ARTISTS TALKING

# 76 [19 May 2007]

The invitations for the opening of my exhibition were printed today and I began sending them out.  What with that and the emails, I worked until four am to get the next stage of painting done.  Colour nuances again.

# 75 [17 May 2007]

A-N magazine, did an article on my Berlin residency on this Projects unedited website. A lot of people read these blogs, and have got in touch with me.  Mostly people from the UK about to visit Berlin, or interested in Berlin, or already living in Berlin, but others too, like artists asking me to join their projects, which is great.  One artist living in Berlin now has got in touch and today I met her for a coffee.  Tall, forthright, loose shoulder-length brown hair, large almond shaped blue eyes she seems clear about her aims to be an artist.  Having done an exchange term in Berlin and enjoyed it, on graduating from Chelsea School of Art she had found that she had to spend her time doing a lot of jobs just to pay for her rent, not being able to have a studio nor to spend much time doing her own work.  After three years of this, the opportunity came up to come to Berlin so she took it.  Rents are much lower here making it a lot easier for artists.  What she hadn't realized is how long it would take her to settle in.  Not speaking any German, after nine months of being in Berlin she is gradually picking it up.  She has finally found a place to live that she really likes, is doing a curatorship of a new small gallery in exchange for a ‘free' studio on the premises, and is picking up from play school a four year old child and taking care of her until the mother comes home at seven pm.  This earns her sufficient money to allow her to live and to paint.  After a time she will find a separate studio as she finds the situation however convenient still confining on her freedom.  A bold confident mover, she gives the impression of being capable and adaptable.

In the evening there was an opening of the third exhibition to be at her gallery, so I arranged to meet Tom there.  Green helium filled balloons covered the ceiling and the walls of this tiny brightly lit gallery were covered with photographs of the beautiful forests of an archipelago of islands between Fiji and Australia, called Vanualu.  It looked rather like the Bush in New Zealand.  In fact the Designer half of the Designer-Photographer duo is a New Zealander.  Between the green balloons and the tiny baby on her shoulder we had a natter about living in Berlin.  The German Photographer and tiny baby meant I didn't have to ask her about why she stayed on here after a residency. 

Tom and I went on to have dinner at the Vietnamese restaurant Saigon at Rosa Luxemburg Platz, which was so fulsome that I took home what I couldn't eat there in a package.  Lunch for me tomorrow.

# 74 [16 May 2007]

This was the first time I've been to Ackerstrasse which is surprising as it is just one street over parallel to Kastienallee that I go up and down all the time.  It is funny how one sticks to the known paths unless one consciously makes an effort not to, or unless there is a reason to go there.  Like this evening when I was going to a fashionable Italian restaurant, Locando Pane to have dinner with an architect, partner in an enormously successful German practice.  On Ackerstrasse there is also a most formally elegant Schinkel   church so that is another reason to go there.  And a supermarket that has a large tank of huge fish swimming around.  If you don't mind being an executioner, and of course it is hypocrisy otherwise if you eat fish, then you buy really fresh fish just by saying ‘kill that one for me'.  However I must confess, hypocritical or not, it would make me squeamish to do it myself.  Getting to the restaurant first I was a bit nervous as the buildings done by Sauerbruch and Hutton are so enormously prestigious, but the instant I saw her come in I liked her enormously.  First of all she is immensely, openly intelligent and friendly, not at all pretensions which I had feared.  Secondly she is English, brought up in Norfolk that I hadn't known.  Her husband is German and they met at the AA in London.  Their buildings use a lot of colour that interests me a lot.  They are so contemporary and vibrant.  We chatted away about all sorts of things getting to know each other and our backgrounds.  Then we had a good moan, i.e. discussion about how difficult it was to get the exact colour one wants, and how it changes when you do get it.  I had said ‘well at least you don't have to mix it as you get samples ready-made'.  As was quickly pointed out, yes a six-inch sample is not quite the same as twenty floors of it.  Quite right.  In fact my difficulties with the colour charts of paints is only a miniaturization of that, and the problems are there for both.  Yes the extrapolation of a small sample into a much larger area changes it entirely, but even when you sort that out another colour put next to it, or another building built next to it can throw it off unrecognisably.  On top of which the light changes and the same colour looks like four other colours, and so on.  You can see how we could get really stuck into this subject.  And we enjoy it.  These difficulties and joys are what we are involved in.  What a delightful evening.  Walking back to the Milchhof, see how convenient Berlin is, one can walk home, and safely at midnight, I was gingerly picking my way, trying to avoid going into the slush, cursing my having sent back my boots to London prematurely, concentrating on not falling as it was extremely slippery, when I saw another woman coming towards me also lifting up her feet high as she went along.  We spontaneously both burst into laughter at each other and the joy of it all.  What a wonderful evening.

# 73 [15 May 2007]

I'm already feeling nostalgia for Berlin.  When I went into the Kunstler Magazin for yet more paint, I thought ‘oh in a month I'll not be here coming to this convenient art shop with the nice auburn haired girl.  I will have vanished from the Berlin life.'  I am being reminded of what is going on in the world away from this, the London world, and the very different world that this is.  Like a slice of a life, an interesting special life, but encased in a transparent glass large bubble separate from my other world  and soon the life in the bubble will stop and the bubble will be stored away somewhere so that I can bring it out and look at the life inside it but I won't be able to get inside that particular glass bubble again.  No more than I can get inside the glass bubble with my four-year-old self-running in the cornfield, with the sweet rustling stalks higher than my head and I am enamoured with the feeling of being invisible to my mother who is trying to get me inside the house to go to sleep.  I run and run so happily feeling ‘I can do whatever I want.'  That is what the bubbles contain, sunlit illusions of being free, liberated from real life.

# 72 [14 May 2007]

Manfred came with his ladder to change the anteroom light bulb that blew a week ago.  Now they have all been changed nothing more should need doing.  The problem here is the twenty-foot ceiling so that I can't do it myself because I don't have such a high ladder, or any ladder.  The bombshell for me, or since that is rather dramatic, the disappointment for me, is that Manfred won't be here for my exhibition.  He's going to be working in Köln at the Art Fair.  Since the majority of artists in the Milchhof are German speakers, amusing Manfred has been a main link between the whole Milchhof and me.  He speaks a lot of English and is a very sociable person knowing everyone, making jokes making things easy.  And now he won't be here, that is upsetting for me, but can't be helped.  It is strange, now that I am in the fourth month, although with four weeks to go and all the paintings to finish still, I have that home stretch feeling of ‘what needs to be done before I go?'  Which is weird.  Some people come to Berlin for a weekend and here I am again worrying about "only four weeks and time is running out".  Psychology give it a boot!

# 71 [11 May 2007]

Nicole Monteran is a French artist who I met through Joseph and Mary when we went on the Fat Tire Bike Tour of Berlin.  She has lived in Berlin for over thirty years, yet remains very French in her comme il faut elegance.  Her apartment in Charlottenburg is full of space, light, everything white, and objets d'art placed just so.  The white painted floors set off the  pieces of decorated furniture and collected paintings.  Her own work is figurative and very assured of Berliners interacting, done in that almost caricature way like a combination of Chagall, Matisse and Georges Groz.  Another strand of Berlin life revealed.  Back I went to much more messy Bohemian Mitte and again spent many hours agonising over colour values.  How to achieve exactly what I envisage remains elusive.  I am going to have to achieve the effect I want by not using the colour I wish I could get but using another with the final effect being still what I wanted.  Or at least try.

# 70 [10 May 2007]

At the Milchhof Sculpture Space two English sculptors both Goldsmith graduates are opening their exhibition from 4 pm up to 9pm.  So from light afternoon until pitch-black night with the range of lighting becoming a feature, especially with Charlotte McGowan-Griffin's light installation.  She now lives in Berlin but it turned out that when she used to teach at Exeter, Tom was doing his first degree and she was his tutor.   Dean Kenning who uses electrified kinetics is only in Berlin for the opening.  He teaches at University College Canterbury.  It was all very friendly and I kept going in and out and took photographs.

# 69 [9 May 2007]

Thinking ahead to when these paintings will actually be finished with the colour relationships worked out, masonry nails have to be bought at OBI, (standing for German DIY) which is a bit of a walk away, but passes a second-hand shop which is always a plus.  Once out it is irresistible not to have lunch in the café at Rosenthaler Platz and sit around reading the weekend Guardian newspaper that comes out on Saturdays.  This is a treat for me lasting for a few days if rationed properly.  Back at the studio the sturdy big nails refuse to penetrate the thick stone outer walls.   Instead the solution is to use the thinner masonry nails but more of them. Finally, the elements of the hanging are marked out and put into place.  There is an air of anticipation in the studio with the new arrangement of tables and sequence of paintings lined up.

# 68 [8 May 2007]

Dresden is only two hours from Berlin by train, and I was looking forward to seeing the famed Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister painting museum, as well as the newly rebuilt Frauenkirche faithful copy of the original destroyed in the war.  Getting out of the train nothing but hideousness could be seen.  During the occupation the DDR didn't do much re-building preferring to leave the destruction as accusation of guilt against the Allies.  Some of what they did do, of anonymous concrete Soviet styled buildings is being knocked down.  If anything could make the horribleness of war, and revenge sink in, this should do it.  Completely flattened by Bomber Harris's firestorm raids as response to the bombing and destruction of Coventry the two cities are twinned not only by their destruction but also in their rebuilt, unappealing mediocrity.  Tower blocks and shopping mall banality is all that can be seen, nothing remotely like the word Dresden conjures up, of an established historical city.  Staggering past all that, one wonders how people can stand it and why wars go on.  Then of a sudden the Cathedral looms, and a cluster of immensely beautiful Baroque buildings.  How did this magnificence survive is then the question, and gratefulness that it did.  It is an uneasy mix of revulsion at the devastation of war and awe at what remains that I feel.  The replica Frauenkirche glows and its soft pastel colours enchant but however lovely, it looks too new, lacking the accretion of feeling that it will acquire over the next hundred years, if it is still there.  What is not at all a mystery is why the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister is so famed.  Again it is overwhelming to see so many and such great works hung on the walls, packed in tightly.  Rembrandts and Titians are so numerous that some you will see hung very high up.  And without crowds pressing in.  I can't believe my eyes there are two such important masterpieces as The Bride and The Letter by Vermeer in an empty gallery.  Room after room of Cranachs many of which I have never even seen reproduced before are completely mesmerizing.  Let alone that strange painting with the two angels at the bottom that all the greeting cards love so much, Raphael's Sistine Madonna.  A glimpse of greatness in spite of all.

# 67 [7 May 2007]

"The most secret movements of the inner world are inaccessible to words." -Hegel.  Berlin with all the interleaving of sinister violence, layered decadence, its brilliance of intellectual thought, outpourings of creativity, music swirling over all, has also its physical elements as great implacable givens.  When I first arrived, the heavy gloom was palpable.  It was dark, it rained, I couldn't see.  It then snowed, it was dark, I couldn't see.  Since then it rained, it was dark, I couldn't see.  It rained and rained, snowed and snowed, was dark, and I couldn't see.  Being built on a swamp, the water table is high, and with so much reconstruction digging down for the vast new structures, water has to be constantly pumped out of these sites into the river Spree.  The sewers smell of dank foulness as one passes their vents.  All of this is imbedded into Berlin, as much as the grisly past, points of candle lights, magnificent accomplishments.  There is movement in all this, change and the excitement of new possibilities, perhaps uniquely so.  These shifting blocks, at this time, and here. 

Now, overnight before my eyes sunlight has entered Berlin, transforming it entirely.  Throwing off the long dark winter, everyone is out on the streets and parks breathing in sunlight through their pores.  One can feel the instinctive awakening; at last it has come.  One turns one's face to the light.  Up on the hill of Mauer (Wall) Park, it is as crowded and festive as any beach in the summer.  After all the darkness this brilliant explosion of sunlight has magnetically drawn everyone outside as if sucked by a radiant vacuum.  The Milchhof studio building is empty of artists.  It may be a false spring, so enjoy it now.  On the hill built out of the debris and bones of war, the large swings swoop out over the city, both children and adults pump their legs swinging out, letting their cares, the past go.  Here comes the Future.  We are alive.