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.

Labelling the world and the spaces between

I was invited to write a short piece about labels and what they do to our understanding of the world. I decided to focus on unlabelled 'spaces between'...

Lost in place acrylic on canvas, 50 x 65 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2013

Here's how the article begins...

I arrived in Berlin to work with a new label, as “artist-in-residence”. It is a beautifully vague label that finds many different instantiations in the cross-over between art and organisations. Its core meaning is only that an artist is resident for a period of time in a particular place and makes art. The art may happen in situ or in the months and years afterwards. The art may relate directly to the place and what happens there, or it may be more loosely connected to it and influenced by it. The art project is sometimes pre-determined but more often, as with my post in the Cinepoetics centre at the Freie Universität in Berlin, is left open as a space to be filled. In my work as a professor of applied linguistics, I gained a reputation for rigorous and precise analytic work, all categories carefully defined and labelled. In my work as an artist, I love the looseness, the spaces between, and the reluctance to label. ...

....  you can read the full article here  

Sorting the back catalogue

Coming back to my cottage, I've re-found the paintings I left here last October. As I prepare to set off back to Berlin, I've been getting these out and taking a long look with refreshed eyes.

12 works were taken to a lovely new space at nearby Claydon House courtyard for a small exhibition in the workshop of my local framers. They put a box frame around one of the Landscape of Possibility paintings, which I think makes it look really good.

Paintings from two or three years back have to pass my 3-way test in order to stay on the website and be considered for future exhibitions: they must still 'catch the eye' so that a quick glance wants to look more deeply; they must mesh with my current style and ideas; they must be technically good enough by my current standards.

Paintings from the 'back catalogue' that pass my test will be coming with me to Berlin. The rest will be painted over or given away.

I've also enjoyed showing the new work in the pop-up exhibition, and selling the first dynamic painting to a new friend who's moving on in her life and wanted to mark the transition. What a lovely reason to buy a painting!

Dynamic paintings in the domestic gallery aka my cottage

Taking the work out there

After a long period of intense painting since last October, I am on the road with my work now. Taking it out there for those who are waiting to see it.

This one is going to Tig Gallery on the west coast of Scotland.

Buried treasure. Acrylic on watercolour paper. 41 x 60 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2016.

This one will be part of the pop-up exhibition I'm holding later this week (contact me for details if you'd like to come and haven't received an invitation!)

The passionate fury of making peace. Acrylic on watercolour paper. 41 x 60 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2016.

And here are some of the things I love about the English countryside, even if spring is cold and windy: a red kite soaring, an old village church, hedge laying, primroses and white violets on a bank.

And the driving! Berlin to UK, with the help of my wonderful brother. Scotland. Back to Berlin - or maybe I'll take the plane next time?

Signs of spring

A wander around the neighbourhood today. The sun is shining, almost to ground level, and it is even feeling a little warm.

It is beginning to feel different. Cafes are putting out their tables on the pavements (with blankets), summer clothes are appearing in the shops, and, strongest sign of all, the ice cream shop has re-opened!

Back in my apartment, I am sorting paintings for galleries and exhibitions, in Berlin and in the UK.

Behind the Moon  acrylic on paper, 43 x 60 cm, Lynne Cameron 2016.