Merry Xmas and Happy New Year from 2 Dogs Art Space

To all our supporters out there Merry Christmas and Happy News Year for 2017 

take care and look after yourselves 

SEE YOU NEXT YEAR.

Works in Progress Paul Humphris from London

Paul Humphris with artworks in progress

Paul Humphris current praxis is about the neon remembrances of living and working in Japan, whilst walking through the endless shopping arcades of the Kansai region. If you've been through these unending mazes of shopping arcades in the cities of Japan, you will more than likely know what the neon, fluorescent sales signs are about, with the constant shop lights flickering omnipresently day and night, it  is truly overwhelming to one senses at times.

Within Humphris’s praxis there is the usage of neon pens that one can buy at many of the shops that dot the arcades, they’re not overly expensive, nor is the paper and this tends to escalate the sensation of the cheap purchases one can make from countless shopping forays into the oversupply of cheap goods.

Interestingly, Humphris creates these artworks in silence back in Britain, he creates an almost meditative praxis within his studio, to bring the remembrances experienced in Japan as clearly as he can into coloured textural traces on paper and this is curious because it has being shown the silence may well  replenish and enlarge the brain in this article by Carolyn Gregoire  Senior Writer, The Huffington Post link to article

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/silence-brain-benefits_us_56d83967e4b0000de4037004

This is a good exhibition by Humphris and one looks forward to what he returns from London with the next time he comes to Japan.

The discovery of the human "inner GPS" and maybe its partial relationship to painting/drawing.

Sake cups and small bottle 

Drawing 

by 

Peter Davidson 2016

The aim:
To draw the motif strictly as observed from its public surfaces 
(meaning only what the eye can see)

Over the many decades of one's drawing studio praxis there has been a focus on constructing images from the public surfaces of a chosen motif, just like the above sake cups with the influence of delay (the period between the initial drawing beginnings of the image to the final end common standpoint, being the completed artwork) and human optical flux. 

Whilst drawing from the motifs public surfaces in the studio, the realization that these small drawn pencil markings or traces, were almost as if one was using a internal navigating system, going back and forth across the given picture plane from optical analysis then externalizing it in real time as an artistic mark,  this methodology was gleaned from the British artist William Coldstream who was Head of the Slade School of Art, University of London in the sixties and seventies.

These drawing and painting praxis traces which I might call aesthetic navigation marks have been going on for  three decades.  More particularliy these aestethic navigational traces began in1986 after reading a book published by the Tate called; The Hard Won image with Coldstream's painting in it titled; Reclining Nude 1976 this image  and his artistic praxis  idea of measured exactitude in painting and drawing has continued to nag my curiousity. On The Tate Galleries website there is  good coverage of Coldstream's painting ideas here;

Coldstream had employed a rigorous measuring method since his return to painting in 1937. The small vertical and horizontal marks, with which he marked the relative size and position of different elements, began to perform a denotative role in such wartime portraits as that of Havildar Ajmer Singh (Tate N05687). They became increasingly dominant in his subsequent work and could be said to reach a climax in Reclining Nude, 1974-6. The artist described the practice to Sylvester as ‘the old idea: you look at what you’re painting and you hold your pencil or brush out in the ... picture plane ... your arm straight out and the brush up vertically and you mark off with one eye shut’.^[9] He acknowledged the various flaws in the system: the discrepancy between the flat picture plane and the three-dimensional world and the difference between viewing the world with one eye and the painting with two. However, Coldstream was not ‘in the least discontented with this nucleus of unreason in his style’,^[10] and he, himself, described his measuring processes as ‘simply rituals and methods of somehow getting one going’.^[11]

Now it may be reasonably true to say that Coldstream’s intentionality's of studio praxis in lead pencil or oil traces, on canvas or paper did not equal his utterances by his own admission. 

Nonetheless, recent scientific discoveries being the human "inner GPS" by John O’Keefe May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser (Mapping the brain’s GPS system has earned three neuroscientists the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. John O’Keefe of University College London shares the prize with husband-and-wife duo May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim) caught my attention and it is my belief that Coldstream, like myself were both very interested in unity and the diversity of this kind of painting/drawing navigational/mapping from the optics. But unlike Coldstream, one has had the luxury of knowing partially how the inner GPS works, whereas he didn’t, so it was very hard for him to articulate a formal theory, hard for me to actually!

Not being a medical scientist of any sort this is just a hunch that Coldstream like myself was interested in how this human navigational mapping or "inner GPS" through optics reveals itself within his studio praxis in painting/drawing with its subsequent delay in transferral from observation onto canvas or paper. 

Whether the human "inner GPS" effects the artist praxis is true or not, I don’t know but looking at Coldstream's praxis over fifty years and mine going on thirty years, there appears on the face of it,  to be some relationship one might suggest between painting/drawing and the artist's "inner GPS" but then again I might be completely wrong.

Tate Gallery Coldstream Link;
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/coldstream-reclining-nude-t02079/text-catalogue-entry

The human inner GPS
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neuroscientists-garner-nobel-discovering-brain%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98inner-gps%E2%80%99

Michael Doherty - Two Dogs Art Space - Akashi - Japan

Painting by Michael Doherty

There is no doubt the response to the Western Australian artist Michael Doherty's  painting in Japan has been very positive and this is unusual because Kobe is within the Japanese Aesthetic Golden Triangle so it's a hard place to impress and this he has done.

Western Australia is Hyogo's Prefecture sister state and in as much as it is far away, it is not that isolated but it is when it comes to viewing artworks, as the Internet doesn't give you the full story, for there is scale, dimensions and the impact of the art object just to name a few. But nonetheless, exhibitions such as Dohertys that are now coming out of Western Australia are giving the Japanese audiences a live chance to experience one artist's idiosyncratic memory, and what interests him paint in that faraway terrain.

Doherty's painting are strange but odd is good that's for sure for nowadays a lot of art appears to a brand label, almost an expected taste when one visits the gallery but when viewing his images that supposed art flavour is usually shattered by the weird accumulations of objects, he desires to render in oils and that's a great system within studio praxis to achieve, being the continued search for new motifs to paint either internally or externally from ones memory.

At times when viewing Michael's painting the memory of the English romantic painter John Martin resonates within one's memory, due to the phantasmagorical subject matter he desired to paint, and it seems not dissimilar at times to some of Doherty's painting as seen below in John Martins illustration Paradise Lost. Book 3, line 365 (The Court of the Gods) London c 1827.

Doherty is fast becoming one of Western Australia's most original painters that is now getting recognised internationally and deservedly so, 2 Dogs Art Space has pleasure in bringing this current series of paintings to Japan.

Link to John Martin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_(painter)

Diokno Pasilan Still Life Drawing Project

Diokno Pasilan's Still life

Motif

Image courtesy of the artist 

Some of Diokno Pasilan's memories originate from his encounters of living in the Philippines and Australia, both countries are islands, one a lot bigger than the other but nonetheless sailing boats, ships and small water craft have played a large part within their histories for survival.

The above still life by Pasilan looks playful, almost like someone is having fun by stacking the boats up to see what they might look like as a shape, the audience who gaze upon it may liken it to ships out of water, it appears at this point the artist's human curiosity starts to kick in for where does the motif start, which boat is subtracted or added to the motif's form and how does he articulate this within studio praxis. 

Why does memory perform such strange tasks of arranging what might be considered an odd array of different coloured boats and why does Pasilan draw in charcoal,  eliminating the colour, reducing the number of boat shapes to an almost skeletal form, like a fish back bone without a head or tail.

Image courtesy of the artist 

One doesn't think artists can have all the answers of their artworks, for somethings artist's create contain a certain mystery in the way they manifest themselves, from human remembrances into a drawing.  And all the text in the world isn't going to adequately explain why Pasilan has created such an image but it now floats on the Internet for the audiences engage with their memories of ships sailing through the passages of time, oscillating down ones nervous system colliding with other remembrances through human delay.

One of the nice traits of Pasilan's drawing the audience is free to engage as he has created craft (charcoal drawing) to set themselves free to travel their own oceans of memory. And in a way the drawing above by Pasilan in its engagement with the spectator reminds me of  a statement by the American Artist Dan Graham "my art is for the people" and so is Doiknos it seems.

Audience vists to Edo and Meji Ukiyo-e Master s Yoshitoshi, Hiroshige III, Toyokuni III and others at 2 Dogs Art Space - Akashi

Audience members

enjoying  the show at the extended 2 Dogs Art Space

even though it was a biotterly cold day