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There's a Ghost in my House:Paint Club at Tate Britain # 1: 1 pm Friday March 7th 2014
Is part of Contemporary Painting's function to enact a séance with painters of the past, with Painting’s history and with collective memory? Three artists discuss their relationship with particular paintings from the new Tate Britain displays. This event addressed the issue of what kind of working relationship contemporary artists might hope to have with the paintings (both historical and recent) in a ‘Museum’ collection. Does new painting, to gain significance, always have to genuflect to art of the past?
See Tate Event listing
Read about the speakers and their choices from the Tate Collection
The speakers:

Andrew
Cranston
Painterly problems 2011
Oil on board
32cm x 38cm
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Andrew
Cranston is a painter based in Glasgow and a
lecturer at Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon
University, Aberdeen. His paintings often allude to
rooms from literature, such as the bedroom of Gregor
Samsa, the hapless travelling salesman who transforms
into an insect in Kafka's Metamorphosis. His recent
exhibition at Hawick museum in Scotland tells the story
of a house in the grounds of the museum, owned by his
grandparents and demolished in the 1950s. Based around a
painting of the house from memory by his uncle, the
artist compiled his own paintings, a giant doll’s house,
a short film and photographs.
Walter Sickert is one of the
great image-makers and one of Painting's most
unusual colourists. I think of him, especially in
his early work, as a sort of psychological
Impressionist with a feeling for the dark rather
than the light. An inverted Monet and yet so much
more than "just an eye". His nocturnal, close-toned
palette acknowledges the eye's ability to adjust to
low light, to discern shape and figure in the
peripheral and hidden; and this artist had a
peculiar ability to penetrate the threatening
shadows of Victorian London.
His painting of 'Minnie Cunningham at the Old
Bedford' gives us the subtle nuances of observation,
but with the mysterious, haunting quality of a
memory or dream. Minnie is a Red Riding Hood figure
who seems to "hover through the filthy air", a
singer rendered still and mute by the condition of
painting. As she turns to the wings, her costume
glowing in the crepuscular gaslight, we are allowed
to take in the scene unnoticed, from the dark.
Click
here to see his choice from Tate Britain's
displays
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Dougal
McKenzie
The Intimacy of Roundness (after Charles
Morin) 2013
oil on linen
55 x 46cm
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Dougal
McKenzie is based in Belfast and teaches at
Belfast School of Art, University of Ulster. His exhibit
in the 2012 John Moores Painting Prize exhibition defied
traditional categorisations of media and materials,
bringing together found images and objects as well as
his own painting and inviting a dialogue between the
specific associations of these objects and materials
with the culture and society of our time. His past works
have been constructed around images invoking a wide
range of historical and cultural figures including
artists Edouard Manet and Friedensreich Hundertwasser,
Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Finnish runner Lasse
Virén.
Kitaj was always in
the picture for me, going right back to when I was
mystified by his 'If not, not' (1975/6) at the
Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. His commitment
to the possibility of painting being about a
narrating of histories (also, of reading and
painting),over time has become mine also. His very
late works and commentaries I have become almost
obsessional about, where there is, more often than
not, more canvas revealed than actual paint marks
(what he termed his areas of 'White Exploit'). In
its way his 'Erasmus Variations' was the beginning
of it all, what he termed the first modern art that
he committed.
Click
here to see his choice from Tate Britain's displays
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Ann-Marie
James
A bandit, a ruffian 2013
oil and acrylic on canvas
70 x 100 cm
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Ann-Marie
James completed her MA in Fine Art at
Wimbledon College of Art in 2012, and held a solo show
at Karsten Schubert, London in March 2013. Her paintings
and drawings employ quotation as a tactic through which
figurative elements can acknowledge and engage with
imagery from art of the past, Operating within the
existing aesthetic of a found image or object, she
explores the transmutation of the beautiful into the
monstrous, and back again.
John
Martin's 'The Great Day of His Wrath' is
bombastic, epic, and kind of ridiculous; at
once arguably distasteful and undeniably
brilliant. Despite the artist's original
intention for the work as a tool for moral
instruction, and it's relationship to the
Grand Tour, in our contemporary context, it is
hard not to draw comparison with the type of
imagery stereotypical of the covers of science
fiction or fantasy novels, heavy metal album
covers and chintzy chocolate boxes - John
Martin is the Michael Bay of the RA. The
subject of taste as it relates to class plays
an interesting role in our reading of this
painting, which by implication calls to mind
the argument pivotal to Pierre Bourdieu's
Distinction: a social critique of the judgment
of taste, the core of which is perhaps most
succinctly put by Dave Hickey, who wrote "Bad
taste is real taste, of course, and good taste
is the residue of someone else's privilege".
Click
here to see her choice from Tate Britain's displays
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The event was chaired by Dr
Jo Melvin, writer, curator and researcher at Chelsea
College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She was recently
the consultant for a major retrospective of Barry Flanagan at
Tate Britain and also devised and curated the Tate exhibition of
the archives of Peter Townsend, founder of Studio International.
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