arty types alike milling around in the dark in and around all manner of literally fired-up contraptions flaunting the wonders of flame, it doesn't need to be said that I'll never see Trinity Green - an area that I have long regularly walked past - in quite the same way again. Central to the whole experience was a mesmeric show of light and sound in Trinity Church itself, a hollow, ruined husk of a building that I hadn't realised ever still opened to the public (railings normally keep the structure safely shielded from the arsonists who used to plague it).

Admittedly, those were my only two major experiences of SIRF '15, even if I did also catch the closing 10 minutes or so of Love Struck, a balletLORENT dance theatre production conceived specifically for the festival. It charted a story of accidental alchemy between an extroverted circus dancer and a lonely, obsessive John Walker - the man who invented the friction match in this very town. Having seen the stage under construction on the High Street in the days leading up to the several runnings of this performance, the finished result made a nice coda to Saturday's events schedule - also marking my last big encounter with this year's festival. 

Roll on next year - when I'll hopefully be much better-prepared! 

The Approach, London

4th June - 19th July 2015 

***

The press release introducing RITES, the Edinburgh-born artist Peter Davies' fourth exhibition in The Approach, made much of the notion that while these new monochromatic abstract paintings had a "graphic appearance in reproduction", they were more "tactile" when viewed first-hand.

This wasn't a declaration backed up by my own first inspection, visible brushstrokes - even at the closest quarters - being at a premium. It all meant that as intrigued as I was by the distinctive process of making these paintings initially by collage conveyed onto blank canvas via a projector, such was their outward appearance from afar that simple screen printing would have affected a barely different outcome.

However, I certainly hadn't anticipated the sheer, unadulterated blankness of these blank canvasses - utterly raw and unprimed beneath the painted grey, albeit faultlessly stretched. The aforementioned 'tactility' also becomes more evident on witnessing certain pieces across the space - all mysterious thrown shapes and dark, protruding shadows.

There are no wall labels or captions identifying the images, their lack of even names of their own further accentuating that this is a group to be appreciated as one, its constituent members unable to be fully appreciated separately.

The association to be made by many observers will be with Henri Matisse's '50s cut-outs, only for their greyscaled palette to render them the black sheep of that particular family - or a murkier underbelly. Nonetheless, all manner of associations can be made here with wider Modernism, formalism and conceptualism, in which Davies has shown ample proficiency in his career to date.

Although the setting for RITES - above a humble pub in a still slightly rough-around-the-edges Bethnal Green - might speak of a certain 'salt of the earth' warmth and distance from the contemporary art elite, the space is nonetheless a fairly nondescript white cube.

Some of the squarer graphics here give the sense of the ghosts of Tectonic plates, rubbing along uneasily. Among the more jagged of these shapes, it is tumult and even violence that are principally communicated. These qualities could have their origins just as easily in 'nature' as in the human hand - if such a distinction can even be made.

For all of the claims of 'tactility', Davies has seemingly aimed for the utmost flatness in his application of paint, even as bobbles and bumps do show up as a seemingly inevitable part of the process. Nor are the bare canvasses a continuous, immaculate shade, with apparent little dots and nooks appearing amid the grain. Not-altogether-intended dust, dirt or even paint? It's hard to tell.

Much emphasis on contrast prevails - some pieces seeming to be dominated by the canvas, others by the paint. A couple of the pieces seem to relate to their counterparts in closest proximity - or do they? Am I the chief participant at this point, teasing out similarities only discerned or cared about by me? Perhaps Davies took a resolutely unplanned approach to the positioning of canvases?

And yet, even the most minor background details of these pieces' production seem to beg for interpretation at the centre stage. The collage-projector method of working, for instance, points to a dimension of respectively blocking out or allowing light. It is also possible to see hints of the pen outline where Davies has traced the projected images onto the canvas, prior to painting them in.

Sure, there may be much about RITES that appears to say very little - right down to the nonplussed exhibition space and the manner of the pieces' installation. But perhaps by saying very little about some things, art can actually communicate more.

Under The Bridge, London

17th July 2015

****

One of the more unquestionably hipster-friendly members of the legendary Jackson clan made the jazz-club-esque Under The Bridge - beneath the Stamford Bridge home of recently crowned Premier League champions Chelsea FC - his stage for a rare UK solo show.

Supplemented for Michael's iconic high-pitched vocal parts by talent from Thriller Live as the baritone singer performed the deeper-voiced lines largely reserved for Jermaine on the family's records, Tito - somehow in keeping with his modest persona - occasionally seemed relegated to mere guest at his own show.

The man who did so much to start the Jacksons' musical legend as a child when he famously broke his father's guitar strings alternated between showing off his always unsung talent behind the mic and strumming away guitar parts on hits ranging from the group's "Heartbreak Hotel" to "Black or White", the track made a chart-topper by Michael in 1991.

While the former brought the most famous Jackson's implicit presence front-and-centre through an exhibition of the departed Gloved One's potent songwriting signature - this song from the group's 1980 Triumph album having been largely a solo effort, albeit with a La Toya opening scream and a Tito guitar solo - "Black or White" showed its worth once again as a true 'stadium song'.

The gig had opened - after a pair of opening acts that included Larissa and Diane Shaw - with a smattering of Tito's little-heard blues numbers, the first a self-referential track doffing a cap to the Jackson 5. He then called on his support talent to power through a medley covering the Motown group's one-two-three punch of upbeat hits - "I Want You Back", "ABC" and "The Love You Save" - with "I'll Be There" an obligatory later stop-off point.

A pumping "Can You Feel It" was then delivered in tribute to the group's Epic years - the label erroneously referred to by Tito as "Sony Records" in one of a small number of spoken word introductions.

The crowd appetite for familiar smashes duly satisfied, some of the attendees - including this reviewer - headed for the rather snazzily-appointed toilet facilities as Tito introduced some country songs to his set. A return to pacier territory was marked by tracks like his celebratory 2011 single "We Made It", which might just have been the perfect way to close this show.  

That role was reserved, instead, for another group chart-strutter from back in the day, the one referred to in the past by Tito as the band's definitive "disco hit": 1978's "Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)". Leaving the classily-fitted venue to the sound from the speakers of a cover of "Tell Me I'm Not Dreaming (Too Good To Be True)" - a Jermaine and Michael Jackson could-have-been hit from 1984 - I was left in no doubt that this was a fine place and night to be a Jacksons aficionado.

It was all the more of a shame, then, that such dweebiness could not have been better catered for by the line of "Tito Jackson merchandise" on offer near the door - an underwhelming selection of magnets, badges, Jackson 5 compilation CDs and a ladies', but oddly not a man's shirt. Wouldn't this have been the perfect spot for a few copies of Tito's long, long, long awaited debut solo album?

New studio material may have been referred to on stage by the man himself, but even with Tito's voice given another airing in concert after his live forays since 2012 with The Jacksons, the wait for a long-player from one of the more studio-shy members of America's most famous soul family continues.  

Lordy, lordy, lordy... where to start. I'd not quite expected to take this long to update the blog again, what with this supposedly being the year in which I got back into art writing in a big way, but there you go. 

Things have been pretty busy with the copywriting day job - or that's the excuse, anyway - and the SEO copywriting agency that I work for is set to move into a pretty exciting new office, although I'm not sure whether I should say much more about that yet to avoid jinxing anything. 

Other news... I do still keep meaning to get to all of the North East England Fine Art degree shows one year, although I only got round to one this year (Newcastle) - the rest just whooshed by, not helped by the weekends being the only time when I can even consider getting to one of these things. 

I still need to book the open-access print room at my studios to continue some monotyping experimentations that I was doing a few months back, and I wouldn't mind reeling off some new sugarlift etchings either, now that some new inspirations have come to mind. 

On the art writing front, I've applied for a few opportunities (one paid, one not) and there were promising signs with both, but I've frankly not heard back from either for a while. It's time to wing another few 'nudge' emails their way. 

Oh, and next month, I will also be in London for a week to embark on an art criticism course that I hope will point me in some interesting directions in terms of writing about art regularly again and getting published. I'm only in London twice a year, so if I can get as much value out of the trip by also cramming in some exciting evening stuff, all the better. 

Anyway! I'm not sure what to say other than that. There might be a change in my personal circumstances soon that will make it a little easier for me to make more actual art, but I'll keep shtum on all that for now. Hopefully, that'll give me more source material for my writing/blogging here. 

Bye for now... 

Well, I had to get this art blog started somehow, and I had to get into writing about art again somehow, so here goes.

I spent a few days in London from 29th January to 1st February (why am I only just writing about it now? Yeah, don't ask) and it was almost entirely centred around art gallery visits. I'm normally here once or twice per year, and I covered a lot of ground this time - the Katy Moran exhibition at the Parasol unit (it's reachable from Angel tube station if I remember rightly), Sarah Sze at Victoria Miro (basically next door - I wouldn't have known about it if a gallery guide hadn't directed me there...), Howard Hodgkin at the Gagosian and Louise Bourgeois at the Tate - and that was just the Friday...

On Saturday I squeezed in Isabelle Cornaro at South London Gallery and the Peter Paul Rubens show at the Royal Academy (which I'd never visited before in the flesh, you'll be astonished to hear). There were various other artists represented at that exhibition as part of a 'Rubens' legacy' room or something to that effect - Renoir, Cezanne and Auerbach among them.

In-between all of that, I made a few purchases - one book on erotica, another the catalogue that accompanied the Moran show and a few other art materials. I also spent too much time in the LPs section of Urban Outfitters down Oxford Street, noticing a super-duper-ultra-remastered (and also super-duper pricey) LP of Michael Jackson's Thriller on sale while wondering whether I'll ever get that vinyl turntable purchased...

The Moran and Hodgkin shows were the ones that I was most eager to see. I'd seen Moran's exhibition nearer to home, at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) back in 2008, so there was a sense of getting reacquainted with some old friends, but the new show did also extend up to what has been a decade of her practice since her 2005 graduation from the RCA.

She does appeal to the 'thing' I have for extremely painterly artists that skirt between the figurative and abstraction in various interesting ways, and it's all of those 'rustic' and idiosyncratic touches - like the bubbles on the surface of the dried acrylic - that I love getting up close to most. There's  a sense of deliberation about what she does - she's obviously not just doing random abstractly painterly stuff, which is even clearer in her newer output that I hadn't yet seen, where there are elements of collage and experimentation with alternative materials and the 'frame' of the painting that are really quite intricate. Maybe I don't respond to these newer pieces quite so much, but I'm a fan of the fact that she's doing them.

I'd bought the catalogue for the mima show and I bought the (limited to 500 copies) publication for this one, with the latter's photographs being much bigger - as is so important for appreciating an artist like Moran. I won't say the price, but I got my money's worth from it...

As for the Hodgkin show... well, I found the venue easily enough from Oxford Street, although I missed the door a good few times while some bystander made what must have seemed like doomed attempts to get me pointed in front of the right panel of glass. These new paintings were all a bit underwhelming really, not necessarily in and of themselves, but more as it was only a modest display space and there were so few of them.

That said, I'm looking at the Gasgosian website now about this show - Indian Waves - and there were apparently 30 gouaches, so I'm now wondering whether there were several more rooms that I didn't realise existed. Maybe I should have walked around the building and I'd have found where the catalogues were being sold, as I wouldn't have minded a copy? Bleh!

Anyway, thanks for reading my first substantial piece of art writing for years! The blog's all very informal and note-like to begin with as I get back into art blogging, but now it's up to me to keep the darned thing regularly updated as I take you through the arty events that I visit, accompanied by reflections on my own practice... which I hope to introduce you in the richest detail in the weeks and months to come!