LandEscape A r t R e v i e w Anniversary Edition C o n t e m p o r a r y ALEX GILFORD CEINWEN GOBERT DATIS GOLMAKANI ALEXEY ADONIN IRINA IVANOVA WILLIAM RULLER DORO SAHARITA BECKER ROSE MAGEE SAMUEL GOLC Datis Golmakani in his studio, 2021 ART
SUMMARY Ceinwen Gobert Germany C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t R e v i e w Canada Irina Ivanova The person is born to be an artist and art is a necessity for him. The need to create art has been with me all my life and has manifested itself in various forms. Art is a necessity for me! In my work I imagine sealed moments from my life, from the places where I have lived and everything that has surrounded me. The purpose of my work is to create joyful emotion in people, peace and happiness. One must unload from the hard everyday life when looking at art and creativity to have a positive effect on his senses. Special Issue Alexey Adonin Israel Alexey Adonin is a Jerusalem based abstractsurrealist artist. His works have been showcased locally and internationally and are held in private collections around the world. Alexey uses a unique and beautiful technique in which he layers oil paints solely on top of one another to create a mystical, transparent look. Alexey's philosophy stems from the idea that one's reality is made up of what they believe it to be. He uses his art as a platform to express his profound ideas about reality, humanity, and their intertwined behaviors. Bulgaria Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Alex Gilford USA The primary influences in my life and art are an interest in history and an appreciation for nature. In addition to my work as an artist, I am a Stewardship Volunteer at a Wildlife Refuge and some State Parks. Doing this type of work provides me with an opportunity to physically care for the environment and use my hands to support its future health. When I paint and draw in these natural spaces, directly from life, I engage in a more intimate way. It is much like a naturalist who quietly observes a subject, interprets what is experienced, and makes notations. Personally, I have always gravitated toward historical stories as a way of unearthing origins and tracing a winding path to the present. Centered in the eye of the storm is about keeping calm in every situation, even if you are standing in the middle of the great salar de uyuni in Bolivia watching a huge sandstorm is making its way to you... All you can do is staying focused and watch the storm goes by. Every single artwork is a unique piece of my soul – without the right feeling I don’t start to paint. Therefore I regularly use goldleaf to create a precious, shiny look and the colours of nature to mirror my deep love for mother nature. Layer by layer I try to bring positive thoughts on to the canvas. I’m interested in real time creation using structured improvisational skills – How does the current environment of the drawing and the present individual mindset alter the construction? What arises when a planned idea evolves in real time? What emerges visually and how does the final image reflect the initial ideas? My practice is about the tension and shifts between memory, dreams, and the reality of the inner landscape, and how our perceptions change due to movement between these three. I’m inspired by childhood nostalgia and a fascination with spells, words, and the longing for magic. Doro Saharita Becker United Kingdom Samuel Golc The key emotion I wish to convey in my art is a sense of wonder. As a man, I am driven by perennial questions; the Whys of existence. In my professional life, I use curiosity as a tool of the trade. I have been making art for as long as I can remember. I spend my earliest years surrounded by nature in a rural corner of Poland. I was still a child when my family and I moved to a big city. Eventually, I settled in London where I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art and Master’s in Art Psychotherapy. Currently, I divide my time between a clinical role and my artistic endeavours. Nature is my chief influence. Through my art, I attempt to capture ephemeral sights and mental states.
Special Issue Special thanks to Haylee Lenkey, Martin Gantman , Krzysztof Kaczmar, Joshua White, Nicolas Vionnet, Genevieve Favre Petroff, Sandra Hunter, MyLoan Dinh, John Moran, Marya Vyrra, Gemma Pepper, Michael Nelson, Hannah Hiaseen and Scarlett Bowman, Yelena York Tonoyan, Miya Ando, Martin Gantman , Krzysztof Kaczmar and Robyn Ellenbogen. SUMMARY Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW USA In her work, Vytautė Trijonytė examines individual and collective memory revolving around cultural identity. She was born and grew up in Kaunas in Lithuania. Growing up in suburbia formed her initial close and intimate relationship with nature which resembles in her practice. The interest in photography was cultivated during her teenage years after the death of a grandfather who used to be a professional photographer in Kaunas. He eventually turned into the main inspiration to develop a career as an artist. Datis Golmakani Iran William M. Ruller, Born in Gloversville NY, 1981 received a B.A. in painting and ceramics from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in 2007. Following his undergraduate degree, Ruller moved to Oregon where he worked as a production potter and ceramics instructor. In 2014 he received is MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Ruller has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States in group and solo exhibitions. His painting has been featured in Friend of the Artist Volume 12, Whitewall Art, New American Paintings Issues 111, 124 and Studio Visit Magazine Issues 20, 21, 23. His work is in private collections such as Hyatt Andaz Hotel, Savannah College of Art and Design and Museo Riso. Rose Magee USA / Germany My eyes are drawn to contrasts, dramatic lighting and bold colours, oils with their richness and depth are the ultimate medium for this. Colours create atmosphere and the shapes breathe that in, resonating together on a canvas waiting patiently to be experienced. My creative process is sparked by a glimpse, the stolen intimate moment between a couple, the way a street light illuminates the leaves on a tree. The core of my work looks to the essence of the first of the 20th century, the freedom of the unconscious that surrealism and cubism gave birth to. The aim is not to produce a direct translation of reality on the canvas but rather an impression of it, pure and ready for interpretation. William Ruller 4 42 Samuel Golc lives and works in London, United Kingdom Rose Magee lives and works in Berlin, Germany Alexey Adonin lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel William Ruller lives and works in the United States Doro Saharita Becker lives and works in Germany Irina Ivanova lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria Ceinwen Gobert lives and works in Toronto, Canada Datis Golmakani lives and works in Mashhad, Iran Alex Gilford lives and works in Detroit, Michigan, USA 64 84 106 134 162 184 208
Hello Samuel and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would like to invite our readers to visit https://hadashart.wixsite.com/samuelgolc-fine-art in order to get a wide idea about your multifaceted artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted The key emotion I wish to convey in my art is a sense of wonder. As a man, I am driven by perennial questions; the Whys of existence. In my professional life, I use curiosity as a tool of the trade. I have been making art for as long as I can remember. I spend my earliest years surrounded by nature in a rural corner of Poland. I was still a child when my family and I moved to a big city. Eventually, I settled in London where I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art and Master’s in Art Psychotherapy. Currently, I divide my time between a clinical role and my artistic endeavours. Nature is my chief influence. Through my art, I attempt to capture ephemeral sights and mental states. I am intrigued by the mind's ability to generate seemingly seamless experiences from the unceasing flow of sense data, thoughts, memories, and feelings. I draw inspiration from psychology, quantum mechanics, and Kabbalah. My approach to art is diverse. I engage in painting, photography, drawing, and printmaking. I enjoy experimenting and pushing the boundaries of my practice. For me, art is a language that allows one to express feelings and experiences that transcend what can be described in words. I think that using multiple means to tell a story is more important than following a particular genre or having a recognisable style. I am enchanted by the alchemy of art. I often grind my paints and inks by hand. This allows me to get familiar with the characters of raw substances and pigments; to both have control and forgo control over my mediums. In my photography, I use self-made optical instruments that allow me to beguile the camera into capturing ambiguous semi-abstract shots. My treatment of photography evokes that of painting as I use various props in much the same way as I would use brushes and colours. My method of fractaloscopy allowed me to achieve a photographic equivalent of cubism. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Samuel Golc
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art and Master’s in Art Psychotherapy: how did those formative years influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum due to your clinical role as a psychotherapist address the direction of your current artistic research? Samuel Golc: Hello. Thank you for having me. I’m really grateful for this opportunity. Training to become an artist was a time of constant creative incitement. This stimulating experience pushed my practice into new and exciting directions that I would never have taken. That being said, I don’t feel those years changed much about my professional identity. Some time ago, I came into possession of a rather flimsy and tattered old drawing that changed hands several times. It was poorly executed, yet its dreamy quality, its combination of concrete elements and vague shapes, and its use of the composition as an invitation for viewer’s projections resonated with my own artistic style and sensitivity. The drawing was by seven-year-old me. I guess I didn’t make myself the kind of artist I am; it was in me all along. The idea of working with art to help others has a great appeal to me. I have always been fascinated by the human mind. Art therapy presented me with an opportunity to use my scientific and creative leanings in the service of people’s mental well-being. Becoming an art therapist didn’t affect the content of my work. Instead, it changed my attitude and understanding of it. I become aware of the inner life of art as it were. A piece of art created by a client can become a cultural object or a commercial item, but in most cases, it is made, viewed, and thought about only in the context of therapy. Art therapists also produce art- for clinical purposes. This may serve as a way to explore their own unconscious processes or think visually about their clients. Sometimes, therapists paint, draw, or sculpt together with people they support. Art in art therapy has no rights or wrongs, no need for criticism or applause, and doesn’t need to be aesthetic or accomplished in any way, but it always has a meaning. In art therapy, I found art free from the influence of current trends, the market, and even history. There is something wonderfully primal about it. I imagine that the cavemen didn’t have other reasons for painting animals or making stencils of their hands than the desire to leave their mark and give shape to their thoughts. Researchers have been investigating the relationship between art and neurology for decades. In his book Inner Vision, neurobiologist Semir Zeki explores the brain’s responses to visual stimuli in the form of artworks. The neurologist Oliver Sachs relates numerous case studies where neurological impairments led artists to form new artistic tastes. Similarly, the link between creativity and mental health enjoys considerable attention in both academia and the art world. Take for instance the practice of posthumously diagnosing famous artists or the Outsider Art movement. All these investigations are highly relevant to my artistic research. My project Meditations, which includes Aleph and The Permanence of Sound, could be considered a crossover between fine art and art-based research.
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition This series of paintings and drawings attempt to capture my experience of hypnagogia, or images spontaneously generated by the brain at the onset of sleep and in meditative states. Hypnagogic hallucinations usually don’t carry any personal meaning. I experience them as a constantly changing melee of geometric forms and phosphenes. From this randomness emerges Dragonfly
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW self-organising harmony, which bypasses all the workings of the conscious mind. I find these spectral episodes fascinating. Interestingly, the works in Meditations reverberate the aesthetics of my abstract photography, which emerged independently. The body of works that we have selected for Dragonfly
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition this special edition of LandEscape and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article has at once captured our attention for the way it unveils the connection between reality — with recurrent figurative elements, as in the interesting Moonrise, The Great Dream and the diptych Dragonfly — and such dreamlike ambience: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, would you tell us The Great Dream
Samuel Golc scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land how do you consider the relationship between the real and the imagined playing within your artistic research? Samuel Golc: When it comes to the philosophy behind my art, I find the distinction between the real and the imagined blurry. More often than not, it is a question of an agreement based on arbitrary assumptions. Psychoanalysis already observed that many truths we hold about ourselves or take from society stem from illusions or, dare I say it, delusions. The scholar Raymond Barglow quotes Freud, who listed three blows to man's self-importance, two dealt by Copernicus and Darwin, and his own theory of the unconscious, which took away man's charge over his own mental life. Barglow strikes the final punch by claiming that in modern society human subjects may not exist at all. Worse still, this may apply to the entirety of existence. Where the relativity theory robbed space-time of its absolute nature, quantum mechanics and its modern incarnations question the absolute presence of time and space. Naturally, this doesn’t come to us as a complete surprise. Mystics across the ages have always suspected something of that kind. So, how can we make distinctions between the real and the imagined? I don’t have an answer to that. It seems to me rather unsound and arrogant to taking the auspices Blue Sunset
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition say that reality is as we see it. I would say that meeting life with an open mind and curiosity feels like a healthier position. It is hard to say how my creative process begins. An idea resembling a finished painting may come to me in a flash. I hold on to it, rotate it in my mind’s eye, add and subtract elements, and play with composition and colours until I get a sense of what the image is about. From there starts the hard part of sketching and making preliminary studies. In my paintings, I mix figurative elements and abstractions to capture something of what I imagine the flow of consciousness may look like. Some thoughts and ideas gain permanence, while others barely brush our awareness. The fragments of landscapes that I incorporate in my compositions tend to be places I saw either in dream or in waking. Clocks, pots, bicycles, and photographic enlargers that keep popping in my pictures are mostly things that I own and have endowed with symbolic meaning. As is the case with mental objects, their shapes change slightly according to the light and perspective in which they are seen. We have particularly appreciated the way your works show that vivacious tones are not strictly indispensable to create tension and dynamics. How does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in your artworks and in particular, how do you develop your textures? Samuel Golc: My choice of techniques depends on the type of effects I wish to achieve in a given piece. For moody, dark, or misty paintings, such as The Great Dream, I
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Storm
Bridge
scape Special Edition CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land usually start by covering the whole canvas with tempera (ultramarine, Indian red, or burnt sienna are my preference). This ground gives a nice ‘toothy’ texture for further layers of oil colour. For lighter, more crisp paintings, I start by blocking dark and light areas with grey and beige tempera, taking care to make shadows thicker than highlights. In some cases, I use watercolours instead. Hand-grinded oil colours have more fluidity and freshness than manufactured paints. Each pigment retains its characteristics. Thus, yellow ochre tends to be heavy and gluey, while helios red is light and buttery. In some paintings, I mix oil with other media, such as gilding (Taking the Auspices), encaustic (Storm), watercolour and pastel (Projections), or ink (Time). I achieved the broken colours in the sky area of The Blue Sunset by applying a thick coat of blue paint and then dipping it face down in a tank of water with a layer of diluted white oil floating on top; just as I would do when marbling a piece of paper. It was a crazy idea, but just this once, it worked. Another example of an unusual mixed-media piece is Vortex 2. I began by smudging the entire canvas with some tempera-crayons, which I have made previously. I then applied a coat of gesso mixed with powdered graphite. I drew the vortex with metalpoint, this most ethereal of the Old Masters’ drawing tools. As a result, the vortex seems to dissolve in the background which, to me at least, looks like the inside of your eyelids when you face the sun. Occasionally, I use collage to create textures. For example, the support for Aleph is made out of hundreds of flower petals. Every new project requires an alternation of style and technique, depending on what emotion or idea it is to convey. The change may be slight or drastic. This is one of the honey mushrooms
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW joys of making things. Nature is your chief influence, and both your oil paintings — as Blue Sunset and Storm — and the works from your photographic series, — as (s)p[l]ace/s — reflect such important
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition part of your sources of inspirations. How do your memories due to your earliest years living surrounded by nature in a rural corner of Poland and your everyday life's experience fuel your creative process? Samuel Golc: In constructing my images, I Drop Symphony
use memories and photographs of places I know. Whenever I get a chance, I take my sketchbook and camera and go recording things around me; trees, flowers, and clouds. It helps me train my eye. Besides, it is a joy to interact with nature. A lion’s share of my artistic production is autobiographical. When I was a child, stories and books would spark my visual imagination. Words would conjure up images in my mind’s eye that I just had to transfer onto paper. I was lucky enough to grow up in a place where it was easy to envision characters from my favourite fairy tales in the landscapes around me. Behind the dark orchard, there was a small lake. A little further stood a derelict brick factory worthy of a horror film set. The golden fields and wide pastures just asked to be populated with hobbits, and the dome-like hills carpeted with pine forests would teem with elves. Painting heroic landscapes led me to the discovery of magical realism and surrealism of my adolescence. I feel most at home in nature. When I can’t stay with it, I keep its memory on canvas. I spent my school years in a big city where I missed the Milky Way’s eternal ribbon of my early childhood like an old friend. Perhaps that’s why I keep painting so many spacescapes. While hiking in the mountains or forests, I would contemplate my kinship with all living things. The sense of mystery of things fuels my creativity. Naturally, when seeking nature, one is drawn to think about its uncertain future. I don’t explicitly raise any of humanity’s problems in my art, including ecology. However, I think that the concern for what we do to the planet filter into my work. Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
Pozo de las Calcosas
The Well of Health
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW You are a versatile artist, and your practice encompasses painting, photography, drawing, and printmaking: what does direct you to such interdisciplinary approach? In particular, are there any experiences that did particularly help you to develop your attitude to experiment with different techniques? Samuel Golc: I think my attitude to experiment derives from my art education. To learn a technique, you need to try it first, and I never stopped learning. Art history has also shaped my approach. It is not only a tale of changing canons of beauty and the correspondent ideological, political, and social shifts; it is also a history of options available to artists at a given time. Nowadays, when there are heaps of materials to choose from, I don’t think I would do justice to my ideas if I limited myself to a single modality. The diversity of art materials and techniques offers a multitude of ways of saying things. I wish to say many different things in my art. Becoming an art therapist strengthened my interdisciplinary tendency. I realised that a choice of materials and techniques can say a lot about the artist’s mental make-up. For instance, pens, markers, and pencils are ‘safe’ as they don’t require getting your hands dirty and offer reasonable control. Paints and clay, on the other hand, require a degree of risktaking. For some techniques, you have to be subtle and careful, while in others you need to assail the emerging artwork. Likewise, I choose techniques and materials according to the need of the hour. In a more abstract sense, my interdisciplinary approach reflects my general attitude to things. In tackling an academic problem, it is often best to borrow from multiple fields of knowledge, not just your own specialty. Similarly, I am a proponent of pluralism in interpersonal relations. As you have remarked once, art is for you a language that allows one to express feelings and experiences that transcend what can be described in words. Visual artists from different eras — from Eugène Delacroix, passing through Pablo Picasso, to more recently Fang Lijun — communicated more or less explicit messages in their artworks: how do you consider the relationship between the evocative power of images — even abstract ones — and ''ordinary'' language? Do you think that there's a subtle point of convergence between the structured syntax of words and visual arts? Samuel Golc: Visual art and language branch out from the same cultural matrix that rests on the bedrock of archetypes. I think art and language complement each other. Ultimately, they produce a very similar affect in the viewer or reader if you consider the gestalt of their experience. An overall sense in a piece of writing, and a feeling in a piece of art, are more than just the sum of their constituents. It is the elements that make up a visual scene and a syntactic structure that sets them apart. I call it the problem of graininess and smoothness. Briefly speaking, language and text are quantised; they possess their own kinds of indivisible atoms. Half a morpheme or quarter of a letter doesn’t carry any meaningful information. The lingual bits form larger molecules that obey the rules of grammar. Thus language, when zoomed into, appears grainy. Yet, this is not the case with pictures since the interplay of lines, shapes, and colours cannot be deconstructed just in the same
way. Obviously, digital photographs are made out of pixels, while paintings are physical objects with chemical structures, however, the atomism of images plays a minor role in their creation and perception. In other words, a reader arrives at the meaning of a piece of text by taking a series of discrete steps, whereas an art viewer skips right inside a piece of art. One cannot retrace one’s ‘thoughtons’ that led to the visual perception because one’s journey from not-seeing to seeing is too smooth. This resembles Zeno’s ancient paradox about a race between Achilles and a tortoise. If the tortoise is given a head start, Achilles can never overtake it, as he needs first to reach the point from which the tortoise began the race. By the time he arrives there, the tortoise would already have moved ahead. Thus, reasoned Zeno, movement is impossible if time and space can be infinitely divided. Howbeit, in discerning a piece of art, we make a cognitive jump, which is logically permissible. Perhaps people of the past had a more verbal relationship with art. The American psychologist Julian Jaynes speculated that the parts of the brain responsible for speech may have had more developed counterparts in the right hemisphere of the cerebrum of people of antiquity (in modern humans, the Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas are located in the left, ‘rational’ brain). The right brain is more involved in symbolic, intuitive, and- yes, you guessed it- artistic sides of life. Did our ancestors hear voices of the world around them- and of their creative interpretations of it? If that is the case, in the course of our evolutionary and cultural betterment, we silenced those inner voices. All we are left to do now is create, view, and use language to describe art and hope Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Special Edition
Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Samuel Golc we can recover some of our sense of being. New York City based artist Lydia Dona once underlined the necessity to re-evaluate each step of the mechanism of art making itself, highlighting the fact that a work of art is a physical manufact, with tactile properties. In your artistic practice you often grind your Sign
paints and inks by hand, in order to get familiar with the characters of raw substances and pigments: how important is for you to transcend the visual dimension of the materials that you work with? Moreover, is important for you that your artworks feature clear tracks of your process, or are you more interested in the Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Special Edition The Eye
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW final results, regardless of the process? Samuel Golc: For me, every step in the creative process affects the next. Without a good drawing, I find making a good underpainting difficult, and if there are faults in preliminary layers, they will likely show in the final painting. I think that all the tracks of my process are visible in the finished work because it is but an amalgamation of all the steps I have taken. Actually, for me a piece of art never gets quite finished, rather there comes a point when I decide to stop working on it. Naturally, viewers don’t see all the scars of creative struggles written on the surface of my paintings. I think it makes viewing them more interesting. I would like my audience to be curious about the nature of my pieces as physical objects, not just the messages they sent. My approach to painting is in itself such an inquiry. I didn’t quite understand premodern painting before I tried using handgrinded colours, just as prior to discovering silverpoint and iron gall ink I was baffled by the lightness in the Renaissance artists’ studies and the warmth of tones in the Old Masters’ sketches. At the start of my career, I was more interested in the finished artifacts. Once again, my art therapy training changed my attitude. The act of artmaking is a ritualised sensory experience that has great therapeutic potential. Becoming an art therapist helped me to rediscover the pleasure of the creative process. When capturing ephemeral sights and mental states, your artworks invite the viewer to make personal associations. Austrian Art historian Ernst Gombrich once remarked the importance of providing a space for the viewers to project onto, so that they can actively participate in the creation of the
The Age of Fire
Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Special Edition Noncommutative Pillars Of Creation
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW illusion: how important is for you to trigger the viewers' imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? Samuel Golc: I agree with Gombrich. I find that viewers’ associations and interpretations are crucial in giving a piece of art its meaning. The greater the scope for meaning-making an artwork presents, the more potential for re-evaluation it has. I like art that invites discovery. For me, the creative process itself is intersubjective. While I paint, I simultaneously assess my creation through my artistic eyes and that of an imagined viewer. Art is a kind of dialogue. Having a theory about the other person’s mind is a prerequisite for any form of conversation. After a piece of art is ready for viewing, it is the audience’s task to complete it. I don’t expect the viewers to ‘read’ all my symbolism and subtle references. What matters is that the artwork allows me to share an experience with the people who come to witness it. I learn a great deal about my art from the viewers. Take Dragonfly for instance. The teapot on the right-hand side of the painting bears a Chinese symbol fu, which translates as ‘good luck’. The fu ideogram is traditionally displayed in reverse during New Year celebrations due to a play of words; the Chinese for ‘upside down’ sounds the same as ‘arrives’; thus, upside-down fu signifies wishing of good fortune. Now, I have purposefully composed Dragonfly so that it would visually make sense when hanging upside down. The various elements in Dragonfly; the cyclists going round in circles, the Mandelbrot fractal, insects, and face emerging from splodges, all point to the tension between the mundane and the extraordinary, determinism and chance, permanence and ephemerality. Knowing this, you may think that I used fu as a visual pun and its cultural significance forms another layer to the story the painting tells. Wrong. I learned the significance of fu from a fellow art therapist who viewed the completed painting. When Taking the Auspices first saw the light of day, many people naturally concluded that the globe surrounded by the omniumslooking flock of birds referred either to the Earth engulfed by the pandemic or the graphic representation of coronavirus that flooded the media. The problem is that the painting was based on a sketch that I produced before any news of Covid reached us. Nevertheless, the Covid interpretation inspired the title of the work. I felt like an augur of old prophesising disasters from the movements of birds. These ‘artistic premonitions’ happen to me surprisingly often. Is it a result of viewers’ projecting personal interpretations onto images that mean something else entirely or evidence of the collective unconscious at work? Perhaps sheer coincidence? I don’t think these explanations are mutually exclusive. Another interesting body of works that we would like to introduce to our readers is your Fractaloscopic series, that has captured our eyes for its unique composition of tones and geometry, and that you created without
Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Special Edition the use of any specialist equipment, but through a series of optical devices made from household materials: when walking us through the genesis of such captivating idea, would you tell us how do you consider the relationship between Technology and your creative process? In particular, do you think that Technology could even shape creativity? Samuel Golc: I think Technology does shape creativity in many different ways. Not only does it equip artists with new mediums and techniques, but it also produces problems that they are bound to respond to. Some of those issues are pertinent, such as people’s alienation in the technology-led era or the effects of interacting with screens on developing brains. Others are more fanciful, like the impending AI world domination. Speaking of which, I don’t advocate demonising technology. I think it’s amazing what we achieved with it, both in terms of scientific discovery and protecting people’s lives and health. Technology makes everyday life easier and more complicated at the same time. Ultimately, it is what we make of it; if we feel threatened by technology, it is because we are a peril to ourselves. I appreciate digital art and sometimes employ it to create images (as in Noncommutative Landscape, Asymetriade, or Relativity). I use editing software in post-processing my photographs, but it is not the most important part of my workflow. The essence of my image is captured in-camera. I suppose most of the effects created with my optical devices could be achieved in Photoshop. Many of the instruments that I use have mirrors that allow a single capture to depict the subject from multiple perspectives in a kind of photographic counterpart of Cubism (this is what inspired the name for this technique, the body of work, and the devices themselves). Perhaps the same could be done through some clever use of computer graphics. To me, my method seems simpler, faster, and more straightforward. In the end, I prefer to think with my hands to staring at the screen. The use of DIY equipment is also fundamentally me- you could call it my signature style. As a painter, I also prefer to use self-made materials customised to my needs over manufactured ones. It probably has something to do with my nonconformity. I don’t like starting where others have left. While I was at art college, I had the privilege to learn the techniques of analogue photography. Seeing pictures coming into focus under this unreal red light or fixing a ground glass of a largeformat camera under a cloak felt almost like partaking in some magic ritual. Darkroom photography presents multiple ways of manipulating images. My pinhole and photogram props were the forerunners of my other optical devices. I asked myself: how could I achieve the same freedom of manipulation with my DSLR? Could I enjoy myself as much using a machine that does most of the work for me? Of course, digital photography presents a much wider repertoire for creative alternations. Where a traditional photographer is constrained to work
Aleph
Galaxy
Hypnogogia
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW with the information carried by the light scattered from the subject, Photoshop artists are bound only but their imagination and skill. Having said that, I think that sometimes less is more. Limiting one’s pallet can result in a better picture. The history of fractaloscopy is a tale of one idea leading to another. Once I made triangular, round, and square fractaloscopes, was there anything to stop me from trying spiral and oval shapes? This experimental process led to many unforeseen successes and even more blind alleys. My main inspiration was photography itself- the way it extended the reach of the human eye. Telescopes have taken us to the far reaches of space, while microscopes revealed the minute worlds beneath our feet. Long and short exposures, infrared and ultraviolet have exposed us to entirely new realms. I was influenced by the exotic aesthetics of electrophotography and holographs. Since making a giant hologram was beyond my technical and financial means, I settled to make something comparable with the stuff I found lying around. Perhaps, due to its ad hoc nature, the idea was even more original than building a hologram. In a controversial quote, German photographer Thomas Ruff stated that ''nowadays you don't have to paint to be an artist: you can photography in a realistic way". Provocatively, the German photographer highlighted the short circuit between the act of looking and that of thinking critically about images: how do you consider the role of photography in our contemporary age, constantly saturated by ubiquitous images? Samuel Golc: I suppose it all depends on what we mean by art and artist. The romantic notion of art as a masterpiece and artist as a representative of humanity, blessed with talents and skills beyond comprehension, is tempting but immaterial in the modern world. With the growth of the population and cultural shifts it brings, I don’t believe we will see any future VanGoghs and Picassos. They will get lost in the crowd, together with potential Einsteins, or get too numerous to ever reach the height of giants. To borrow a phrase from Barthes, the author is dead. Or is he? Teenagers taking selfies on their phones or children scribbling in their notebooks are not bestowed with the title of artists. However, what I would ask is not how many years the person behind the lens spent in an art school or how likely their picture is to be hanged on a gallery wall; the question I would ask is what story does their image tell and what intention lies behind its creation. Art psychotherapy taught me that a selfie or a scribble could be as rich in meaning for its author and intended audience as Mona Lisa and Guernica is for the public. I don’t know if human experience and emotions are enough to produce art and artists. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there is a potential for the inner artist in everyone, but this is just an exercise in semantics. Without a doubt, we are constantly saturated by ubiquitous images that lack both story and intentionality. Whether they be taken by a Modern Master or a man in the street, to me, they are but the visual equivalent of white noise. Over the years your artworks have been
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition showcased in a number of occasions, including your Dreams and Dreaming exhibition at the Sharp Art Gallery, London: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? By the way, as the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram — increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? Untitled
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW The Permanence Of Sound
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Fractaloscopy
Samuel Golc Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Samuel Golc: Obviously, different gallery spaces and platforms for viewing art attract different audiences. I think that my work is versatile and polysemous enough to sit comfortably on a gallery’s white wall and in more informal settings. For example, the (s)p[l]ace/s project includes many urban captures that affiliate with street art. Some of my drawings and paintings were found to fit the brief for a short indie film about a mentally unbalanced artist (Let Me In, theCANDOproduction). A number of them were used for the scenery. I enjoy the fact that my art can be reached by different kinds of art lovers. The example of the Dreams and Dreaming show at the Sharp Art Gallery is an interesting one. The gallery is connected to the NHS Mental Health service. Many of the exhibiting artists are service-users. It would be an exciting opportunity to form a relationship with the audience for any art psychotherapist. I think that a sense of shared experience and empathy is required for any form of meaningful conversation. Art should make us feel that our experience of life is not limited to our evanescent being; it is experienced by others and will outlive each and every one of us living today. Moreover, the exchange with the viewers doesn’t have to be only about the work being shown but can also evoke deeper philosophical, social, and political issues. Art therapists often exhibit their work to promote their ideas and profession. Nowadays, much of art viewing is done online. Accessing art with a click of a button is no doubt convenient, but takes away much of the experience. Looking and a bunch of pixels is not the same as interacting with a physical object. Online platforms make viewing art a rather solitary affair; something it was never meant to be. That being said, I don’t think any of us can turn the hands on a clock. Art now lives online, along with most of humanity’s cultural heritage. To unplug it is all but impossible, so we could just as well make the best of this situation. Fortunately, physical art spaces still exist. I hope that we’ll maintain a balance between using them and taking advantage of images accessible by the computer. I too share my art on the internet through my website, social networks such as Instagram ( ), as well as platforms and marketplaces, like 500px, , and . We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Samuel. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Samuel Golc: Well, there is a new fractaloscope on its way. I am also looking into ways of bringing my painting and photography together. One medium which I haven’t yet tried is screen printing. It combines the subtlety and freedom of hand drawing with the alchemy of darkroom photography. I think it has the potential to become a new playground for my artistic experiments. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Rose and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.rosemagee.com in order to get a wide idea about your mulifaceted artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid formal training: after your studies in Art and Design, at Worcestershire college, UK, you started your careeras a Tattoo artist and you later decided to retrain in the conservation of cultural heritage, nurturing your education with a Bachelor of Restoration and Conservation, at HTW Berlin: how did those formative years — as well as your work as a tattooist — influence your evolution as an artist? In particular, are there any experiences that did particularly help you to develop your attitude to experiment with different techniques and media? Rose Magee: Firstly, thank you for My eyes are drawn to contrasts, dramatic lighting and bold colours, oils with their richness and depth are the ultimate medium for this. Colours create atmosphere and the shapes breathe that in, resonating together on a canvas waiting patiently to be experienced. My creative process is sparked by a glimpse, the stolen intimate moment between a couple, the way a street light illuminates the leaves on a tree. The core of my work looks to the essence of the first of the 20th century, the freedom of the unconscious that surrealism and cubism gave birth to. The aim is not to produce a direct translation of reality on the canvas but rather an impression of it, pure and ready for interpretation. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Rose Magee Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
scape Special Edition CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Bubbles
Rose Magee Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW presenting my work in your magazine, I am extremely thrilled by the opportunity. I think my time in the Art and Design course showed me what I did not want which is why I did not complete the study. It felt convoluted and more about the way we speak about art rather than the art itself. From tattooing I took my love of clean clear colours and sharp lines. Creating a tattoo design and working on a painting commission are also very similar, in both scenarios you are working under specifics whilst trying to find the balance between what the client wants and what you think as an artist works. Later the restoration degree introduced me to all the possibilities there are with organic and inorganic materials as well as working with a large range of tools which is proving invaluable in the experiments with different waste materials to create sustainable sculptures. The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of LandEscape has at once impressed us for the way it captures the A smouldering nightstand Mountainous Silk
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition ephemeral of daily experience inviting the viewers to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, would you tell us how do you usually develop the initial ideas for your artworks? do you create your works intuitivelly, instinctively? Or do you methodically transpose geometric schemes? Rose Magee: Each morning I try to take the time to make a slight detour on my way to the studio, so I can walk through the woods. I find this time perfect to think, I just let my mind run and this is normally when I come up with most of my designs. Of course sometimes I will have a rough idea and as I try to implement it something better or more realistic occurs. I think I am naturally too impatient to sit and plan a sculpture or painting meticulously out. The core of your work looks to the essence of the first of the 20th century, the freedom of the unconscious that surrealism and cubism gave birth to. Your artworks are marked out with such sapient combination between Uncomfortable Studio at Night
Rose Magee Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Colours of Grief
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Colours of Grief
Rose Magee scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land rigorous sense of geometry — as in the interesting diptych Colours of Grief— and dramatic lighting and bold colours, that provide your works with unique aesthetic identityand that draw the viewers to a state of mind where the categories of time and space become suspended. How does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in your artworkd and in particular, how do you develop your textures in order to achieve such unique results? Rose Magee: If I had to assess my own psychological tendencies I would say I tend towards optimism, in particular a nihilistic optimism. This is possibly why I choose bright colours over muted ones. One of the paintings I am most happy with is dying tulips from 2016, the colours are bright and yet it shows flowers dying. It is not a sad piece by any means and I find the thought that life has a perfect cycle of birth and death extremely comforting. Something about geometric forms also comforts me much like distorted perspectives and surreal situations. To express the anxiety I feel about not being able to be hyper productive during Berlin’s English Countryside Galaxy
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition lockdowns I painted cacti growing out of beds and armchairs. The quarantine room series has tried to portray the isolated inspiration one can find if they look hard enough. Your subjects often include domestic environments, and we really appreciate your ability to capture the aesthetics of the ephemeral from daily experience: how do you select such locations and what does you appeal of ordinary environment? In particular, how does your everyday life's experience fuel your artistic research? Rose Magee: I am especially interested in the beauty of the mundane, how a shadow falls or the sunlight reflects. I think what I like so much is that it doesn't try to be anything showy, it's effortless and often overlooked. In our modern lives we normally don't take the time to really look at the things around us and for me there's something peaceful, even luxurious about taking the time to look at the things I take for granted. The painting ‘English countryside’ is a manifestation of homesickness during lockdown, one wall disappears to show an imagined english scene. With elements sapiently selected from the ordinary, your Uncomfortable triptych features powerful narrative drive: how do you consider the role of symbols and evokative elements playing within your artistic process?