Monday 16^th May 1977

“Just off the quay somebody has drawn a maze in the sand, it looks rather good. It is a nice idea to draw something that will only last for a few hours, to be reclaimed again by the sea; maybe I’ll have a go. The time factor is interesting.”

Tuesday 17^th May 1977

“which will show me I can work from the landscape. This is something that I have felt is too over powering, too difficult for me to undertake but even after today I’m picking up little tricks. Tricks are I’m sure what landscape painting is all about.”

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The constant questioning and declassification of what art is and what the content is has lead to this so called crisis in painting (there as always been a crisis in painting) – Painting is dead – the exponents of Conceptual Art tried to destroy the art object but failed – thought and the idea is the object. The primary aims of Conceptual Art in the 1960’s was to carry out a theoretical examination of ‘art’ and through understanding propose ‘concepts as art’.

In all cases the created image lies about its representation. A representation/illusion takes on more realness than the actual physical object, the object then becomes a metaphor for the created illusion. This in turn creates an additional reference for the object, an extra visual adjective eg. ‘The sky was very Turneresque.’ Turner’s illusion becomes a metaphor for the real thing, which vividly describes [in words] the actual sky. The concrete object cannot say everything about itself – it has a limited vocabulary and is unable to say what is required of it, it is on many levels mute. Read more...