Riding the wave

I am riding the embodied wave that is my jet lag.

airport aesthetic - it adds to the exhaustion

Back in Europe after farewells, 21 hours of flying, 4 airports, and 2 Fridays, I love the sudden clarity that wakes me up at three, and today four, o'clock in the morning. By mid-afternoon I am in a pleasant daze. Later, I fall asleep within minutes of placing my head on the pillow. For a few hours before it starts again.

In the wide-awake early mornings, I drink lots of tea and eat toast. I listen to Raymond Chandler stories on the radio as the darkness shifts to grey. I make life decisions and note them down to consider when rationality returns.

These drifting days soon end but they are not so unpleasant. A nowhere-place to rest up. If I can continue to avoid the sinus infections that usually plague me after flying, I will be content.

And being back in the studio is making me happy.

Drifting days.  acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron, 2016

The light here

is so bright. Even in the NZ equivalent of the end of February (2 months after the equinox), when the sun comes out, it is dazzling. For me, this makes everything more noticeable - and if you know me, you'll know that 'noticing' matters both theoretically and empirically!

yesterday at Castle Point on the Wairarapa coast (south east of North Island), looking out to the Pacific

At nine in the morning, the light sent shadows of old oak trees across the road:

and the double-glazing provided a cinematic image of the kitchen on the screen of the fence..

Meeting up again with paintings I made and left here in 2015, I notice how they too captured the light. In the title too!

Guaranteed to bring a ray of sunshine into your home. Acrylic on canvas, Lynne Cameron 2015.

Today I bring you a fence

in the bright New Zealand sunshine and the pure New Zealand air that lets the lichen flourish

around an old cemetery in the north of South Island

And a painting from earlier in the year that began with a rather similar fence ...

Scarlet walks on    acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron 2016.

Beautiful disruption

No blog posts for a while because I have been travelling. Flying around the world to New Zealand, 23 hours on airplanes, and a day lost. And suffering the usual disruption to sleep and body patterns as a result.

The other, more beautiful, result is that I get to be with my faraway family for a while.

As for the art, it is plodding along with my disrupted self: looking, noticing, and preparing. I wandered through the botanic gardens and the cemetery next to it, finding begonias, camellias and last year's roses. This jet lag phase offers a different way to be present in a strangely distanced world.

In The French Art Shop, I was seduced by oil pastels. And when the sun comes out, it is amazingly bright, even in the depths of winter.

I am trusting this beautiful disruption.

Connecting painting with empathy and metaphor

I was interviewed recently by the online magazine Interalia and used the opportunity to think about connections between my work now as an artist and my academic research into metaphor and empathy.

My dancing mind          acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron, 2015.

You can find the interview here:

http://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/lynne-cameron/

Here's an excerpt:

Question: Is intuition part of creativity and the intellectual process?

Intuition for me is a quiet whispering voice from deep inside, that is so easily ignored. It often suggests connections and paths of action.

We learn as academics not to call on intuition, although it insists and sometimes is the only way through. That’s why intellectuals find it helpful when working to take long walks and why the best ideas may arrive in the shower – stepping away from the desk and screen gives intuition the space to move and speak.

Although the intellectual process is often held to be rational, it is seldom entirely so. For me, it works best when intuition, imagination, and reason interact. ... As intellectuals, we may start from intuition, consider hunches about what matters and possibilities for ways forward, use our imagination to notice gaps in knowledge, and find our intuition offering solutions to intractable problems. Despite this, it is still not considered appropriate to display intuition or speak much of its role in academia.

Studio Interludes

Before leaving Berlin for a holiday, I held the last Studio Interlude of this academic year. These began as an invitation for research colleagues to come into my studio during the working week, to take an hour away from text and keyboard, and to spend it with art.

Over the months, I've talked about my thinking and making processes. We've had a go at drawing, printing and painting. I have discovered that teaching painting is not only fun but lets us experiment with a range of creative strategies. We've experienced overcoming inhibitions to make large gestures with a paint brush; pushing through a problem; finding out by trying; adding contrasts; leaving empty space; creating negative space; taking risks.

For this last Interlude, I brought small shells from a Scottish beach. I showed some works of Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

We looked very closely at the lines on a shell or stone, and used this looking as a starting point for painting on card.

At the end we put all the paintings in the corridor to make an impromptu, floor-level exhibition and gently critiqued the work. Then we applauded ourselves. Well deserved!

What it is not, and what it is

Painting is not how I make sense of the world.

There is not much sense to be made of it, as it turns out.

Painting is how I hold the world for a moment,

For long enough to notice,

And see it slip away.

Degrees of uncertainty                                   acrylic on paper, 51 x 60cm, Lynne Cameron 2016.

There was an exhibition

and then there was a holiday.

First, the exhibition, "Landscapes of Possibility".

It happened during the conference in Berlin of the Researching and Applying Metaphor conference. RaAM and I go back a long way - to its beginnings in fact. And it was lovely to meet up with friends and former colleagues in the exhibition room.

There were paintings on paper and on canvas. A wonderful group of students helped put up the work and organise the furniture to make the university room welcoming as an art space.

There were lots of visitors, for the artist talk on the Saturday and throughout the weekend.

I especially enjoyed meeting Robin, who has just turned 4, and who wanted to make her own picture in response to one of mine.

There was lots of deep looking, encouraged by providing guidelines and by making the space as comfortable as possible. Cushions helped.

I really hate 'museum legs' and want my visitors to feel at home with the art...

And there were sales and positive comments. All in all, a lovely experience.

Then I needed a break...

Under all illusions of civility, our fear

The rather mild dynamic painting that I started on Tuesday took flight in a strange and scary way as I listened to the EU referendum outcome. Look closely into the dark space and you will find fear creeping out. It's in all of us, the nightmare fear of losing what matters. And when it insists on being felt, that fear often creates an Other to blame; labelling and blaming can mark the start of violence and hatred.

The politics and rhetoric of the referendum were shamefully misleading, even dishonest. The outcome was shocking. But it was the new emphasis on the Other in social media posts that was most upsetting. The social divisions being pointed out, highlighted, increased: older people were being made Other; immigrants being made Other; non-Londoners being made Other.

I let the horrible image emerge in the painting so I could face it and find out what it was telling me. And I wrote about it on my Empathy blog here

Artists have an important job now to remind people of how the world can be, and of the power of our every choice.

On a day like today

I sat by the Baltic sea last weekend with a German couple and a good friend from Berlin. We talked about our families and discovered that our grandfathers could have been fighting each other in WW1 - lives ruined by nerve gas and killing. Our fathers and uncles were each physically and emotionally damaged by having to fight in WW2, in Russia and Burma. We thought of our sons, appreciated the peacetime we have lived in, and hoped that this generation would not lose their awareness of how much this matters.

More existentialism... and art

We are our projects, says Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex ... Her words on women artists are challenging me to speak more loudly about my projects. Her words on women artists are becoming a new project..

"... what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other; an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanance."

Who is making me up?    acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron, 2015

enlarging the idea of negative space

The idea of negative space has fascinated me since I first heard about it. It changes the way you think about painting when you stop trying to paint 'things' and paint the space instead.

In The Wonder World for Enid series, grey paint was used to make negative space that created flower-like shapes.

Sometimes negative space is "the space between", which also suggests metaphorical interpretations, and reminds me of my research into how people talking together cross the gap of understanding that lies between them.

Recently, I've been dipping into French existentialist philosophy (prompted by Sarah Bakewell's excellent book At the Existentialist Cafe). There I found a further extension of negative space, into 'specific nothingness'. This idea from Jean Paul Sartre captures that feeling of something or someone actively absent. For example, if you think you have a whole bar of chocolate in the cupboard, but when you get there you find only half a bar, the missing half is what draws your attention. And in a more serious vein, Bakewell writes of friends of Sartre and de Beauvoir who they would meet in the cafe but who then disappeared during the war - their absence in the cafe would be strongly present.

I have been thinking a lot about this idea of "the presence of absence" and applying it to my experience here in Berlin.

Yesterday I showed a new audio-visual piece on the theme at our group workshop. It included some exploratory collages made after watching the film Jezebel (from 1938). There is definitely more to be done with the presence of absence.

The air is full

of fluffy white seeds from the trees that pile up on the pavements

of swifts swooping in formation over the roof tops and between buildings

and of rumbling, cracking thunder

of bubbles blown by a child

and of ideas from painting, reading, writing.

My task now is to assemble them into an exhibition.

That kind of day (continues)

The painting I showed you last time has been through several more stages.

Some orange hoops crept in one day.

For a week it shared the studio/kitchen space with some flowers from the market. The lilac and gorse died more quickly than the aquilegia.

The aquilegia wanted in to the painting. It was added with a long thin brush and black paint, blossoms and leaves printed on with thick paint. And then it asked for a pale background to stand out against.

The painting sat, taped onto the board, for a few more days, not feeling finished. Then it was time for strength and determination to add yellow. Four yellows in fact: cadmium yellow deep, lemon yellow, process yellow, cadmium yellow light. Perhaps that was the gorse.

The orange shifted tone. And more indigo, always more indigo, dripping.

It's still sitting, waiting. Perhaps it is finished.

That kind of day

My dynamic paintings usually take several days to work to an endpoint. Today I have been adding to one that I started a few days ago. It was already pretty busy in terms of colours and strokes:

The changes I made today were about light and dark. I used indigo to darken some strokes and places, and then white and emerald green to lighten others. Can you spot the differences?

It was a meditative process that took me deep into the painting to add contrast to small areas. I love that process!

The painting is called "That kind of day". And it is probably not yet finished.

The fall of the cherry blossom

Spring in Berlin was cold for several weeks. The cherry blossom came out and glowed in the new light. Then one day it was hot. That was the beginning of the fall.

Sometimes - quite often, in fact - the street offers abstract compositions to inspire future paintings. Often the organic shapes in my paintings contrast with hard-edged lines or strips, like the falling blossom blown against kerbs and walls.

Untitled. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 60 x 60 cm, Lynne Cameron, 2016.

A Fierce Following

This is the artist statement I wrote for the pop-up exhibition in April. Some days I need to read it again.

Walking in a changed light

I didn't know why I wanted to go for a walk this morning. Or why I needed to know. I found out by setting off.

In the four weeks I was away, spring came to Berlin. Blossom, bright green new leaves, longer evenings - I had noticed these changes immediately. Walking, I realised that the light has changed qualitatively too. The sun is higher in the sky. It makes sharper shadows. It shines in different places on familiar streets.

Unexpected resonance between the cobbled pavement and a crocodile skin accordion case (what else?) outside the antique shop:

I needed to walk to set myself back into the place as it is now.

My dancing mind. Acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron, 2016.