Finding such an exhibition in a museum in the Lake District, of an artist who is internationally respected, whose works hang in galleries worldwide and was featured in Saatchi’s  “ Sensation “ exhibition in 1997 was both unexpected and proved to be a rewarding experience.

Mark, Irish born, and trained at St Martins and Chelsea School of Art between 1980-1986 where he was a contemporary of Damian Hirst and others of the YBA’s but managed to forge his own unique style that we see today at Abbot Hall.

Fascinated by the natural sciences in general, Mark Francis is one of a number of artists of his generation for whom the electron microscope and advances in telescopic technology opened up a new a world of fascinating images. This material forms an integral part of the artist’s life and provides the inspiration for his paintings.

Mark, in his work “Arena” has explored grids and lines coupled with his now familiar imagery of bacterial cells, microbiological photography and sine waves to give the impression of purely analytical painting but the result is both fascinating and cold.

Here we have an artist who conjures up with his endless grid lines both vertical and horizontal, amazing depth and perspective which pulls you into his world of fantastical network of lines and  small black objects that resemble microbes swarming over the canvas. His use of line thickness and limited colour do give great depth but it is the Gerhard Richter style fuzzing of some lines that make you want to touch, its as if the image is alive, tense and vibrating.

The title of the paintings are very terse and sound like something from a mathematics’ treatise with Quadric, Ecliptica, Timbre IV, Universal, so they lend themselves to the paintings as they appear to be something we should recognise but cannot quite recover from deep within our memories.

It is the same when looking again at the paintings, they remind you of structures once seen on building sites or music sheets, experiments in the lab with sound waves or even those wonderful things seen under a microscope with little bugs scampering over the slide, this is what his paintings convey, microscopic life ready to move should you glance away.

He also, in many of his paintings draws you in with his rhythmic flow of lines and muted colours, almost mesmeric and then bounces you back to reality with vivid colours in the bottom third of his painting such as “Universal”, its almost as if the next the next painting is coming into view or perhaps a laboratory slide  “Universal”   

 “Timbre IV”

 The individual cells are softly painted and seem to be wriggling just beneath the pictures surface. This softness removes the cold and clinical impression, allowing the paintings to become very tactile objects as well as powerful abstract images. It’s as if one is looking into a three dimensional structure and watching a cage full of creatures going about their life cycle.

  “Ecliptica”

 “Quadric”

 The settings for Marks’ paintings are in complete contrast to his subject matter of precise imagery of microscopic subjects. The building is old with very large rooms, uneven walls and a range of levels so that one feels that you are constantly moving up and down.

However this has allowed the curator to hang the paintings, some of which are very large, in sufficient space so that when viewing one painting you do not have another painting impinging into your eye line, this does allow you to really look at an individual image without distractions, thus you get the full benefit of Francis’s beautiful draughtmanship and use of subtle colours.

The exhibition runs till the 3^rd of July and should be considered a must for all art students and enthusiasts to look and learn.

 Abbot Hall Art Gallery.

Kendal.  

Exhibition 20^th March – 3^rd July 2010

 Exhibition Review by David Defeu

Anyway I had to establish that I could do basic editing of a 60 second video in order to get another box ticked.

Regretfully I can not get enthusiastic about video art and therefore find the whole process unrewarding.

I have tried making mind maps, scrawling ideas on bits of paper, looked at various artists but to no avail and then over Easter I was in Abersoch, North Wales with the family and eureka, I had a lighting up moment, no not a ciggy, but an idea. The beach was empty, tide just going out, lots flotsum at the waterline and only my footprints in the sand.

So the flash of light and an idea was there, intrusion of man in to beautiful spaces, we go to these lovely spots to see beauty but despoil them by actually going there, leaving our rubbish etc.

So I am going to prepare a range of images of a journey along one of these wonderful beaches which show how we pollute our own beautiful countryside by just visiting it.

It would be nice to enhance the images with sound not music to help create the impression of serenity, tranquility and sheer peace then the harsh sounds which show human contamination even though its done by peaple who love the beautiful countryside.

Further thoughts on the photo montage, I have decided I would try to compile  a series of images  based on the theme of empty space that has been visited by people.

1) Studio space,

2) Beaches

3) Landscape

Will hopefully have sounds effects to suit voices , sea and wind sounds, birds etc.

Have struggled over the past week to get photos in right order,get transitions and some visual effects but sound has defeated me so far.

Also have decided I would create only two shows, one of beaches and secondly of emptyness and space in our art studios, may try that in B/W with sound from a full studio over the top.

Couple of  items that were really good, a lot of it was colorless and often badly put together, however I did not actually get into Art Gallery in the traditional sense.

These images were part of sculpture exhibition, Vestiges, really very good but these mirror like sculptures reflected the surroundings which made them very errie and ghostly. The other objects and sculptures were either so obscure as to be incomprehensible or badly constructed.

The video clip of a moving sculpture which was really intriguing.

Visiting the “Tramway” was an eye opener, in that it was a huge art centre complex with a huge range of gallery space plus rooms for art classes etc.

In part of the building there was three installations by Christophe Bouchel, on a large and detailed scale, first was a Celtic FC supporters bar of the 70-80′s and next door was the Rangers equivalent even the smell of beer and ciggy smoke was there, I am not sure what the artist was trying to say other then that football was like a religion, because it was like a shrine to the club, its players and managers over the years. These two bars were built in to shipping containers which made the installation even more claustrophobic.

Then next door inside of a huge space was an installation of a prison around the periphery walls, again in containers, there bunk rooms, mess rooms, visiting area for families,wardens office full of files in huge piles, (obviously before computers took over the world), washrooms and loos. All was very depressing as I am sure it was meant to be, one could almost touch and talk to past inmates, feel the hopelessness and despair.

In the central area was a truly amazing installation, a real crashed jet aircraft was being reconstructed as I imagine forensic engineers undertake in actual incidents.

There were rows of burnt out seats, tables laid out with burnt and torn clothing, even some child’s doll, partially burnt, shards of shattered lighting tubes, huge amounts of tubing, pipe work all twisted and torn.

I left the installations really feeling depressed, but the sheer scale was impressive.

Some of these images are facinating and could certainley be used as special atmospheric effects.

Projector light through milk bottles on to screen, the distorted and refracted light is quiet beautiful.

Founded in 1999, the Rhizome ArtBase is an online archive of new media art containing some 2519 art works, and growing. The ArtBase encompasses a vast range of projects by artists all over the world that employ materials such as software, code, websites, moving images, games and browsers to aesthetic and critical ends. We welcome submissions to the ArtBase; they are reviewed by our curatorial staff on a monthly basis.  Our classification system consists of terms that artists assign to their work. Artists choose from Rhizome’s vocabulary of new media terms as well as adding their own terms. When new terms reach a certain level of popularity they become part of Rhizome’s vocabulary.

Like some of his kinectic sculptural work.

After an apprenticeship at an engineering factory in Leicester, he became his firm’s industrial photographer. From there he went to Brighton Art College, where he spent a year creating a camera out of a biscuit tin: ‘It was a Queen’s Coronation tin,’ he recalls, ‘and so perfect that I did not want to take pictures with it.’  Pippin’s interest in photography had been excited as a boy by his father, an engineer, who helped him to develop his own photographs in the family bathtub. Pippin took this idea one stage further: he made a pinhole camera out of a bath lined with photographic paper and wheeled it, on a custom-built trolley, down to Brighton beach, where he took pictures of his naked self. It was Pippin’s fascination with the pioneers of photography that led to his most triumphant work to date, for which he has received his Turner nomination. He had an obsession with the landmark studies of human and animal motion made by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s, which were the first successful attempt to make animated pictures, and the inspiration for films as well as for the work of artists from the Futurists to Marcel Duchamp. Pippin decided to recreate the spirit of Muybridge’s work for Laundromat-Locomotion. There is an eccentric genius to the images he eventually produced.

Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists. Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life. Confronted with “What to do?” in his studio soon after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1964 with a BFA, and then the University of California, Davis in 1966 with an MFA, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” Working in the diverse mediums of sculpture, video, film, printmaking, performance, and installation, Nauman concentrates less on the development of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can transform or become a work of art. A survey of his diverse output demonstrates the alternately political, prosaic, spiritual, and crass methods by which Nauman examines life in all its gory details, mapping the human arc between life and death. The text from an early neon work proclaims: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” Whether or not we—or even Nauman—agree with this statement, the underlying subtext of the piece emphasizes the way in which the audience, artist, and culture at large are involved in the resonance a work of art will ultimately have. Nauman lives in New Mexico.