Kettle’s Yard: Sybille Berger: Paintings: Pre-visit

untitled 2002

I’ve only seen one picture by Sybille Berger so far, the one used to illustrate the invitation card. This is a square piece, with four horizontal stripes of colour, (from top to bottom) a purple, yellow, a slightly darker purple and a lilac strip. The colours are flat, the divisions between them hard.

My initial thoughts are of hard-edged abstraction; the stark arrangements of colours remind me of the Homage to the Square paintings by Josef Albers (this is probably why I am particularly drawn to this piece out of the three exhibition cards that Kettle’s Yard have sent). The colours themselves don’t seem to have any meaningful references that I know of.

It’s a striking image, used on the card (but not in itself obviously striving for this effect, that’s just the way its been used in this situation), but beyond that, I’m unable to comment. I assume there must be more to it than just arrangements of colours.

I plan on visiting the exhibition on Monday 4 December.

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Touch typing

I’m teaching myself to touch-type.

I’m using a piece of software called Ten Thumbs which is working quite well, although it’s quite basic looking. I’m up to 24 words per minute after a couple of weeks with a c.7% error rate. Although it can be very frustrating, it’s slowly becoming more natural to do, and I can see my technique visibly improving.

I decided to learn when I decided that I should be doing more writing. My handwriting is terrible—even I can’t read it—and very slow and, at the time, my typing was also quite slow. Learning to touch type therefore seems a sensible thing to do.

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Next Stage

I think I have to get to grips with my Next Stage.

I’ve recently re-discovered reading Art Theory. I really enjoy (I think that’s the right word) reading these books about the reasons for Art. On the one hand they represent a challenge for me, they are in many cases opaque in their language and take some effort to understand, on the other they’re relating directly to the works of Art that I am excited.

Looking back on my time at College I can see that I was always quite interested in the reasoning behind work. Case in point: I’d do little talks as part of my art practice about what I was thinking about with regards to Art (I really must dig out the notes that I made for those sessions–potentially embarrassing). At the time I didn’t place much importance on them–they were just what I did to keep my hand in when I was unable to make objects. But in retrospect perhaps they were more important in forming my practice than I was aware.

The reason I think it’s important is because I’ve never really understood what Art is, and my programme has become the investigation of it and my reactions to it. I have always felt uncomfortable making Art objects–as much as I love them, and I get a real thrill from them–I cannot justify to myself creating them. But thinking about it and trying to explain what I think about them is actually part of the thrill, I see something I like, in my excitement I need to verbalize what it is and why I like it. Maybe I should be a teacher.

So, the Next Stage. I want to develop this, after this 10 year hiatus. I want to write more about my opinions about Art (and other things), I want to thereby develop the writing into a strong medium for my work (I see the writing as my work of Art in the absence of any other medium I can use).

So, I’m reading and I’ll be writing. And hopefully, something will come of this.

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