Sue's colours

As I mentioned in passing, about six or seven weeks ago, I've been lucky enough over the past few months to be granted access to the development journal of artist Sue Bamford as she works on a memory theme.

One of the recent pages from that notebook particularly intrigued me. It shows, in oil pastel swatches, a detailed and profusely annotated comparison between landscape palettes.

"...this page ... was really the first idea which came to me when pondering possibilities. ... ... ... When I remembered my trips to the Caribbean and Connemara, what struck me most was the differences in mood and colours between them ... Hence the page developed..."^[1]

The page is, for me, an impressive work of art and act of memory in itself. It's shown in miniature on the left. Click it for a larger view

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[1] Sue Bamford, unpublished correspondence, 2008.

Singing the land

Six weeks or so ago, I referred to “several good exhibitions coming up, which I am eagerly looking forward to visiting” but only named one of them: Acerone's Where is Iron John? which I visited a couple of days later and where I bought a print of the "White knight"

Others which I had in mind included the epic Bronze at the RA in London (which I managed to get to at the beginning of this month) and Sue Bamford's more intimate Impressions of landscape which opened with a private view last night at the Grange gallery in North Dublin County.

I've mentioned Sue Bamford more than once before in this blog. I love her work, which has two primary strands: the land, usually abstracted to a greater or lesser extent from the area around her home, and avian studies (she is passionate about bird life, amongst many other things) which are usually more figurative. I find both entrancing, in different ways, though  my greatest favourites tend to be drawn from the former: her lyrical but sure use of line, texture and colour sets up strong resonances within me which I am completely unable to put into words.

The exhibition is open to the public from today until the end of December (though a considerable number of the works sold immediately at the private view, so you may need to hunt between increasing numbers of red dots for ones which are still available to buy). If you are in the Dublin area (or can get there) in the five weeks ahead, I thoroughly recommend a visit.

Sue Bamford web site

I have, at intervals, several times made mention here of my admiration for the work of Dublin artist Sue Bamford and have, since her exhibition last December, spent many hours lost in examples of her work on the walls of my home.

She has, as I write this, a weekend "at home" exhibition. She also, I'm delighted to say, has a new stand-alone web site (separate, that is, from her Facebook page) carrying galleries of her work.

One of the galleries is given over to the landscapes which I love so much – including, I'm quietly chuffed to see, Estuary in winter which I was lucky enough to buy in her December 2012 show.

Another contains, amongst other drawings, examples (here, here and here) from the sequence of drawings which I mentioned (see "Drawing from the hip") back in January, which so strongly call out to the observational photographer in me: her Dubliners sequence of street drawings from a personal James Joyce project, each framed in the wing mirror of her car.

Small cardboard rock

A while back, I mentioned that I have the unique pleasure and opportunity of seeing the developmental workbooks of County Dublin artist Sue Bamford, growing in something approaching real time.

I always, given the opportunity by any artist, make a beeline for these; they reveal a deep and rich hinterland behind the finished works, a mental and spiritual analogue of the iceberg's 90% below the waterline. This is where experimental thinking is done, development of craft piloted, ideas grown. To have a window onto their evolution as it happens, though, rather than just a snapshot at one point, is even better^*. My access to Sue's notebooks is a constant delight now stretching over two and a half years, and a cumulative one since every page, each offering a new view or aspect of the world, remains available for backward reference in the light of new additions.

I can't record every astonishment and wonder (it would be a full time job, and demand a blog all of its own), nor even all of my particular highlights. Sometimes, however, a particular fragment sings to me in a uniquely unexpectedly way on a perfect resonance frequency ... I don't mention most of those, either, lost as I am in the moment, but I do always think that I would like to.

Recently, happening across an entry labelled simply "black gesso, acrylic & pen on cardboard", I asked permission to publicly post and write about it. That permission being given, here it is at top left; click on it for a larger view. The interaction of materials, line, colour and texture is wonderful to see. Drawn from rocks at Loughshinny, it has since led to a larger piece of work from which the title of this post is taken.

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* One of the many fringe benefits of teaching is seeing this development of process. Not just in art but in any subject. Perhaps I'll talk more of that another time ... but for now I'm concerned with the specific joys of seeing inside a mature artist, which is a much rarer opportunity.

Drawing from the hip

I said, recently, that my favourite Sue Bamford works lie in her abstractionist landscape strand; and, indeed, it's a picture in that strand which I've bought from her current show.

However … looking through her latest sketch books, while at the show, I was was competely entranced by the “snapshot documentary”, photographic eye, quality of her representational drawing.

Weeks later, I still find my mind returning to one particular set: an urban sequence compiled around a James Joyce theme.

This one, framed in the wing mirror of her car, is an example. (As always, click it for a larger view.)

Memories are made of this

I've just posted a response over on photo.net's Philosophy of Photography forum which is probably not going to do my cultural credibility much good. At the same time, I feel it's important, so ... in for a penny, in for a pound.

The thread, "Every Photograph is worthy", was started by Nic Bower:

"...when I look at any photograph produced in a different time or generation, I find interest in it. It could be a standard family snap shot but if it was produced 30 or more years before - it invites or commands a deeper interest or delight or pleasure from fresh eyes not belonging to the time when the photograph was produced. What a fantastic. amazing medium photography is; almost every photograph from anyone ever taken will be considered valuable by someone."
(Nic Bower, Mar 10, 2008; 09:56 a.m.)

Following that are several responses; I recommend reading the whole stream, including the opening lines which I have clipped above. As I write this, nobody has come back at me for my two penn'orth; (but I expect they will) so it closes the sequence for the time being. Fore those who read here but not there, here it goes:

I have to pluck up the courage for this [gulp] but ... I'm with Nic on this one.

There are different kinds of value and worth ... kinds, not levels.

Most of the emphasis here in photo.net is on functional or 'high art' worth - functional being, just for example, anything from social documentary to wedding or sports work, while by high art I mean the image as an æsthetic object in its own right.

Those are both important and worthwhile. But they are neither the only kinds of worth nor more important than other kinds.

Snapshot photography is many things: again taking only two examples, it is individual self examination of a unique kind on a mass scale and at the same time a single social artefact.

I think all those inane shots of Bob and Tash getting progressively rat-arsed in a bar in Ayia Napa, and the growing pains of Sam (age 3 months), and the repetitive strain of Aunt Agatha recording every park bench in Christendom, are wonderful and epic.

Yes ... unlike [the response contributor preceding mine], I would go so far as to say that every cellphone snap is worthy. Not worthy or epic in the same way as Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, nor for the same reasons, nor on the same scale, nor for the same people, nor even in the same cultural universe ... but equally so, yes.
(Felix Grant, Mar 10, 2008; 04:34 p.m.)

One question that occurs to me, in response to suggestions that one type of image is worthy and another is not, is: worthy of what, exactly?

There's another aspect to mass snapshot photography, which I didn't mention above. For the past three months, I've been privileged to have access to the ongoing project notebook of Sue Bamford, an artist working on a theme of memory, and the experience has quite profoundly changed the ways in which I see the relation between memory and image.

The nature of memory is an elusive and intriguing thing. Artistic memory is structured in particularly nuanced and layered ways, which make externally visible those mechanisms which are usually hidden and unconscious. Mass snapshot photography is stripped down and unsubtle, by comparison: it serves as the concrete armature upon which agreed versions of memory can be constructed between individuals who might otherwise have very different memories of the same events. Beyond that, it now serves a very similar function for society as a whole. Social memory is the total body of all photographs (I include video) taken ... and if "professional" images provide the underlying skeleton of that social memory, mass snapshots provide the flesh which give it life and form. It may not be great art, or the sort of memory we would chose to have ... but it's how we, as a single extended social meta organism, see ourselves.

Symphony

Crossing flat rural lowlands by train, I'm watching the aerobatics of a starling flock preparing to roost.

I know the research results and mathematics of this phenomenon; I have photographed and filmed it many times; I have played with Boids. These are enriching ways to explore it, but can never capture the wonder.

I've mentioned before the privilege of seeing Dublin artist Sue Bamford's working records. Amongst pages I've seen recently is this wonderful drawn and grated charcoal impression of the feeling of a flock, reproduced here with her permission.