Adriana Varejão

O Sedutor, 2004
Oil on Canvas 230 x 530 cm
Victoria Miro Gallery, London
10 October 2004

The show contained four of these immense, almost life size, paintings of tiled saunas and a number of smaller studies on paper that were framed behind glass. Each had a different monochrome theme and I have chosen the one painted in a variety of blues from tinged white to almost black. The blues themselves range from aqua with a lot of green, right through to almost lavender.

Although she has used a fairly heavy canvas, the weave on the surface isn’t prominent indicating that the surface must be heavily primed to get it flat. The process of painting is fundamental to the reading of meaning behind the work and I would say she has started with a dark red ground, perhaps burnt umber and then painted each tile individually. In light areas colours are not just tonally lighter, but slightly warmer. The paint is uniformly applied, but you can see brush marks when looking closely. There is definitely a glaze with the paint and some of the tiles look like two coats with the paler one underneath. This is left to show at the “tile” edges and helps the 3d illusion as do the edges of shadows’ which are subtlety blended over a small area. The other curious point is that all four of the large canvases had rounded corners; this isn’t easy to do and contradicts the rectangular tiles but I cannot guess the significance.

Whilst the use of the grids that constitute these works could hint at modernist aesthetics, her earlier work depicted fragments of tiled wall with rubble made of flesh bulging and bursting through the painted surface. This use of the tile as a recurrent motif refers to the azulejo, a square terracotta tile used continuously throughout Portugal’s history since the middle ages. Influenced over the years by Moors, Spanish, Oriental and Dutch artisans it was used for decoration in such far distant corners of Portugal’s empire as Brazil. So Varejão is invoking the colonial history of Brazil though the use of tiles albeit in a more subtle way in these Sauna paintings.

In these large scale trompe l’oeil paintings, the tiles have become simple, unadorned, abstract and minimalist, but the space the paintings describe is one of empty luxury, hard and cold. Whilst I find this non-space deeply melancholic on account of the implied solitude, that reading may be at variance with her conceptual impulse. In other words what I am reading as an impersonal modern skin of a contemporary “temple” for the body, she may be referencing the opulence of Portugal’s past fuelled by resources flowing from Brazil. Who is “The Seducer” of the title?

©blackdog 2021

Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton

September (Ben), 2001
Oil on Panel 30.8 x 23.2 cm
The Royal Academy, London
September 2002

I first came across her work at the "Galleries Show" at the Royal Academy in September 2002 and was very taken with this portrait of a lost soul.

Peyton made her name with paintings of male celebrities, on the one hand rock stars whose flames had burned too bright, and on the other those from royalty and the annals of history. The smallness of the work and the delicacy of the brushwork, despite the apparent speed of its execution, gives the painting an appropriate intimacy that suggests a close friend or lover. Yet the likeness is tinged with sadness and the idealised features of the subject hark back to her idealistic representations of doomed dandies. In this respect all of her portraits carry this melancholic lineage that although contradicted by the lightness of her painterly touch, says as much about her as it does about the subjects.

It is from her own photograph and is one of several studies. Whilst it lacks the blurry "photographic" close-up crop of many of her icon portraits, it still has a photographic signature. It is almost as though it was taken with no thought to composition, a naive "Ben with sunset" snapshot - the off centre figure losing his knee in the process. This "snapshot" impression is further reinforced by the apparent speed of the painting, capturing the fleeting posture as he raises his hand to his shoulder. In an interview with the Hayward Gallery in 2007, she states her preference for working with ‘images that are incidental and anecdotal, rather than formal – they have more information to pick and choose from when it comes to making a composition’[1].

It is the unusual framing of the figure within the portrait that drew me to this image - seated well off centre he is crowded into the bottom right hand corner of the painting. The focus is almost on the lurid sunset on the horizon and our wavering attention is matched by his disinterested air as he gazes off to the right into the unseen distance.

As with all her works it is brightly coloured using a full palette of unmixed colours, the most striking of which is the streak of cadmium red across the horizon. There are two blues, yellows, browns, pinks and greens each isolated and pure. Some small elements are almost Matisse like in their separation. The larger areas have been wiped back to give a range of tones. The flesh almost white, with colour at edges. The lips are very red. The hair is painted with thick confident brown strokes. Thin washes and allowed to run in trousers. I have seen quite a few of her works now and this is typical with thin glazed colours applied individually, giving a very intense saturated surface, the almost smooth ground allowing maximum reflected light.

The panels for her paintings are about 2cm deep and are covered with very thick layers of acrylic primer. This has been applied with a scraper of some kind (I used to use a credit card) and the thick paint runs over the edges and the ridges in the surface become an integral element of the artwork. Paint is mainly transparent and the vertical ridges can clearly be seen in the reproduction above.

Names her favourite painters ranging from Velazquez and John Singer Sargeant to Andy Wharhol and David Hockmey. I see Karen Kilimnik and Florine Stettheimer (art deco influenced modernist d1944).

[1]Elizabeth Peyton in conversation with the Hayward Gallery ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ Hayward Publications 2007 p133

©blackdog 2020

Edouard Vuillard

Nape of Misai’s Neck, 1897
Oil on board mounted on cradled panel, 13 x 33 inches
Royal Academy, London
31st March 2004

This extensive show covered not only his paintings, but also featured his drawings and photographs. Although there were many paintings of gloomy interiors that betrayed his interest in the theatre of Ibsen and perhaps the influence of Edvard Munch, I preferred his intimate portrayals of his mother sewing, and her clients trying on their new dresses. These and the portraits of close friends record the melancholia inherent in the everyday and have a claustrophobic intensity that he shares with Pierre Bonnard. So rather than a bleak interior, the painting I have chosen is of Misia Nantanson, the wife of one of his clients, and for a time the object of his desire.

Misia Godebska, a Polish pianist and pupil of the composer Gabriel Fauré was attractive, intelligent and capricious and after her marriage to Thadée Nantanson, she gathered around her a group of bohemian admirers. There is little doubt that Vuillard fell under her spell; he helped her to decorate her apartment, went with her to exhibitions and in the 1890’s painted her more than any other person outside his family. The setting is the Nantanson’s country house in the summer and the pose suggests that the painter is watching his hostess engrossed in reading perhaps. Despite the small size and the simplicity of the restrained palette the loose matte brushwork in creams and yellows contrasting with the violet notes in the background, keeps the surface vibrant and suggest the torpor of a hot summer afternoon with little to do.

However, rather than ennui, you get a real sense of the voyeuristic presence of the artist, as his subject, with her face hidden behind a lock of hair, looks away leaving her neck exposed to his gaze. The sense of unfulfilled romance is palpable and it seems Vuillard was destined to “long after women” from a distance as he never married and lived with his mother until her death in 1920.

The extraordinary long rectangular shape of the painting reinforces the claustrophobic intimacy as the viewer looms above the vulnerable neck. The tight crop, although not the shape of the image reflects Vuillard’s use of photography as an aide memoir, he owned a Kodak and took thousands of photographs including several of Misia Nantanson that afforded him the luxury of extending his indulgence. However, the flatness of the image and the vulnerable neck as subject recalls Japanese prints, in particular Utamaro’s images of courtesans.

As Vuillard states in one of his journals: “The expressive techniques of painting are capable of conveying an analogy, but not an impossible photograph of, a moment. How different are the snapshot and the image.”[1]

No doubt he felt his painting was a better vehicle for conveying his true feelings than the photographs of her that often featured her husband, albeit out of focus.

[1] Easton, Elizabeth Wynne, The Intentional Snapshot Vuillard Catalogue National Museum of Art Washington 2003 p431

©blackdog 2020

Eberhard Havekost

American Lip Gloss BO6, 2009
Oil on Canvas, 95 x 150 cm
White Cube Hoxton, London
3rd April 2007

This painting was in his exhibition of new work in the White Cube and selected for ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ exhibition at the Hayward later the same year. I don’t care for his technique, but the interesting choice and range of subjects meant the exhibition was better than I expected.

All his work is based on photographs he has taken himself, video stills or found images and as the gallery handout explains; ‘using a computer, Havekost might crop, stretch, skew or tweak the colours of the picture, or leave it almost untouched before making an inkjet print that he uses as the direct source material for the final painting.’

A figure in white is slumped in the passenger seat with the seat belt on. The car interior is definitely American with their dreadful taste in seats and trim in almost matching garish colours. The head is obscured as the seat is tilted back. A pair of sunglasses are tucked into the door handle. The situation is ambiguous, the person could have been ravished, involved in an accident or murdered. The title doesn’t help and could be euphemism for the smear of red blood running from the face down the front of the passengers white jacket. I since read in a review for the Hayward Exhibition that the image is based on a widely circulated newspaper photo showing a German visitor to Miami murdered in her hijacked car.[1]

Probably the strongest melancholic notes comes from the subject matter, a holiday in the sun tragically cut short, but I also identify with the way he has rendered the interior of the car. He uses the blur of the brush work to unify his images, treating all images equally, but it really works for this subject. I can believe the nasty velour of the seats and the fake leather panels on the door. For me there is a depressing sadness of this pathetic attempt to make a poor substitute look cheerful and appealing, and that more than anything is American lip gloss. The cheap fake alternative to the ‘real thing’! Interesting to think that it is this interior detail that will fix the image in time and provide a commentary on a period in history. I don’t think the tampering with the perspective of the interior in the car adds to the melancholic aura of the image other than serving as a method for providing distance between the painting and the original image.

[1] Dorment, Richard Review of ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ Daily Telegraph 2007

©blackdog 2020

George Shaw

Scene from the Passion #53, 2002
Humbrol enamel on board, 77 x 101 cm
Tate Britain, London
March 2003

Seeing George Shaw’s work for the first time was one of the highlights of the ‘Days Like These’ triennial showcase of the work of contemporary British artists. The paintings struck me as being perfectly modern images, combining the horror of the non-places of my own childhood with a superficial beauty that photography cannot capture. The painting I have chosen shows a row of three derelict garages presumably in Tile Hill, Coventry the scene of his childhood. Like all his paintings it is taken from his own snapshot photographs that have been edited to remove references to specific time and date. I find this detail an interesting choice given the painstaking photo-realism of the work implies verity. In fact we have a tampering with reality and consequently the emotional impact of the image.

The painting is composed centrally across the horizontal board and is conventionally divided into thirds. The colour scheme is very gloomy. He uses just seven colours of paint for all his work - this example is predominantly grey and green Humbrol enamel. This unusual selection of paint doesn't reflect a childhood obsession with painting Airfix models - just a happy accident![1]

Whilst I used to make the models I could never be bothered painting them, primarily because of the difficulty of working with this paint! So how he achieves such flawless photo-realism without any evidence of brushwork is incredible. The beauty of the painted surface is at total variance with the subject matter and I think it is this disconnect that adds to the melancholic strength of the images. The shadowy gloom of some of his work evokes the dark glazes of Rembrandt which is all the more remarkable given the materials he uses.

[1] Stout, Katherine Days Like These Tate Publishing 2003 p138

©blackdog 2009

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Resting, 1905
Oil on Canvas 49 x 46 cm
Royal Academy, London
3rd July 2008

A woman is seated on an open backed chair, with her hair gathered up in a bun. Her right arm is hooked over the back of the chair. Her gaze is at the wall on the left hand side of the painting. She is wearing a black skirt and a dark grey blouse with puffed sleeves and a scooped neck. A piece of porcelain is on a table/dresser on the right and side. Light is coming from the left hand side of the painting and catches the back of her neck and the porcelain bowl. A shadow is cast on the floor and wall on the left hand side.

Canvas is quite fine and has a thin umber colour over the primer. The painting has been built up with a series of thin washes, particularly noticeable in the blouse. Uses a round brush very confidently to apply thicker paint to depict the folds in the blouse; reminds me of Manet. Particularly liked how he uses the paint to delineate the arm, but the body of the blouse is just the ground colour.

Uses thicker paint on the neck which is applied with short brushstrokes of a short flat bristle. The back of the chair has a similar treatment with the brush work following the form, although he does leave some small areas without paint. Brushwork for the wall is almost cross hatching except where it meets the figure, then it follows the form. The light to dark transition of the shadow on the wall looks to be in slightly thicker paint – although this appearance might be as a result of wet in wet blending.

The painting is behind glass, so it is hard to tell how rich the oil in the paint is, but looking at unglazed examples from the same year, I would say the paint is lean and has been varnished afterward.

The composition is a series of right angles, which clearly owes something to Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother from 1871. Like Whistler, he conveys a sense of harmony with his composition, but I think Hammershøi’s painting is much more melancholic. It is the anomalies within the painting that I perceive as melancholic.

The fact that the sitter is deep in self-examination displaying total indifference to the spectator is the main incongruence in what is a classic portrait composition, but there are other more subtle nuances. The crop of the flower-shaped bowl laid on the sideboard, the loose brush work in such a tight ordered composition, and the arm hooked over the back of the chair.

In this as with all his other paintings shown, nothing is seen to be happening, and as Felix Krämer notes in the exhibition catalogue ‘the figures introduce no element of vitality into the rooms’[1] resulting in a pervasive mood of ennui and time suspended.

[1] Felix Krämer Vilhehm Hammershøi: The Poetry of Silence Hammershøi Catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts 2008, page 25

©blackdog 2020

Michael Borrëmans

Michael Borrëmans

One 2003
Oil on Canvas 70 x 60 cm
Parasol Unit, London
4th June 2005

The last time I visited this space it was housing the Carnegie Art Award in 2004. Since then it has been transformed from a crumbling warehouse into a really beautiful exhibition space. I was one of the first visitors after the opening and the polished concrete floor is amazing. I would love one in my own studio! This was the first work I had seen by Michael Borrëmans, and it was totally suited to these airy pristine galleries. The work was sparsely hung and I had plenty of opportunity to contemplate the paintings.

It was very hard to grasp the meaning of his paintings, but the pervading mood throughout the work for me was one of melancholia. With so many melancholic works in the exhibition, I find it hard to choose a specific painting. I have picked a very interesting profile of a self absorbed woman whose melancholic mood has something in common with Dürer’s Melencholia I. She is in a doll-like state between dreaming and vigil.

The ground is various random sketchy marks made with different brushes and blue grey paint. This has then been knocked back with a thin pale glaze. The figure is painted over the top, realistically for the face and hands, but very sketchy for the shirt - in fact little more than outline with a few pearly white highlights. His painting shows painterly flourishes of Baroque pictorial economy similar to Velásquez. Light comes from behind the figure and is painted very delicately - no deep shadows.

The fascinating bit is the oily rich brown glaze over the lower part of the figure, yet around the arms and hands. It looks like she is seated at a table that goes right through her, turning what could be read as a straightforward portrait into something much more enigmatic. This surreal notion of the figure evolving from the table links his work with the paintings of Magritte and other examples of his work demonstrate temporal disconnect more clearly.

As to the meaning of the painting, I find it pretty impenetrable - the title doesn't offer a clue (this was same for all the paintings). Is she working on the table surface or contemplating her hands? She is gazing down at her hands very intently so perhaps she is preparing to type, yet there is no typewriter? Hand gestures are also a repeated motif in other works in the exhibition, and it each case the action looks frozen.

The hair cut looks like a style from the 1940's and the face seems to have the austerity I associate with the period. It is probably painted from an old photograph or made to look that way. This reference to a time past enhances melancholic feel of the image and instills a certain feeling of nostalgia. In an interview for with Luk Lambrecht for Flash Art he acknowledges working with existing images, ‘Sometimes these images are indeed photographs from a distant past. I attempt to create an atmosphere outside time, a space where time has been cancelled.’[1] In fact, I do get a sense of time being frozen – she is almost a still life, concentrating on what she is about to start, but never actually starting.

[1]Luk Lambrecht MICHAËL BORREMANS - I AM AN AVANT-GARDE ARTIST! Flash Art Online (Translated from Flemish by Dirk Verbiest)

©blackdog 2020

Euan Uglow

Lemon, 1973
Oil on Canvas, 19 x 33cm
Private Collection, Not Seen

In July 2003 I went to see the first public exhibition of the work of Euan Uglow since his death from cancer in 2000. Disappointingly this painting of half a lemon was not included in the show. It is quite unsual in that most of his work whether of nude models or still life involved a dynamic pose. The artist notoriously placed his models in geometrical and sometimes stiffly contorted poses and since he sometimes took up to five years to finish a painting and only ever painted from life, his models had to keep such poses for considerable lengths of time.

There is a sense of harmony within the image, not just about the placement of the lemon on the grey shelf, but also the weight of the graduated yellow in relation to the size of the background. The lemon is strongly lit from the right and his planes of colour give a suprising degree of three dimensionality to the flat surface.

I have seen a lot of Uglow’s paintings and drawings and this looks typical of his method working. Taught by William Coldstream at the Slade School of Art in London, he used little registration points and tiny painted crosses to help the drawing process. It is worth noting that his obsession with accuracy ran to marking these reference points on the skin of his life models and that they had to keep these marks between sessions. These marks always remain in the finished painting, revealing the history of its making by a prolonged process of looking hard.

He sometimes took up to five years to finish a painting and only ever painted from life and the marks become a record of the temporal aspect of painting. This recording the passage of time is taken a step further in a little painting I saw in his exhibition at the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath called Diary of a Pear, 1972. He placed the tip of a pear at the exact centre of a perfect square, but he painted so slowly that the pear rotted, and the tip drooped. So each day he began a new square with a new centre point and a series of marks showing where the tip had once been. He has said in interview that he “isn’t interested in producing pictures; but in personal research”

Perhaps because of this perfectionism his paintings seem to lack emotion and whilst I find them technically interesting I don’t feel that they have a melancholic aura, even when the subject is a lonely half a lemon.

©blackdog 2020

Norbert Schwontkowski

Das grüne Leuchten, 2005
Oil on Canvas 55 x 70cm
Not Seen

Unfortunately I have only seen this painting in photographic reproduction, which isn’t ideal for such a subtly painted work. However, I have seen a number of similar pieces from the same time at art fairs, which gives me an understanding of his process and how the finished paintings look.

He adds metallic oxides to his ground which lead to unforeseeable changes of colour in his paintings as the chemical compositions change through oxidation. He will start a canvas, leave it to mature for a couple of weeks and then return to it and modify the altered state.

Like most of his work, the image comes from his imagination rather than an appropriated source. It shows a tiny incident all too familiar from my childhood holidays - our car was always breaking down too! Innocent in itself but the gaseous lime green glow hovering on the horizon fills the image with a sense of dread. The family watch from a safe distance whilst the father, head under the bonnet tinkers with the engine. It is almost as if the family are hovering on the horizon between mundane reality and the surreal happenings beyond.

The painting has a gentle naive quality, but as with all his work the title and image are inextricably linked, and translating this title as The Green Light we see he has a sense of irony too; green for stop rather than go! I associate the green light in this painting with the dreary tones of winter skies that warn of an immanent snowfall, but it could also be read as a green ray. These are rare optical phenomena that occur shortly after sunset or before sunrise, when a green spot is visible for a short period of time above the sun, or a green ray shoots up from the sunset point. It is usually observed from a low altitude where there is an unobstructed view of the horizon, such as on the ocean.

Although it is the image itself that fills me with a sense of loss, the process is a key component of the melancholic feel of his paintings. It is like a slow version of the development process associated with wet photography and results in the luminous glow of pastel colour that haunts his work.


©blackdog 2019

August Strindberg

Purple Loosestrife, 1892
Oil on Canvas
Tate Modern, London 2005

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this exhibition, I found it both charming and melancholic and was interested to read that he was a Gemini and prone to mood swings. Strindberg was clearly influenced by Northern Romantic [1] landscapes, but had his own expressionist way of painting that relied more on the palette knife than the brush. There were many of Strindberg's dark brooding seascapes that shared a single man-made object at the mercy of the elements: a buoy in the midst of a stormy sea, or a startlingly white navigational mark against a tempestuous sky. Several paintings of lighthouses conveyed a similar mood reflecting his inner turmoil, but most interesting were his astonishing delicately painted pictures of wild flowers set against a very loosely knifed / brushed landscape. If these earlier solitary flowers are also to be read as symbolic self-portraits he chose very unappealing plants, thistles, toadstools, and "weeds".

Purple Loosestrife is typical of the genre, with the painting divided by a pronounced horizon and the plant a small element isolated in the landscape. The mark making is vigorous but the mood is serene and melancholic, he uses a buttery yellow thickly applied with a palette knife for the foreground gradually merging with a blue/white shoreline and then above the horizon line similar blues and whites for the sky but painted in a different style. He was clearly an acute observer of nature and the plant named in the title is painted with accurate botanical detail, causing it to stand out sharply against the loosely painted landscape.

These small flowers in the vast landscape reminded me of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich that also use the shoreline as a metaphor for the daunting vastness of the world. Whilst it isn’t as dark as Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer, for example, it shares some of that painting’s depiction of the sublime; a boundless, silent, solitude. These qualities were typical of all these paintings of solitary flowers that were painted on the shore south of Stockholm and even more pronounced in some e.g. in Lonely Poisoned Mushroom (also 1892) there is no clear division between the land, sea and sky. I found myself reacting to the emptiness in these calm paintings much more than the violent seascapes, as at least in those there was the storm to provide a narrative!

[1]Strindberg wanted Bocklin's painting “The Island of the Dead”, to serve as the final image of his 1907 play The Ghost Sonata

©blackdog 2019

Michael Raedecker

Tipping Point, 2007
Acrylic and Thread on Canvas, 198 x 336 cm (3 Parts)
Hauser and Wirth, London 2007

I always find the wood panelled rooms of this old bank building a strange space to exhibit large contemporary paintings. This show of a mixture of Michael Raedecker’s work was no exception. The subject matter covered the familiar modernist houses, flowers and ruins. The stand out piece for me though was the line of washing drying in the garden. An idea I had had for a painting, but beaten to once again.

I first saw his work in 2000 when he was nominated for the Turner Prize for his fresh approach to painting and his use of unusual materials, the same year as Glenn Brown. He combines thread and paint on the surface, using the stitching to give forms an outline and helps delineate the subject matter. Raedecker takes his images from such disparate sources as Dutch still life painting, photographs of modernist architecture, B-movie scenes and antiquated gardening catalogues creating images that look like film noir sets waiting for actors to come out of the shadows .

Tipping Point is a very large three panel painting that is so sparsely covered with shades of near white that it is hard to make out the banal subject of washing hung on a line. Without the embroidered description this austere image would be taken for an indulgent modernist abstraction. Yet by defining the subject matter on such a bleak surface, it raises disturbing narrative possibilities that nag at our consciousness. The shirts and sheets are blowing in the breeze but this isn’t a washing powder advertisement, this is our dirty washing hung out to dry. It is very difficult to convey in the photograph, but the subtle changes in tone create strange halos of light which radiate from the image making the washing looks like it is dirty. It is this effect that gives the painting its latent power; we note the absence of any human figures, but conditioned by contemporary film and television drama we know something bad is going to happen. The tipping point has been reached.

©blackdog 2009