ARTISTS TALKING

# 66 [6 May 2007]

Most welcome arrival of the Architect again.  It was to be the final visit and departure but now there is this period of another month's grace.  Hurrah.  We visit the Landscape Architect in his spacious apartment, a newly converted attic of a turn of the century solidly bourgeois building into a contemporary loft up some six flights of stairs.  No wonder he is so slenderly athletic.  It is elegant, filled with paintings, some his own, artworks, both a grand piano and an upright, and of course many large impressive plants.  My favourite being the Madagascar Palm with its' tall spiky trunk and two leaves in hibernation.  After fragrant white tea that is, I think, from Lychee leaves, we had an elegant dinner at the Austrian, but with a French touch, Borchardt's restaurant.  With my calf's liver the mashed potatoes were a vivid viridian green, because pureed Ruccola had been added.  That was a delicious first.  Afterwards we walked and looked at new trophy architecture built since 1989, including Jean Nouvel's Galerie Lafayette, and were showen more of Berlin's hidden places and passages.

# 65 [4 May 2007]

These colours won't come right.  It doesn't help of course that the studio lights are so dim that I have to blast the two halogen lights onto the painting just to see at night.  Now I am resorting to glazing.  Who would have thought I would have to take recourse to this Old Master-ish oil painting technique, but I'm desperate.

# 64 [2 May 2007]

"I can't tell you on the phone, I'll come over."  That sounds like a leftover from our parents' generation, either from the war when telephones might be tapped, or from country towns when the local switchboard might have been eavesdropping. Nope my twenty-four year old Welsh artist friend has been having German girlfriend challenges.  Well Prince Charles had his mobile phone intimacies broadcast to the world, so who knows now.  Over tea he tells me what's up.  It involves two lovely girls both fancying him but now he is starting to fancy only one and he doesn't want to hurt the other.  This takes a lot of discussion of course, but then he postpones the burden of how much truth or what sort should be told and we go off to the vast Templehof airport to have lunch in the workers canteen.  This gigantic Fascist building is the largest building in Europe.  It is eerily empty although complete with employees; there are almost no passengers as it costs much more to fly into this airport than the commercial Tegel airport.  And I mean no passengers.  A clutch of pilots and airhostesses sitting at the Air Lift coffee bar, all the counters manned, or wo-manned, and three single passengers scattered about.  Unbelievable.  In the employee cafeteria, called Casino, again there were five people serving and apart from us two there was one lone couple eating in the large claustrophobically Fifties dark wood panelled dining rooms.  Weird.  Very cheap the food, unfortunately it was not above institutional standards, although with an impressive range of dishes set out, gradually drying out and congealing.  All the time I felt as if I was underwater or in some old film.

# 63 [30 April 2007]

The paintings are so heavy to move, and I am having such difficulty getting the exact colours, painting and then repainting, adjusting, all the while bent double over them, that there is difficulty straightening up after long sessions of this.  Ow. Ouch. My back!  Being in the studio all the time must be unhealthy.  I feel weak.  What I'm going to do is work on the smaller canvases, 60 x 50 cm., for a bit as a break from the big ones.  Even better, ‘I'm going to stop working, cook some dinner and flop into bed', I thought when, just then there was a thumping on my door.  Hugo the artist, whose studio is one floor up, can't unlock the front door.  He's just checked and would like to work on for a couple more hours, will I still be working then, he asks. Fortunately I hadn't undressed was my first thought.  Being the only artist who actually lives in the building, such practicalities can sometimes be startling.  ‘Oh I'm tired tonight', I say, ‘but at midnight I'll check the front door and go up to your studio to let you know'.  Waiting for midnight means I start painting again.  At half past eleven another thumping on the door, Hugo has decided to go home and the front door is OK.  Of course by now my energy has resurged and I paint on for another hour.  Funny how these things come and go like moods.  One can be distracted and the heavy fatigue might be dismay or anxiety about the painting not working.

# 62 [30 April 2007]

The paintings are so heavy to move, and I am having such difficulty getting the exact colours, painting and then repainting, adjusting, all the while bent double over them, that there is difficulty straightening up after long sessions of this.  Ow. Ouch. My back!  Being in the studio all the time must be unhealthy.  I feel weak.  What I'm going to do is work on the smaller canvases, 60 x 50 cm., for a bit as a break from the big ones.  Even better, ‘I'm going to stop working, cook some dinner and flop into bed', I thought when, just then there was a thumping on my door.  Hugo the artist, whose studio is one floor up, can't unlock the front door.  He's just checked and would like to work on for a couple more hours, will I still be working then, he asks. Fortunately I hadn't undressed was my first thought.  Being the only artist who actually lives in the building, such practicalities can sometimes be startling.  ‘Oh I'm tired tonight', I say, ‘but at midnight I'll check the front door and go up to your studio to let you know'.  Waiting for midnight means I start painting again.  At half past eleven another thumping on the door, Hugo has decided to go home and the front door is Ok.  Of course by now my energy has resurged and I paint on for another hour.  Funny how these things come and go like moods.  One can be distracted and the heavy fatigue might be dismay or anxiety about the painting not working.

# 61 [29 April 2007]

First I went to the Copy Shop and got printouts of all the possibilities to check out my decisions, and then to Boesner's.  It meant difficult decisions about which colours to get.  The "hand painted" colour charts are a long way off from the reality of putting the colour on canvas.  I bought great colours, I hope, from looking at the paint itself: unscrewing the tops and even putting tiny bits on a piece of paper.  The result on my fingertips made me choose for one, Cadmium Green Deep whereas I had rejected it from the printed chart.  It has made such a difference to me not having the paints that I'm used to working with.  The experience of having to search and make the colours happen has been very intense.  Finally, I spent another small fortune of two hundred and forty euros.  Now I really am going to try not to buy any more paint and just use what I've got.

# 60 [27 April 2007]

A long day making definite hard decisions about the colours for the next stage which meant a lot of trial samples mixing colours, as well as working on the computer looking at varying combinations.   Living in the studio means that I can completely concentrate and immerse myself in the painting.  Working right through without stopping until midnight.   Not stopping for lunch, not talking to anyone, nor stepping outside at all, I felt quite spaced out having dinner  then dropping into bed.   I've made a shopping list for Boesner's the big Art Shop.

# 59 [26 April 2007]

Today I recovered myself back into the work.  All these visitors and descriptions of outings, I can almost hear murmurings of ‘and the work?  What about the paintings?' buzzing in my ears.  But my news is that the residency has been extended for a month.  And that's why I haven't gone mental and was able to spend some time going round Berlin with my friend.  That is so great coming just as I felt despair at getting the paintings finished in time.  Is this instead of the perfect bowl from the Great Calculator of Checks and Balances in the Sky?  OK thank You.

# 58 [24 April 2007]

What does one do on a Sunday?  Why go to the Flea market of course.  There on the very first stall was a cherry stoner.  One euro and one pleased friend.  What luck.  Maybe it was because she'd gone to church first.  For my part, I went to visit the perfect white bowl with which I have been having a distant love affair, and my breath caught; it wasn't there. Oh no.  I registered the fact of its' absence, but my eyes continued to search.  Feeling a pang, but knowing it wasn't meant to be, the phrase, ‘we were only ships passing in the night,' entered my head.  Nothing will stop me coming back of course, in case it reappears.  Will I continue to search the world's flea markets for a perfect white porcelain bowl priced less than thirty euros, preferably at twenty euros?  Yes I still think it was too much.  Twenty-five euros may have weakened me.  The possessive stallholder kept us apart.  He was obviously right that it would happen.  Someone did pay thirty euros.  But we have our history, that bowl and I.  Ships that cross in the night.

From there we went to the Chapel of Reconciliation, the Mauer Wall Documentation , and the Hamburger Hof Contemporary Art Museum, where we saw the William Kentridge video installation.  Somewhere just before this my blood sugar level must have dropped as I felt that I couldn't move another step.  Fortunately the Felix Gonzales-Torres piece of the huge pile of shiny wrapped caramels was still on display, and crunching away on several made me feel better.  Even more recuperative was the unmissable Kakao Cafe for the most sophisticated hot chocolate in the world.  This, along with an attractively modest Indian meal on the way back to the studio, brought my friend's visit to a close and from the Haut Bahnhof on the overnight train to London, back she went

# 57 [22 April 2007]

After bacon, eggs, a plum and coffee we went to the Gallery Goff+Rosenthal, on Brunnenstrasse to see an exhibition of American artists, ‘From Our Living Room to Yours', full of funky art objects.  Sitting round a table talking to the extremely pleasant and friendly gallery director with one of the art pieces in the centre was somewhat disconcerting as it looked exactly like a big layer cake with icing that one would like to scoop out and lick a finger full, but it is made all the way through of solid oil paint.  From there we did a bit of shopping.  My friend, a textile designer and screen printer is also a magnificent cook and wanted to buy a German cherry stoner.  This quest we pursued from one store to another without success.  The reason given being that ‘cherries are not in season now.'  But stainless steel does not have to be fresh we moaned fruitlessly.  (Sorry).  So a plum pitter was purchased instead.  Plums are in season, as we knew from eating them.  (But probably in Bolivia or somewhere, Peruvian plums anybody?).  There was just time to fit in a museum as we had booked a dinner reservation for the restaurant on the top of the Reichstag, to circumvent the invariable long waiting queue to get in. Unfortunately, getting on the (wrong) train, meant we spent the time going back to where we had started, but taking photographs of the seat cover patterns.  East Berlin is completely covered, smothered, in graffiti.  Public transport circumvents any more, or is just responding to prevailing tastes, by using graffiti inspired motifs on the seat covers. Even chunks of graffiti are framed to decorate an S-Bahn station. 

The Reichstag.  What a tremendous experience.  The restaurant reservation certainly made it a privileged breeze to get in and through the security checks.  What a view at the top and the buzz of Norman Fosters glass dome.  The restaurant, elegant, is not cheap, yet considering the wonder of it all, not as expensive as it might possibly be.  But I should tell you that my friend said that the meal was on her and it did cost a bomb, one hundred euros for us both.  Fabulous, memorable, a complete treat.  Seeing Berlin lit up and laid out before us in the night as we walked outside on the roof, then climbed the winding ramp to the top, looking down at the violet seats of the parliament, everyone excited and thrilled to be there, the Reichstag open to visitors until midnight is a glorious glamorous experience.  Who would have thought it?  Something I didn't know is that my friend suffers from vertigo, but she was very brave.

Since we were interacting with the evening, I took her to see the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz for all that Hollywood razamatazz, and then we walked to the Modern Art Museum so that she could at least see the Mies van der Rohe building.  Approaching, the building seemed to be shooting orange sparks.  The whole ceiling was covered with moving orange rays of words pulsating towards us in parallel strips.  It was a Jenny Holzer electronic text piece.  The word ‘scorn' was constantly repeated along with phrases such as, "while you spend I save," scorn, "while you play I work," scorn.  This went on for some minutes while one tried to follow the running words, to see what the pattern might be from one row to the next but it was relentlessly fast like a blitz, then Bang the words receded, then went dark, until Bang they started again, but this time in German.  Midnight and no one else there and this wonderful art piece giving its all.