Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
By: Helen Thomas
Creating new paintings for a solo exhibition titled 'Hundreds' at Milton Keynes Contemporary in March 2008.
www.miltonkeynescontemporary.co.uk
I choose to work in paint for its physical presence and material qualities. I am interested in qualities of seeing and how our eyes make sense of the stimulus they receive. This process of collating and distilling fragments of visual information informs my process as a painter. Each brushstroke updates the surface with new information, creating an overall composition of colour, form, tone and movement. I create interplay between positive and negative space, foreground and background, working towards resolution of the surface. I work on several paintings at a time, pacing the painting process and developing relations between individual works.
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'Helen making notes'. Photo: Justin Neal.
# 15 [10 March 2008]
Details of the show and the audio description are now available at: www.miltonkeynescontemporary.co.uk/
The private view is this Thursday (13th March). 5.30 - 7.30pm, if you'd like to join us please email: helen@toastedorange.co.uk
The exhibition runs until 4th May 2008.
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Helen Thomas, '[Hundreds]', Acrylic on canvas, 2008. Photo: Justin Neal. [Hundreds] Exhibition installation at Milton Keynes Contemporary - WHITEWALL.
# 14 [9 March 2008]
It took two of us about an hour to wrap each of the paintings on Thursday; the studio was just wide enough to accommodate the packaging. After the recent gale force winds, I was relieved when I woke up to a still, dry morning on Friday, when we loaded the van and drove to Milton Keynes.
By midday the paintings were propped up in the WHITEWALL space. As we installed the pieces passers by stopped to watch and comment on the paintings, visitors don’t have to cross a threshold to enter Milton Keynes Contemporary – WHITEWALL, and this seems to facilitate an engagement with the work. By 3pm the installation was complete and for the first time the paintings can be seen as intended.
On Friday evening we went over to Word in Edgeways in Wolverton, to meet Philippa Tipper and record Anne’s text for the audio guide. Yesterday, just less than two months since I got the go ahead for the project, the exhibition opened.
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Helen Thomas, 'Studio 28th Feb'. The extended drawing table finds a new use as a tiliting 'tent' to protect the canvases
# 13 [29 February 2008]
I finished painting a week ago. Since then I've been busy with all the other details that need to be sorted to transform the series of paintings into an exhibition. I've applied a final protective coating to the paintings, ordered packaging and booked a van.
The process of finding titles for the paintings has been ‘running in the background' throughout the project, playing with words, searching for names that work for the series as from either end and also for the individual pieces. The works will be titled as follows: [Hundreds] Refresh, Encounter, Centre, Trace, Departure.
Justin, the WHITEWALL Project Manager, is coming up this weekend to view the work, discuss installation and work on the catalogue.
On Sunday I'm meeting Anne Hornsby at the studio. Anne is coming to look at the paintings in preparation for writing the audio description.
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Helen Thomas, 'work in progress', acrylic on canvas, February 2008. Photo: Helen Thomas. Detail of painting in progress
# 12 [20 February 2008]
How to describe the process of revealing through concealing? Carefully working around forms like an archaeological excavation, applying pigment rather than removing traces of earth etc.
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'Helen Thomas', January 2008. Photo: Helen Thomas. Dusk. Looking along Midsummer Arcade, towards Maslen and Mehra exhibition at Milton Keynes Contemporary.
# 11 [14 February 2008]
At first, I worked on the paintings as separate entities. Sometime over the last couple of days I started to get a sense of ‘travelling' across them. I think they're now got in the order that they'll be exhibited. Working mainly on 2 pieces yesterday, started to develop colour relationships between pieces.
Looking towards the gallery from the mall, the light is much cooler - could this be designed to encourage shoppers to spend a little longer, spend a little more in the warmth and comfort of the shops?
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Helen Thomas, 'Work in progress, 11th February 2008'.
# 10 [11 February 2008]
A fine downy layer of frost collected on me as I travelled to the studio this morning.
My Dad had been in yesterday, working his magic, adapting the old drawing table to accommodate one of the canvases. Last week he made a ‘lean to' easel from three bits of aluminium sliding door runner.
By shutting myself in (dragging the drawing board behind the door) I can now work on all 5 pieces - and at roughly the same height. Last week I was fiddling around with scale drawings to try and get a feel for how the pieces might relate to each other in the space, now I can work with those relationships as the paintings develop.
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'Sweet thing'. Wrapper from the small 'gift' of chocolate that I was kindly given at the buddhist temple.
# 9 [9 February 2008]
The search for a writer has led to an interesting development that I'd not anticipated at the start of the project. I was thinking about how we see and how we put together an image of a place. As a result of a misunderstood telephone message I'm now hoping to work with an ‘audio describer'.
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Helen Thomas, 'Works in progress 4th February 2008'. Photo: Helen Thomas.
# 8 [5 February 2008]
A good solid day of painting in the studio yesterday. Good light to work by and those wild winds that we were experiencing at the end of last week have died down so it was much quieter (and not such an ordeal to cycle).
Taking snaps of work in progress -useful at the end of the day to see the changes.
Have started working on all five canvases but I was frustrated at not being able to view them all, so I rearranged things yesterday evening and can now see and work on them all. The paintings fill the studio space and it's exciting to see them all together for the first time.
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The labyrinth and peace pagoda next to Willen lake North.
# 7 [1 February 2008]
New challenge – finding an author to write the text for the exhibition catalogue. Looked on Interface, lots of writers but how do I begin finding the right person?
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Helen Thomas, 'Hundreds - work in progress', acrylic on canvas, January 2008. Photo: Helen Thomas.
# 6 [29 January 2008]
Full days in the studio - it's very physical working at this scale. The paintings are only 5ft x 5ft (they look so small on the blog photos) but that means that with my arms outstretched I can only just reach the edges with my fingertips. Working up close my whole field of vision is filled by with the surface. I'm climbing up on steps and stools to reach top edges, crouching to reach lower areas, moving in close, stepping back, shifting from one piece to another. Swift broad brush strokes, detailed slow movements. Updating the surface; fragmenting, unifying.
Three main things in mind as I paint, the order changing as I work:
Distilling elements from the visual residue of things seen on research visit.
The changing qualities of light in the gallery space, how light this affects the space, will affect the appearance of the paintings and therefore the experience of visitors.
The correlation I see between the physical processes of painting and how a place develops and how we build our internal pictures of places.
As I cycled to the studio this morning I wondered why I haven't updated this blog as often as I'd hoped to and how I could change that. As I paint, different streams of thought flow from conscious to subconscious. Sometimes as thoughts surface I think I'll record them later, then just carry on painting. At the end of the day, if I get around to writing, the thought processes are different; I struggle to recall the essence of those thoughts. I think the answer is to get into the practice of jotting things down as they occur so I can type them up later. Hopefully these ‘blog-it notes' will help transfer thoughts from my creative process more directly into the blog.