Nature Strikes Back: Festival 15 Hastings

Tuesday, 8 May 2018

FESTIVAL 15 - Andrzej Jackowski

The Work

The work of Andrzej Jackowski (born 1947, North Wales) is largely autobiographical, based on his early childhood memories, recollections of a family history in Poland and the feeling of alienation and enclosure that these experiences roused. Using powerful, insistent images from his past he explores ideas of human memory and psyche, both on a personal and more collective level.
Time of the Dream - 7, which features in this show, came out of a Paupers Press commission to produce a book of 52 lithographs - one a week for a year. A sense of this project is in the following quote:

"..a place of life and death,of disembodiment and sex; a place of things breaking up and being put together again. It is a subconscious land which distils the essence of the self."

Rachel Campbell-Johnston

The Process

Seamus Heaney wrote that for him,writing a poem; "was like dropping a bucket down a well of yourself", most of the time you bring up air, but with patience,trust and hard work you eventually fill the bucket with water. This process (for writing poems or making images) is difficult but when you finally bring up a bucket of water rather then air; there is a feeling that you have come up with something intriguing,haunting; there is some clarity and occasionally great joy.

More

For more see the two videos below.

Dreams of Here (12mins)

This is an excerpt from Andrzej Jackowski's video commentary for the exhibition Dreams of Here, shown at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in 2012. It was a collective exhibition in collaboration with Tom Hammick and Julian Bell.

Andrzej Jackowski’s professorial inaugural lecture at the University of Brighton (2003).

Andrzej Jackowski at the Purdy Hicks Gallery

Sunday, 6 May 2018

Festival 15 - Tom Hammick

Painting is a messy, seat of your pants and nebulous kind of thing.

Tom Hammick

Violetta and Alfredo's Retreat, 2015, Oil on linen ©Tom Hammick

Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York

Can you tell us something about your work in this show and something about how your work has developed over the years.

Waiting for Time was painted fast, in one night. When the paintings are this quick, and they work, they are just the best, and the way they click together makes the hell of painting worthwhile. It's a miracle when this happens. And the advantages of resolving something so lickety spit is a sort of freshness, despite painting wet on wet, that never happens when a painting takes forever over many revisits in the studio.

I like the way the figures in this painting, while marooned away from the banalities of everyday life are so wrapped up in themselves, despite their shared island paradise, that they don't seem they need each other at all. Or perhaps she needs him less that he needs her as she reads her Neruda and he tries ineffectually to gather supper?

My work has slowly become more painterly over the years. I hope my paintings are less prescriptive, where imagery and titles have become more open ended. This way they have more chance of conjuring up individual aspects of what it is like to be human, and any personal narratives they might touch on are completed by the viewer.

Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York

What you find most enjoyable and/or difficult about the process of creating art?

This is a big question. How long have you got?

I am free (sort of) to use my imagination and roam around in my paintings and prints. What bliss that can be. It's a sort of visual equivalent for me of writing a poem. When it works. But it never really works, and the lag and gap between what I see in my imagination and what I end up making is cavernous. But when you get to the point where the painting tells you what to do- that is exciting too. You can end up, if you trust it, in a place where the painting is an equivalent of the intended and imagined image which I am trying to make and to resolve and explore. But painting is a messy, seat of your pants and nebulous kind of thing. Nothing much makes sense, and when you think you have grasped it it slips away. And much of the time you are responding to an intuition and a feeling so primordial, it's too far from the light of the everyday.

What would you like to see the Hastings Arts Forum do in the future?

Celebrate seriously good painting and drawing and sculpture and film and music. And leave 'issue based' work and 'anthropological art making' to other drier institutions.

More about Tom and his work