essay

LINE OF VISION

A New Exhibition of Paintings by Stephen Carter

Line of Vision runs from 27 January - 27 February 2010

Line of Vision is the fifth solo exhibition of Stephen Carter's work presented at the Beardsmore Gallery and follows on from the previous body of work that focused on London's Westway elevated road as a major motif in the urban landscape.
This new set of paintings mark a continuing fascination with the here and now of the city along with ways that the real interacts with the imaginary.
Line of vision denotes the direction of the gaze, to north, south, east or west.
Each painting explicitly privileges this direction of the gaze both in the image and in the title.
Stephen Carter has said :-
"I discover my subject through walking in the city. This tends to be a slow, gradual process and has taken the form of an eastwards drift along and under the A40 Westway, elevated roads. At this time it has reached as far as Paddington Basin and up to Paddington railway station.
Sometimes I just walk and look, sometimes take photographs or a sketchbook. The mental imprints, photographs and sketches provide the basic information needed for the studio work.
These new paintings are based on spaces around the fringes of Paddington Station. Although the station itself is normally very busy and full of people, these liminal spaces are mostly quiet and deserted. The darkness and lack of natural light allows the forms to take on other dimensions, to be easily misread or to invite other readings of what they are and what their function is."
"It is not hard to imagine experiencing a sense of strangeness in these spaces.
The paintings endeavour to push that indeterminate state to the edge of flatness set against three-dimensionality, abstraction against representation, the painterly against the planned. There is often a frontality, a sense of structures that appear to block passage. The frontality is assertive and emphasises the two dimensionality in contradiction to perspectival space. There is often no daylight; the only light is artificial or refracted light. Sometimes light sources are only perceived indirectly.
Not surrealism, but paintings which show a reconstructed urban reality; an unpopulated uncanny dark reality. An approach to painting that holds the idea that a painting might also be something of a diagram or blueprint for another project yet to be realised and which might lie beyond painting."
Stephen Carter was born in Kingston on Thames and studied Fine Art at Canterbury and Birmingham Colleges of Art. He is currently Principal Lecturer in Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art at CSM. He lives and works in London.

Extract from an interview with Stephen Carter by David Barrett 2005.

SC All the spaces in these new motorway paintings are places that I cut through travelling between my home and studio, which happen to be located on either side of this main road that leads out from London to Oxford and the west and to Wales. It's a major trunk road, and I'm walking underneath looking up at the massive concrete blocks.
In a sense it is a modernist project: it represents the idea of easy access for city dwellers out to the pleasures of the country; and similarly for country dwellers to access the culture and wonderful things of the city. So it's an optimistic project.But at the same time, for those that are left pottering about underneath, like me, we're apt to be smelling urine and seeing garbage. It's dirty and the spaces are very often spaces that people avoid, even though they're in the inner city.

DB Would you like to say something about concrete?

SC Yes. Concrete - which as a term has an interesting painting parallel - holds within it the possibility of marks, stains or traces. So whilst, again, it holds within its substance this idea of modernity and mass-production, at the same time it has the capacity to weather and become marked. For example, an oil spill on the road above will be registered in the concrete underneath.

DB The paintings themselves are quite concrete, quite substantial, compared to previous series.

SC They are and they aren't. There's a paradox here because they are very thinly painted. I'm interested in capturing the monumentality and solidity of the space, but the paintings are not that in themselves; they're just filmy layers of paint on the surface

DB The paint dribbles both up and down, with seemingly no regard to gravity

SC I paint them at all different angles but, yes, the apparent lack of weight of the paint is a deliberate, inverse reference to the substantiality of the subject. And it does refer to the stains on the concrete, but by using a parallel from the practice of painting rather than through mimicking a particular detail on the structure...

Word Paintings 2000 - 2002

Notes on the Painting 'Special Love'

On the style one should strive for: II It is through everyday words that style bites into and penetrates the reader: It is through them that great thoughts circulate and are accepted as genuine, like gold or silver imprinted with a recognised seal. They inspire confidence in the person who uses them to make his thoughts more understandable; for one recognises by such usage of common language a man who knows life and the world, and who stays in touch with things. Moreover, these words make for a frank style. They show that the author has long ruminated the thought or the feeling expressed, that he has made them so much his own, so much a matter of habit, that for him the most common expressions suffice to express ideas that have become natural to him after long deliberation. In the end, what one says in this way will appear more truthful, for nothing is so clear, when it comes to words, than those we call familiar; and clarity is something so characteristic of the truth that it is often confused with it." Nothing more subtle than the suggestion: be clear so as to have at least the appearance of truth. Offered in this way, the advice to write simply - which usually harbours resentment - has the highest authority.' *

'Special Love' is the title of a painting which measures 136 x 100 cms. It belongs to an ongoing sequence of paintings started during 2000 which range in size from 'Official Hit' 172 x 146 cms through to 'Shopper Face' 35.5 x 30.5 cms and which feature words appropriated from the covers of popular magazines. The title is from the first 2 words featured from top left. This painting contains a total of 66 words. All the words featured appeared in one weeks magazine display in a Paddington station magazine stand. The magazine display was photographed and lists of words appearing on covers were compiled. The words were then written in standard 144 pt size in helvetica font in bold capitals on the computer. Words which do not appear in an English dictionary were eliminated ; repetitions were eliminated. The words were then printed out, and from the back were cut and stuck together to form a structure of words. The particular juxtaposition of words was not known until the configuration was completed. Oilbar was rubbed onto the back of the words, the sheet was then taped to the canvas and copied by hand over the top of the paper. The oilbar impregnates the prepared linen, leaving marks and traces across the surface. The work produced is like its source in some important respects and unlike in others. It is like in the way words can be read, but are more often scanned, their individual or collective meanings emerging from and disappearing back into the whole. The words acquire a material presence which also seem to refer to their history and pre-history. They become at once both familiar and strange. The grain of the work contrasts with the gloss and impenetrability of the source, exposing another kind of relationship between clarity, mystery and seduction. While the word paintings signal a new departure, they also continue an engagement with understanding the material world, revealing the deeper resonances of everyday experience. More than a simple critique of consumerism or an equation between works of art and advertising, this new work aims to develop the examination of everyday life, finding in the juxtapositions of words on the covers of popular magazines, some fleeting moments revealing collective desire, anxiety and obsession.

Stephen Carter

London 2002

* From Waiter Benjamin 'The Arcades Project' Quoting J.Joubert 'Oeuvres' - 'Du Style' Harvard University Press 1999

•Paintings - 'Abstractions,Replications,Evacuations'.

'Notes on the Painting - ' Search For The Dead'

With the newspaper copying work I have been doing,the twin themes have emerged of 'titillation & tragedy'. These themes are centred on material from everyday newspapers which typically feature page 3 girls or technological tragedies for example 'train crash',or 'plane crash'. While I have consistently examined myself and the reasons for wanting to deal with this material in particular, it is still with a troubled conscience that I do so. While I had justified to myself the position I had adopted on the grounds that [a] the material exists anyway and is generally available and I only repeat it and [b] that by reworking the material slowly and meditatively there is the possibility of causing myself as maker, along with the viewer to slow down in the consumption of this material and to become more aware of the condition of voyeurism as a result. I was in process of re-examining the morality of these issues in relation to my work while also on the 'lookout' for new material in the newspapers just prior to the Paddington rail crash. I had reread Theodor Adorno on the problem of suffering * which contains the unforgettable line 'I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' and goes on to say 'Yet this suffering ,also demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice,consolation,without immediately being betrayed by it.' While these observations relate to very different contexts such as anti-semitism and the holocaust, the significance to my work was also clear. Meanwhile I was also seeking new material, and sifting through my collection of newspapers to identify technological tragedies that I might use in my next works. Then, initially via the T. V. news received the horrifying information, about the Ladbroke Grove train disaster. The sense of this terrible tragedy being so close to home, the implication that in some way I had willed it,the realisation that even in such close physical proximity ,all information was mediated, as it would be if the event had occurred on the other side of the world,all combined to further dramatise and problematise the issues that had been preoccupying me. A day or two later ,still feeling a bit woozy with the flu, I stepped out with my camera towards the scene of the disaster. Our local supermarket I while carrying on business as usual, was also allocating half the car park space to the media,emergency services and police. Feeling a mixture of guilt, curiosity and disorientation, I wandered about the scene. The wreckage itself could not be seen. All images appearing on T. V. and in the press were being transmitted by cameras perched high above on mobile hydraulic platforms. I took some photographs of the photographers. I went into the supermarket and purchased a few items. Ilingered around the newspaper, magazine stand attached to the supermarket, where every front page was covered with images and information about what was occurring just a few metres away, but was invisible. I wandered back home and watched the T. v. As far as my work was concerned I had all the materiall needed every day for the next 10 days in every newspaper. With great trepidation and doubt Ilater made 2 modest works based on an 'Evening Standard' report of the crash - one as a replication, the other as a coloured abstraction. The title of these works is 'Search for the Dead 1 & 2 ' repeating the headline of the 'Evening Standard'. I hope these paintings encourage a slower and more reflective looking and engender a respectful remembering.

Stephen Carter

London 2000

* Theodor Adorno from 'Commitment' 'The Problem of Suffering' reprinted in Art in Theory 1900 - 1990 , Black well Publishers 1992

	LINE OF VISION A New Exhibition of Paintings by Stephen Carter Line of Vision runs from 27 January - 27 February 2010 Line of Vision is the fifth solo exhibition of Stephen Carter's work presented at the Beardsmore Gallery and follows on from the previous body of work that focused on London's Westway elevated road as a major motif in the urban landscape. This new set of paintings mark a continuing fascination with the here and now of the city along with ways that the real interacts with the imaginary. Line of vision denotes the direction of the gaze, to north, south, east or west. Each painting explicitly privileges this direction of the gaze both in the image and in the title. Stephen Carter has said :- "I discover my subject through walking in the city. This tends to be a slow, gradual process and has taken the form of an eastwards drift along and under the A40 Westway, elevated roads. At this time it has reached as far as Paddington Basin and up to Paddington railway station. Sometimes I just walk and look, sometimes take photographs or a sketchbook. The mental imprints, photographs and sketches provide the basic information needed for the studio work. These new paintings are based on spaces around the fringes of Paddington Station. Although the station itself is normally very busy and full of people, these liminal spaces are mostly quiet and deserted. The darkness and lack of natural light allows the forms to take on other dimensions, to be easily misread or to invite other readings of what they are and what their function is." "It is not hard to imagine experiencing a sense of strangeness in these spaces. The paintings endeavour to push that indeterminate state to the edge of flatness set against three-dimensionality, abstraction against representation, the painterly against the planned. There is often a frontality, a sense of structures that appear to block passage. The frontality is assertive and emphasises the two dimensionality in contradiction to perspectival space. There is often no daylight; the only light is artificial or refracted light. Sometimes light sources are only perceived indirectly. Not surrealism, but paintings which show a reconstructed urban reality; an unpopulated uncanny dark reality. An approach to painting that holds the idea that a painting might also be something of a diagram or blueprint for another project yet to be realised and which might lie beyond painting." Stephen Carter was born in Kingston on Thames and studied Fine Art at Canterbury and Birmingham Colleges of Art. He is currently Principal Lecturer in Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art at CSM. He lives and works in London.

	Extract from an interview with Stephen Carter by David Barrett 2005. SC All the spaces in these new motorway paintings are places that I cut through travelling between my home and studio, which happen to be located on either side of this main road that leads out from London to Oxford and the west and to Wales. It's a major trunk road, and I'm walking underneath looking up at the massive concrete blocks. In a sense it is a modernist project: it represents the idea of easy access for city dwellers out to the pleasures of the country; and similarly for country dwellers to access the culture and wonderful things of the city. So it's an optimistic project.But at the same time, for those that are left pottering about underneath, like me, we're apt to be smelling urine and seeing garbage. It's dirty and the spaces are very often spaces that people avoid, even though they're in the inner city. DB Would you like to say something about concrete? SC Yes. Concrete - which as a term has an interesting painting parallel - holds within it the possibility of marks, stains or traces. So whilst, again, it holds within its substance this idea of modernity and mass-production, at the same time it has the capacity to weather and become marked. For example, an oil spill on the road above will be registered in the concrete underneath. DB The paintings themselves are quite concrete, quite substantial, compared to previous series. SC They are and they aren't. There's a paradox here because they are very thinly painted. I'm interested in capturing the monumentality and solidity of the space, but the paintings are not that in themselves; they're just filmy layers of paint on the surface DB The paint dribbles both up and down, with seemingly no regard to gravity SC I paint them at all different angles but, yes, the apparent lack of weight of the paint is a deliberate, inverse reference to the substantiality of the subject. And it does refer to the stains on the concrete, but by using a parallel from the practice of painting rather than through mimicking a particular detail on the structure...

	Word Paintings 2000 - 2002 Notes on the Painting 'Special Love' On the style one should strive for: II It is through everyday words that style bites into and penetrates the reader: It is through them that great thoughts circulate and are accepted as genuine, like gold or silver imprinted with a recognised seal. They inspire confidence in the person who uses them to make his thoughts more understandable; for one recognises by such usage of common language a man who knows life and the world, and who stays in touch with things. Moreover, these words make for a frank style. They show that the author has long ruminated the thought or the feeling expressed, that he has made them so much his own, so much a matter of habit, that for him the most common expressions suffice to express ideas that have become natural to him after long deliberation. In the end, what one says in this way will appear more truthful, for nothing is so clear, when it comes to words, than those we call familiar; and clarity is something so characteristic of the truth that it is often confused with it." Nothing more subtle than the suggestion: be clear so as to have at least the appearance of truth. Offered in this way, the advice to write simply - which usually harbours resentment - has the highest authority.' * 'Special Love' is the title of a painting which measures 136 x 100 cms. It belongs to an ongoing sequence of paintings started during 2000 which range in size from 'Official Hit' 172 x 146 cms through to 'Shopper Face' 35.5 x 30.5 cms and which feature words appropriated from the covers of popular magazines. The title is from the first 2 words featured from top left. This painting contains a total of 66 words. All the words featured appeared in one weeks magazine display in a Paddington station magazine stand. The magazine display was photographed and lists of words appearing on covers were compiled. The words were then written in standard 144 pt size in helvetica font in bold capitals on the computer. Words which do not appear in an English dictionary were eliminated ; repetitions were eliminated. The words were then printed out, and from the back were cut and stuck together to form a structure of words. The particular juxtaposition of words was not known until the configuration was completed. Oilbar was rubbed onto the back of the words, the sheet was then taped to the canvas and copied by hand over the top of the paper. The oilbar impregnates the prepared linen, leaving marks and traces across the surface. The work produced is like its source in some important respects and unlike in others. It is like in the way words can be read, but are more often scanned, their individual or collective meanings emerging from and disappearing back into the whole. The words acquire a material presence which also seem to refer to their history and pre-history. They become at once both familiar and strange. The grain of the work contrasts with the gloss and impenetrability of the source, exposing another kind of relationship between clarity, mystery and seduction. While the word paintings signal a new departure, they also continue an engagement with understanding the material world, revealing the deeper resonances of everyday experience. More than a simple critique of consumerism or an equation between works of art and advertising, this new work aims to develop the examination of everyday life, finding in the juxtapositions of words on the covers of popular magazines, some fleeting moments revealing collective desire, anxiety and obsession. Stephen Carter London 2002 * From Waiter Benjamin 'The Arcades Project' Quoting J.Joubert 'Oeuvres' - 'Du Style' Harvard University Press 1999

	•Paintings - 'Abstractions,Replications,Evacuations'. 'Notes on the Painting - ' Search For The Dead' With the newspaper copying work I have been doing,the twin themes have emerged of 'titillation & tragedy'. These themes are centred on material from everyday newspapers which typically feature page 3 girls or technological tragedies for example 'train crash',or 'plane crash'. While I have consistently examined myself and the reasons for wanting to deal with this material in particular, it is still with a troubled conscience that I do so. While I had justified to myself the position I had adopted on the grounds that [a] the material exists anyway and is generally available and I only repeat it and [b] that by reworking the material slowly and meditatively there is the possibility of causing myself as maker, along with the viewer to slow down in the consumption of this material and to become more aware of the condition of voyeurism as a result. I was in process of re-examining the morality of these issues in relation to my work while also on the 'lookout' for new material in the newspapers just prior to the Paddington rail crash. I had reread Theodor Adorno on the problem of suffering * which contains the unforgettable line 'I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' and goes on to say 'Yet this suffering ,also demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice,consolation,without immediately being betrayed by it.' While these observations relate to very different contexts such as anti-semitism and the holocaust, the significance to my work was also clear. Meanwhile I was also seeking new material, and sifting through my collection of newspapers to identify technological tragedies that I might use in my next works. Then, initially via the T. V. news received the horrifying information, about the Ladbroke Grove train disaster. The sense of this terrible tragedy being so close to home, the implication that in some way I had willed it,the realisation that even in such close physical proximity ,all information was mediated, as it would be if the event had occurred on the other side of the world,all combined to further dramatise and problematise the issues that had been preoccupying me. A day or two later ,still feeling a bit woozy with the flu, I stepped out with my camera towards the scene of the disaster. Our local supermarket I while carrying on business as usual, was also allocating half the car park space to the media,emergency services and police. Feeling a mixture of guilt, curiosity and disorientation, I wandered about the scene. The wreckage itself could not be seen. All images appearing on T. V. and in the press were being transmitted by cameras perched high above on mobile hydraulic platforms. I took some photographs of the photographers. I went into the supermarket and purchased a few items. Ilingered around the newspaper, magazine stand attached to the supermarket, where every front page was covered with images and information about what was occurring just a few metres away, but was invisible. I wandered back home and watched the T. v. As far as my work was concerned I had all the materiall needed every day for the next 10 days in every newspaper. With great trepidation and doubt Ilater made 2 modest works based on an 'Evening Standard' report of the crash - one as a replication, the other as a coloured abstraction. The title of these works is 'Search for the Dead 1 & 2 ' repeating the headline of the 'Evening Standard'. I hope these paintings encourage a slower and more reflective looking and engender a respectful remembering. Stephen Carter London 2000 * Theodor Adorno from 'Commitment' 'The Problem of Suffering' reprinted in Art in Theory 1900 - 1990 , Black well Publishers 1992