Goldfish in Hong Kong

 

 Goldfish in Hong Kong.

Photo by Michael Murton

A photograph of goldfish in plastic bags hanging in a market in Hong Kong sent to me by a friend this week reminded me of some paintings that I did 10 or more years ago. It is an odd thing that when making work how old themes and ideas return, unbidden yet transformed into something visually new and different. I like the way that this somehow takes me by surprise.

 

 

 Husk.

 

The bag a throwaway, an insignificant thing drawing as much attention to itself as to the thing that it contains!

Medical Specimens?

 Occupy 2

Even before I began to enclose some of my constructed drawings in bags there were connections between these works and medical specimens preserved in jars. There is for many of us a fascination with the strange, eclectic and wonderful choices that are found for example in The Wellcome Collection, London http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions.aspx and The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/.
The body parts trapped for examination, odd little somethings separated from the whole giving them an entirely other life and other meaning.

...last chance to see the Lygia Pape at the Serpentine Gallery!

The Lygia Pape exhibition was made more beguiling by its contrast to the David Hockney which I visited the day before.http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2011/03/lygia_pape.html
The Serpentine on a freezing cold morning was an oasis of calm and quietness with Pape's thoughtful, thought provoking and challenging work filling the white spaces.
Of particular interest to me were her spare woodcuts and ink drawings. They demanded a long and careful looking which left me feeling somehow rewarded and enriched.

I suppose that this quality of meditative looking is something that I seek in my own work and value in the viewer who takes the time to give more than a passing glance.

The Death of Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Tanning died at the end of last month, she was 101 years old!She was probably the best known of the female Surrealists. The last time I saw one of her works exhibited was in the 'elles@centrepompidou' a couple of years ago. The work was titled 'Chambre 202, Hotel du Pavot'
http://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view-work/work-132
Its stuffed figures recalled again the work of Louise Bourgeois.
I don't think that these connections are coincidences. The influences of these great women artists work at many levels not the least as an undercurrent of thought or a pulse of visual memory. Then unbidden they weave their way into my own works, both unrecognised and recognised.