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The Presentation 3.6 |
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julian Broadhurst |
In
Person - the Artist and the Work
1983
- 2OO6 |
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In short
- My Work is my life |
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My works are an exploration of the
technical possibilities of a fundamentally Geometric Art, taking as a
premise, the Geometric figure as an Element, hence Elementalism. This
is my project, and I am then an Elementalist. My work concerns the
mechanics of perception, in terms of construction, perspective and the
deception of the eye. I am in that sense an OP artist. My works
however range wider than that, encompassing tenets of Architectural drawing,
techniques from printing and montage. I Produce a range of standard sized
panels on which are printed Giant enlargements of my Drawings or Montages. |
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I include in my practice,
Geometric line & ‘Formal’ Construction, with Montage, Xerography,
graphics and Computer Graphics. For
the most part these works are realised as Bespoke Large Scale Black and White
laminate Panel Prints and as in Berlin, in Acrylic on Canvas. Electronic publication, on the web - Drowningcircle.com,
or on the latest version of the fuller CDRom ‘Drowningcircle.rom’, is
a convenient way for me to
demonstrate the breadth and extent of my Works, by having people see for
themselves my Work’s development,
it’s relations and groupings, through the many galleries available here. |
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A Work typically begins on a
draughtsman’s table in my studio. I ‘compose’ a Work, in a close analogy to
that of the formal nature of composition in music. Namely that of elaborate rule
play, but with a Syntax of pure Shape, Formally and
Geometrically. I study to create
methodologies, with a variable set of Visual Elements, those fundamental
‘Bits’ of the visual field that present to be interposed and integrated
with any others, for which the geometric ‘Givens’ Star, Square, Circle etc.
are most fundamental and profoundly facilitating. I seek out a
Language of Form, Proportion, Aspect, Perspective and Elegance. At first I produce a modestly
sized line ink and montage study or Maquette. This is the ‘lost wax’ of my
Practice, the base drawing that I will Photoprint to Pure black on
white. This Photoprint is then
Professionally enlarged to my standard panel size of A0 or 841 x 1189mm and
mechanically mounted to its ‘Flexiboard’ Panel. This is Heat sealed and
framed in Steel and plate Glass. My first Montage is now a large, highly
finished and unique Art object there being a strict edition of one at that
size. The development of this finishing process together with the formation
of Drowningcircle Fine Art as a marketing Name; Drowningcircle.com as a dedicated
online gallery and publishing Space; Drowningcircle.rom,
as my prime Vehicle of publication and Home Gallery; and an ever
widening programme of exhibitions; has given my Art its public presence. On this disc you will find a huge range of pictures from every part of my career. They will be presented in many ways, as Scroll Down Galleries with thumbnail‘ Icons, as ‘walk through’ suites of enlargements; as a Collected works catalogue 1983 to the present ; and as electronic Slides in Visual indices. In all cases Click on the image to enlarge it. Please use the materials of the Presentation to guide you though My Work. In this set of Presentations I attempt
to provide a range of materials to introduce, and assist in the appraisal of
my Works. Below you will find a short biography, which introduces the
Works in context. The 2nd part, is the Presentation Gallery, showing
examples from the Thematic Galleries available on this disc; the 3rd
part, is the shorter Critical CV,
simply detailing my major projects; the 4th part, is the
longer Illustrated CV, detailing all my projects
large and small, a working life; the 5th part, is the
monograph, ‘On Practice and presentation’; the 6th
part is another short Monograph, ‘On
Edition and Originality’; the 7th and 8th
parts are two Artists Statements, ‘Elementalism is…’ and ‘New British OP’, a distilled
Statement of the aims of Elementalism and a ‘Homage to influences’. My life in Pictures |
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I began an investigation of
Geometric Art in my last days at school in 1983, with my first few Line
Drawings, aged Sixteen. May 1984 I visited Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral
and felt I should Dedicate my Life to Art on seeing Ceri Roberts Altar
Piece in its high Abstract Geometric line. That summer a set of seven
Drawings, Later to become the ‘Seven Early Drawings Op.1’ ( Shown
here in Gallery 1), seemed to show a progression toward a Geometric
Language of possibility. That possibility was to inform and engage me my Work
ever since. I First Exhibited in the Summer
show at The Green Lane Gallery, Derby, just outside the then Green Lane
Art College, in the summer of 1986. One of my featured Works was a
Photoenlargement of my Op.1 no.7 from 1984 and a Paraphrase on Walls with
windows by my hero Egon Schiele, his most overtly Geometric piece. |
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Alas my ‘First Flight’, as
I like to think of these early days, was cut short by the sudden onset of a
life threatening Cancer, in the late summer of 1986. I was infact not able
even to take my own first exhibition down, nor able to take up an offer to
show in Liverpool. My exhibition had been well received, but recurrences of
the cancer in two successive years damaged my eyesight, amongst other things,
and it was not until 1990 that I really began to draw again. The remaining ‘80’s’ I call my ‘wilderness
years’. I wrote hundreds of Poems and half a dozen plays. I thought I might
take try to it up Professionally, I published several Collections, but in the
end it was Art I wanted, and Art I valued more. |
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By 1990 my Eyesight had recovered
sufficiently to draw again and I Exhibited my picture ‘The Irrational’ at a Show in Derby’s Council House that summer. In
the August I followed up with an ambitious set of four Large pencil, ink and
pastille drawings for the delightful Peabody’s Gallery in Oxford Road
Nottingham, my Four Pictures for an Exhibition Op.6. In January 91 I was invited to
exhibit one of my first sets of ‘Variations’
at the new and quite prestigious Weburgh Gallery [pronounced
‘Wer-Berg’], which opened in a converted historic church on Cheepside, Derby.
This was my four piece set ‘Sonata
for Triangle and Line Op. 7’ (shown here in the Canonical
Works). |
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Real breakthroughs in technique
came with such works as ‘Monogram
to see round corners’ ; the ‘Seven Polygonic Dances Op.9’ (shown here in Gallery 2) ; the fourteen piece set
exploring the constructional possibilities of the Pyramid and Structures
thereof ‘The Pyramics’ , (shown here in Gallery 3) ; and
‘Transposition Awry’.
Through 1992 I developed a series of 25 Black on
white Studies ‘White
Black’ (shown here in Gallery
4), some of which I exhibited in ‘Othello’s’, another of
Derby’s small Galleries, also on Cheepside. With a changing show I was there
for most of the summer of 92. The twenty five ‘White Black’ pictures can be
seen here in Gallery four. I had been trying for sometime now to get
into The Leicester ‘City Gallery’, a step up the Ladder I felt. In 92
I succeeded, if only in the sense of getting a set of 30 or so A5 Prints
shown. |
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The years 1990 -1993 are about overcoming physical difficulties;
redeveloping and embracing myself as an Artist; and gaining in experience
through a number of shows. The four years 1990 - 93 are the formative
years of my work. The technical ‘Language’, or Syntax I use in my
work now I developed hugely in these bracingly inventive times. By the
October of 93 however, I had to put
my Art on hold again, except this time, I chose to. In the Summer of 93 I was accepted
at Warwick university to read Philosophy. Earlier circumstances
and then Cancer conspired against this long held dream of academe, Now that the
chance came I had to go. It soon
became clear that I had underestimated the strength of my commitment to
Art. At the end of 94 I had to commit
myself to my Degree, as failure was not an option. I put aside all thoughts
of Art for two years. Thankfully I now have
a good Degree in Philosophy.
Generously they let me take Music
History as an option and sent me to Oxford to do it, all expenses paid
! There are very few pictures from
this time. Most are Minimalist and Architectural in nature. One, ‘A Square and
Seven Spheres’ from 96
is very important, prefiguring a number of later Works. In the summer of 97 I made a version of
the University’s 'Crest' as a Graduation gift to my
Department. I return to Derby secure
in the knowledge, that Art was my life and that I lived to Work. |
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Having done my Degree I felt whole
in that respect and that freed me to concentrate on Art. In the years 97 - 99
I covered a great deal of ground, with a renewed rigor and depth, building on
and departing from what went before; culminating in such Works as: the ‘
Lozenge Blue Black' integrations 97; ‘Quare (12)’;
‘Integrations’ 1998
; ‘Perceptual
Spheres’ - 1998 ; (all shown here in The Canonical
Works) and ‘I
Contemplate’ 1999 (shown here in Gallery 7). |
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April 99, and a set of round green
stickers, just plain green discs, came in the post as an advert from the
NSPCC. I Made them into a Work ‘Of Butterflies and Sows Ears‘. Nominally it was No. 13 of the ‘I Contemplate’
series, which I had just finished, Most importantly it gave me a great idea,
a themed charity Art Auction, later becoming just ‘ARTAuction’, my first really
big Art Project. I searched for Artists
who would donate a work, for auction in aid of the NSPCC, themed with the
Green Spot. Being unknown in the real Art world made it uphill struggle, the
biggest names and Venues turning me away. In the end I brought the Donated
Works of two Dozen Artist, from across Britain and German to York, and 18th
century De
Gray Rooms, kindly donated for the event by a York Arts Trust the York Arts Arena.
The Event was held on the 9th of January 2000 with the generous
assistance of Philips Auctioneers. They said it would be difficult to make a silk purse from a sows ear, I tried to make a butterfly out of mine. |
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During the months of planning for
‘ARTAuction’ I was
invited to join Show at the KUFA Gallery 26 Westbourne Grove, in
London’s West End. It was a show of
mainly Kosovan and Albanian Artists, most living in London, in support
of Kosova I called my piece called Kosova an
abstracted map of Europe.. |
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April 2000 I arranged to have a
ten by 20 foot work of mine installed on a billboard, on Westminster Bridge road
roundabout, on the Waterloo Station Viaduct, the work was ‘Starsplicer 1’ a huge enlargement
of one of my new splice and montage pictures all essentially derived from a
Work of 1992 ‘Star Black’. In 2000 I made 3 Sets
of Black Star Pictures: ‘As Star Black’, ‘Starsplicer’ and ‘Black Star Music’, shown Here
respectively as Galleries 9, 10 and 12. |
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In early summer 2000 at The
University of Derby, with the able assistance Tony Walkington, then of
their reprographics department. I made up an Artists Book from a series of
documentary volumes containing reproductions of virtually every Work I have
done, good or bad, in fact from the first five volumes, covering the Years
1983 to 1996. from the very beginning of my work through slim years and rich,
to the time of my Degree at Warwick. This was a salutary lesson in where I
have been and from what I have come, it contained Works which I felt I needed to revisit and to present to the
scrutiny of others as a Body, edited and distilled into a collection of my
developmental Works, a canon of
Works, which are all to a greater or lesser degree the foundations of my Art as it is now. I Called this
retrospective exercise The Canonical Works This CDRom contains an
electronic version of that Book, carefully revised and extensively cross
referenced through the Visual and page indices; intercession pages
for important Groups; and foot notes.
It is now a permanent Retrospective,. You can view it as a walk through
gallery, as a Visual Slide index, or as a seriese of Scrolling
galleries. For each Picture there are up to three levels of enlargement. You
can read a full Guide and access all areas from the Canonical Works General index. Subsequent
to this it has been possible to think of this project as a Catalogue of
Completed works, individual works being in approximately chronological order,
I can refer to them by their numerical position on the list, prefixed by
‘CW’. The catalogue now extends right up to the present and all my works now
bear the nomination CW. |
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My next Grande projet was to put a
work of mine, Star
Splicer 1 on a 10 by 20 foot billboard in central
London, on Westminster Bridge Road infact. had been designed as a
publicity stunt, to attract the attention of at least one London Gallery and
it did: ‘Art is Elemental London is a Gallery’. Bethnal Green’s ‘Stuff’
Gallery invited me to join their September Group Show ‘Stuffed’ and
in the October gave me a Solo Show; My first London solo ‘This Elemental Art’. See also the exhibition Photoset. |
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Summer 2001 I placed a quarter page
panel in Frieze 60, take a half page in Frieze 61, and
two half pages in Blueprint, in
their July and October issues. Advertising gave me a single work
‘exhibition to be visited by nearly all the readers of Frieze and
Blueprint at least once. A far greater degree of exposure than I could then
hope for in any physical space. What
is more I have given my Gallery ‘hand out’ to every one who ‘came’, all those
readers, many of whom would keep the magazine. The exhibition is its own catalogue
and the catalogue is thus it’s own exhibition. See Gallery 16: Articles of Advertisement. |
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September 2001 I am invited to
Show in Berlin at the BBQ Gallery. I Have prepared and flown
out with three Unstreched canvases, my first exhibition of paintings and my
first International exhibition, my artworld was expanding rapidly. The show
is called ‘Cloud Circles’. Collectively three
Cloud Circles. The gallery at Boxhagener Str. 68 in former east Berlin has a
magnificent street frontage on a wide boulevard. My Work was on one wall and
on another my name was written in black vinyl letters twelve inches
high. BBQ had huge shop windows with the lights on 24 hours a day. I spent
a week with the Director-Curators sight seeing and visiting other shows. See
the four photo galleries, documenting the show.
The following is a statement on ‘painting’ from the show: “Paint gives me a revolutionary freedom to disrupt, in this sense that, the incidental markings a dry brush makes in wet paint are unimaginably complex to the draftsman’s eye . I approach paint principally as a printer does ink. In my life I have always thought of print as the final phase in the making of an image but I have of late become so interested in the effects of hyper-magnification, as the imposer of ‘noise’ on the scan, that it becomes the end in itself . I turn from the pure thought of the image, in a complex Geometric purity, to the rendering of the image, in print. I invite the physical reality of imperfections and imprecision to feedback the image nose of photoenlargement into the detail of the Work. Now with paint on Canvas I can achieve a high noise of ever denser patterning - the infinitesimal becoming in Black”. |
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Cloud Circles at BBQ Gallery Berlin - September 2OO1
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In 2002 I learned of the up-coming
Liverpool Biennale and moved heaven
and earth to be in it. Space in Liverpool was at a premium and I thought I
could only get one of my ‘Seven Liverpool Pictures’ exhibited.
Out of the Blue I was invited to show all seven of the Large panels in a
gallery by the Dockside, in the Blundel Street Works Gallery an amazing space built
in a former bondage warehouse, with a 30-foot ceiling. I also took a billboard
at West Derby Street showing No.6 of the Liverpool Pictures. Before
leaving Liverpool I visited the
Metropolitan Cathedral that had so effected me at 17. I had been recently
working on a series of works based on the groundplan Geometry of the
cathedral called Sacred Circles, with a nod toward
the medieval Idea of sacred Geometry in ancient church architecture. I was
struck then that I should donate one of these works to the Cathedral and I
promised the ‘Cathedral House’ Manager Ms Claire Halon that I would do
so. ‘Eight Crucifixions’, a large, non
figurative geometric piece, No. 8 in my series ‘Sacred
Circles’. It was presented as a 2 Square meter laminate
panel to be installed permanently in Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral;
as a gift to the Fabric of the Cathedral in Trust for the people of Liverpool
on the 24th of April 2OO3. Over the next Couple of months it would
feature widely and diversely in the Media. I had made ‘A Tiny Mark on
England’. At the close of 2OO3 I showed my
piece ‘Tiepolo
& the Rape of Europa’ in the Group show The Rape
of Europa at the London’s Luke & A Gallery off Regent
Street, Mayfair. The show was curated by Megakles Rogakos of Tate Modern and
had a beautifully illustrated Catalogue.
There are three notable events of 2OO4. In the early months of the
year I move The picture Tiepolo & The Rape of Europa Via Warwick
University to the University of Derby, the University of my Home
Town, to which I owe a great deal in terms of the times I’ve occupied and
challenged their print and Graphic Departments. It was suggested to me by Tony
Walkington, the Print Dept. Head, who had helped me create the first
edition of Canonical Works from my Studio papers, that, I should consider
Giving the work to Derby. He took it up with Sue Dakin, P.R., who took
the matter to the Vice Chancellor Prof. Waterhouse who was delighted.
The welcome was Vitalising, from the Vice Chancellor Down, and I was given a
commanding space in the New Library.
On July eighth an Inauguration was held for the
picture and I, where Prof. Waterhouse the Vice chancellor, Prof.
Manly head of Fine Art and I gave Speeches. In
the middle months of the year I requested permission from The Dean of
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral The Rt. Rev. Mgr Provost Peter Cookson,
to put forward the picture ‘Eight Crucifixions’ for the 2OO4 Biennale. He
agreed readily, and the Cathedral became officially Venue 50 in the
Liverpool Biennale 2OO4.
Toward the end of the year I received a Millennium Commission
from The University of Derby Multifaith Building,
then nearing completion. I Provided a
piece called Picture in Polypoint. |
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In the Spring of 2OO6 I was commissioned by Professor Graham Richards - Chairman of Oxford Chemistry to make a piece for his new £60 million gleaming Steel and Glass Structure CRL building, a truly monumental place. I was invited down to have lunch with him at the CRL [Chemical Research Laboratories] and we toured the building throughout. I would provide a piece for the Atrium - IN ATRIA now 3rd in my Oxford series.
Professor
Richards with IN ATRIA Photo
© Karl Harrison 2006 |
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The next part of my Presentation is the ‘Presentation
Gallery’, an introduction to the wider collections of my Works in
the ‘Thematic Galleries’. The Presentation Gallery is a Gallery of Galleries,
click on any picture to visit its enlargement pages or follow the Navigation
below it, to the Gallery Collection from which it comes, or to the photoset
in which it is featured. |
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1: The Thematic Galleries Visual Index |
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