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WELCOME TO THE EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS MAY NEWSLETTER
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THIS MONTH - Climate change news - Andy Warhol - Up North - Pencils -
Art on demand - Police portraiture - and more
If you are viewing on gmail remember to click 'display images' and 'view entire message' when you reach the bottom.
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The East Finchley Open Artists CLIMATE CHANGE Exhibition
The Offshoot Gallery is closed but we have been showing this exhibition online during April.
It's been well received so we are planning to put it online again as soon as we can organise it.
Watch this space or keep an eye on our website www.eastfinchleyopen.org.uk for details,
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ANDY WARHOL Tate Modern until 6th September (Gallery closed until further notice)
MIKE COLES writes:-
Andy Warhol was an American artist, film maker, photographer, print maker, author, music producer and socialite
At this moment we should all be having the opportunity to visit the major Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern but the gallery is closed because of the pandemic. The exhibition is due to run until 6th September. There is no information on when the Tate might re-open – they were talking about early May, but as things stand, that seems unlikely. Whether it’s end date can be extended beyond September would depend on contracted incoming exhibitions, extended insurances and whether some or all of the work is required elsewhere, but I very much hope we get a chance to see it. I’ve seen Warhol exhibitions before and have always been very impressed seeing the work in real life rather than printed.
Andy Warhol died in February 1987 aged 58, but in those 58 years he had had enough experience to fill two lives.
Picasso is often cited as the most prolific of the worlds best known artists. Records show he produced around 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints, 34,000 book illustrations and at least 300 sculptures and ceramics. The number of his drawings has not been quantified. Compare that with Vermeer’s 34 paintings or Van Gogh’s 65.
Andrew Warhola Jnr was born in in August 1928. Warhol’s father had emigrated to America from what is present day Slovenia in 1914 and his mother joined him in 1921. They settled in Pittsburgh where his father worked in a coal mine. Andy had two older brothers.
At the age of eight, Warhol contracted Chorea — a rare and sometimes fatal disease of the nervous system that left him bedridden for several months. It was during these months that his mother, herself a skilful artist, gave him his first drawing lessons. Drawing soon became Warhol's favourite childhood pastime. He was also an avid fan of the movies, and when his mother bought him a camera at the age of nine, he took up photography as well, developing film in a makeshift darkroom he set up in their basement.
Warhol was 14 when his father died of liver disease but his will dictated that his life savings be put towards Andy's college education, and so in 1945 he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, (now Carnegie Mellon University), to study pictorial design. In college, Warhol developed a blotted-line technique that combined drawing with basic printmaking. Blotted line allowed him to create a variety of illustrations using the same initial pattern. This was the beginning of his lifelong interest to quickly created multiples. Warhol famously quipped, “I want to be a machine,” alluding to his interest in mass production.
When he graduated from college in 1949, Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. It was also at this time that he dropped the "a" at the end of his last name. He became one of the most successful commercial artists of the 1950s. He won frequent awards for his uniquely whimsical style, using his own blotted line technique and rubber stamps to create his drawings.
Meanwhile in England in the mid-1950's, a group of painters, sculptors, writers, and critics spearheaded by the British artist Richard Hamilton calling themselves the ‘Independent Group’ aimed to ‘restructure a social order ruled by conformity’. In the Art world their ideas gained traction, there was an appetite for change and renewal as there had been with Dada after World War One and as happened later in the 1970's with punk. Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? was an early marker of this new movement which became known as Pop Art. In post-war austerity Britain it was the view from abroad of the Utopian new lifestyle being promoted and sold by American consumerism that 'Pop Artists' found attractive.
Hamilton’s description of Pop Art: “Pop art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business.”
When Pop-Art spread to the more advanced and prosperous US in the following years they viewed the same consumerism in their own terms. Up to this point Warhol had been a successful graphic designer for ten years but Pop Art offered him an opportunity to advance his professed ambition to be rich and famous, which he embraced enthusiastically.
And so it began.
When the film star Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 Warhol almost immediately started making portraits of the actress, based on a publicity photograph taken by Gene Kornman in 1953 to advertise the Monroe film Niagara. The Campbell's Soup Cans followed - They were exhibited in Los Angeles and helped Warhol along to becoming a prominent Pop Art artist. At this point Warhol was still hand painting canvases to look like they were mass produced.
From 1962 the dynamics were changing. Warhol was becoming not just a character in an art movement but the movement itself. Early on in his career he realised the potential for making money from art. He made more portraits of stars including Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy. By 1964 he had largely industrialised his work using photographic silkscreen printing to directly reproduce images already in the public eye, such as publicity shots or tabloid photographs. The technique also allowed him to employ assistants to easily make multiple versions and variations of the prints.
Warhol understood the superficial nature of celebrity in American society. Images of public figures are created by marketing companies to make money, but in reality, say little about the person behind the mask. Warhol succeeded in creating a powerful public image for himself – the Andy Warhol ‘brand’ – with his trademark straight blonde hair and dark glasses. He became a master at cultivating his own celebrity profile as his fame grew. He constantly documented his daily life through photography and film, an early version of today’s social media.
At this point we have a shy gay man with a skin condition feeding off a progressively avant-garde New York counter cultural scene embracing more and more extreme ideas in art, music and film. Although he professed to hate hard drugs he did use the acceptable, at the time, methamphetamine Obetrol, allowing him to work long hours with less sleep. (Obetrol was banned in the 1970’s)
In 1964, Warhol moved his studio to a large warehouse in midtown Manhattan. The space was decorated with silver paint and aluminium foil, and it became known as the Silver Factory. (the ‘Factory’ moved several times) It was a creative hub for parties and experimentation, from drug use to music and art. Its popularity grew quickly, and it attracted a diverse and inclusive crowd of artists, friends, and celebrities, (Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Salvador Dali, Keith Richards, Lou Reed, Liza Minelli and hundreds more), many of whom posed for short film portraits. With a stationary Bolex film camera, from 1964–66 Warhol made almost 500 of these silent four-minute 'Screen Tests' to be played back in slow motion.
During this time he refined his aura of inscrutability. He could be generous and he could be withholding, and you never knew which he would choose—the classic technique of the passive-aggressive. Within the Factory, he was known as Drella, after the two sides of his personality, Dracula and Cinderella. As an artist, he was astonishingly productive and a great risk-taker. At a time when it seemed that everyone was going too far, he went farther – and then farther after that.
On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, a feminist writer, who had appeared in Warhol’s film I, a Man (1967), came into the Factory and shot him at close range. Solanas claimed 'He was having too much influence on my life'. Warhol was physically and emotionally scarred by the nearly fatal shooting. This event significantly altered his working practice from an experimental, collaborative approach to a much more guarded one. The shooting damaged eight organs and left scars across his stomach and torso. The incident and numerous surgeries that followed required that he wear a corset for the rest of his life. Unsurprisingly the shooting advanced his aura and mystique even further.
Warhol was an enigma – which is what he wanted. On the one hand, his paintings and prints of brand images and celebrity faces could be read as a criticism of what he viewed as a culture obsessed with money and celebrity. On the other hand, Warhol's focus on consumer goods and pop-culture icons, as well as his own obsession with money and celebrity, suggests a life celebrating those very aspects of American culture that his work criticised. Recognising this, Warhol said "making money is art and working is art, and good business is the best art."
He made movies of objects that never moved and used actors who could not act, and he made art that did not look like art. He wrote a novel without doing any writing. He had his mother sign his work, and he sent an actor, Allen Midgette, (yes), to impersonate him on a lecture tour (and, for a while, Midgette got away with it). He had other people make his paintings. And he demonstrated, every time he did this, that it didn’t make any difference. His Brillo boxes were received as art, and his eight-hour film of the Empire State Building was received as a film. The people who saw someone pretending to be Andy Warhol believed that they had seen Andy Warhol. The works that his mother signed and that other people made were sold as Warhol’s. And what he made up in interviews was quoted by critics to explain his intentions. Warhol wasn’t hiding anything, and he wasn’t out to trick anyone. He was just playing to the rules of the Art Game. Like a casino owner he kept on winning because people just kept playing (and paying)
Critics have different opinions:-
Was Warhol - one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century, creating some of the most recognizable images ever produced. Challenging the idealist visions and personal emotions conveyed by abstraction, Embracing popular culture and commercial processes to produce work that appealed to the general public. Was he one of the founding fathers of the Pop art movement, expanding the ideas of Duchamp by challenging the very definition of art. Did his artistic risks and constant experimentation with subjects and media make him a pioneer in almost all forms of visual art.
Or was Warhol - with his bewildering character, his deep superficiality, libidinous desire for fame and wealth, obsessed to see his goals through the medium of painting. An unfortunate boy coming from an immigrant working class family who desperately seeking a promising future with all the insuperable barriers confronting him. In reading his past would anyone have believed that someday that pale, pimply, poor creature would become the godfather of pop art movement in the early 1960s.
I personally like his work, especially in real life – but who knows what terms of reference I have accumulated to make me think that.
Andy Warhol died in February 1987 after post-operative problems with a gall-bladder removal.
Back to productivity, although not in Picasso’s league Warhol is credited with 900 paintings; approximately 100 sculptures; nearly 2,000 works on paper; more than 1,000 published and unique prints; 4,000 photographs; 60 feature films; 200+ Screen Tests; and more than 4,000 videos and millions of posters. Most advertising agencies will have an original Warhol somewhere.
In spite of all the criticism thrown at him, he would never actually take any steps to justify himself. He even never claimed any particular importance of any of his works.” if you want to know all about Andy Warhol just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there i am. There is nothing behind it.” His modest assertion suggested there were no ulterior meanings, no hidden depths , no hint of anything that would indicate any more significance than a product to be bought and consumed
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Warhol is buried in Pittsburgh. His grave has a webcam. You can see what it’s like at the moment by clicking on this link: https://www.warhol.org/andy-warhols-life/figment/
(Pittsburgh is 5 hours behind us)
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UP NORTH - 1968-1971 - PEOPLE, PLACES & STEREOTYPES
a photographic memoir by MIKE COLES
(Please excuse the blatant self-publicity but it's been a difficult month with virtually nothing happening, except of course virtually)
In ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’ (1937) author George Orwell (an old Etonian) wrote: -
“…..but when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart
from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly
because of certain real differences which do exist, but still more because
of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a
long time past. There exists in England a curious cult of Northern-ness,
a sort of Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South will always
take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask
him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real'
life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work,
that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers
and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, dour,
plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish,
effeminate, and lazy - that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner
goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague
inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among savages, while the
Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a
barbarian out for loot. And feelings of this kind, which are the result
of tradition, are not affected by visible facts”
In the years after the Second World War mining, shipbuilding, textiles and heavy industry in the great Northern cities sought to recover their pre-war economic strength, but gradually went into decline.
Culturally and economically they did not attract the investment that the South enjoyed. By 1970 men had gone to the moon, but cheap imports of goods and materials had undermined and eroded the value of many of the traditional skills. Large city centre areas of Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Sheffield had become effectively slums.
Liverpool, in particular, took steps to halt the decline. The city bulldozed old decrepit Victorian streets and, after a period of time, put up high-rise blocks of social housing. It was a bold initiative repeated in other cities but as an unintended consequence it fractured communities leading to isolation on soulless estates – eventually to be bulldozed themselves. Social cohesion depended on stability – jobs, homes and communities. The communities were broken up, the jobs were under threat, investment from the South was lacking, but the stubborn resilience, black humour, pride and warmth of the North had survived – simple values, family, pub, sport and betting,
There are as many ‘Norths’ as there are people – urban and country, inner cities and idyllic dales and lakes. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s having established that whippets were quite safe and curd tart wasn’t at all bad, I visited many of these cities – here are a few impressions of people and places from that time.
Manchester, Burnley, Blackpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle
www.mikecoles.photography
'UP NORTH' is due to be published in March 2021 (although I guess it could be later now)
Here are a few pictures from the book:-
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Cambridge University professor John Barrow tells the story of this underrated technological marvel:
The modern pencil was invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. The magic material that was so appropriate for the purpose was the form of pure carbon that we call graphite. It was first discovered in Europe, in Bavaria at the start of the fifteenth century; although the Aztecs had used it as a marker several hundred years earlier. Soon after, in 1564, even purer deposits of lump graphite were found in Borrowdale near Keswick in the Lake District.
Initially it was believed to be a form of lead and was called ‘plumbago’ or black lead (hence the ‘plumbers’ who mend our lead water-carrying pipes), a misnomer that still echoes in our talk of pencil ‘leads’. It was called graphite only in 1789, using the Greek word ‘graphein’ meaning ‘to write’. Pencil is an older word, derived from the Latin ‘pencillus’, meaning ‘little tail’, to describe the small ink brushes used for writing in the Middle Ages.
During the nineteenth century a major pencil manufacturing industry developed around Keswick in order to exploit the high quality of the graphite. The first factory opened in 1832, and the Cumberland Pencil Company has celebrated its 188th anniversary; although the local mines have long been closed and supplies of the graphite used now come from Sri Lanka and other faraway places. Cumberland pencils were those of the highest quality because the graphite used shed no dust and marked the paper very well.
Conte’s original process for manufacturing pencils involved roasting a mixture of water, clay and graphite in a kiln at 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit before encasing the resulting soft solid in a wooden surround. The shape of that surround can be square, polygonal or round, depending on the pencil’s intended use — carpenters don’t want round pencils that are going to roll off the workbench. The hardness or softness of the final pencil ‘lead’ can be determined by adjusting the relative fractions of clay and graphite in the roasting mixture.
Commercial pencil manufacturers typically market 20 grades of pencil, from the softest, 9B, to the hardest 9H, with the most popular intermediate value, HB, lying midway between H and B. ‘H’ means hard and ‘B’ means black. The higher the B number, the more graphite gets left on the paper. There is also an ‘F’, or Fine point, which is a hard pencil for writing rather than drawing.
(John Barrow, being a scientist, warms to his task at this point) The strange thing about graphite is that it is a form of pure carbon that is one of the softest solids known, and one of the best lubricants because the six carbon atoms that link to form a ring can slide easily over adjacent rings. Yet, if the atomic structure is changed, there is another crystalline form of pure carbon, diamond, that is one of the hardest solids known.
An interesting question (possibly) is to ask how long a straight line could be drawn with a typical HB pencil before the lead was exhausted. The thickness of graphite left on a sheet of paper by a soft 2B pencil is about 20 nanometers and a carbon atom has a diameter of 0.14 nanometers, so the pencil line is only about 143 atoms thick. The pencil lead is about 1 mm in radius and therefore ? square mm in area. If the length of the pencil is 15 cm, then the volume of graphite to be spread out on a straight line is 150? cubic mm. If we draw a line of thickness 20 nanometers and width 2 mm, then there will be enough lead to continue for a distance L = 150? / 4 X 10-7 mm = 1,178 kilometers. (that's quite enough science Ed.)
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The oldest pencil in the world, found in a timbered house in Germany built in 1630
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When it comes to portraiture, police photographers have a particular style
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ABOUT EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS
Find out about us on our website www.eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
There you will find details of all our current members plus photo's of their work and contact details plus information on recent and upcoming exhibitions
MEMBERSHIP: If you are interested in joining East Finchley Open Artists please contact the Membership Secretary Monica Peiser
empeiser@gmail.com
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