 BOB BARRON - Statement
If my work is about anything, I think it may be an attempt to express vague musings about the passage of time made corporeal through certain images, surfaces and textures. According to the Maurice Denis dictum, however, 'before being a horse, a nude or some sort of anecdote, a work of art is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order'. So, first and foremost, I suppose my work is essentially about the material I use, assembled in a certain order, torn, stained, scratched or etched into.
We are surrounded by technological wizardry which the vast majority cannot understand; a digitalised, pixelated and electronic world on the surface of the catacombs of time; a past time with which it becomes increasingly difficult to engage as we become more and more embroiled with technological overload. I would be quite happy to see my work as a place of retreat as it is a deliberate remove from a digitally manipulated, glossy advertising culture with an emphasis on instant gratification. I use card that has often been used as packaging for this consumerist society and then discarded. I am not interested in impact as such, but work that reveals itself over time.
I like the idea of working with slate because of the age and nature of the material. Slate is of sedimentary origin, formed from the deposits of minerals collected on the beds of ancient seas millions of years ago. Movement of the Earth's crust, retreating seas or whatever, pushed these ancient sea beds to the surface where they were eventually quarried by man to provide shelter from the winds and the rain. The slate I use has all served this purpose and is eroded and marked by this exposure to the elements as well as by man-made pollutants in the atmosphere. I am interested in the journey from the seabed to the the quarry, from the quarry to the rooftop, and from the rooftop to the artwork.
I take the slate after it has been discarded, wash away remaining grime and scratch into it or leave traces of some description, a hand print or footprint perhaps, and then assemble the various pieces. The circles could be seen as moons, suns, planetary orbits [strictly speaking elliptical] or the curve of space time. Or maybe they're just circles. The hand prints reference those palaeolithic prints found in the dark recesses of caves alongside man's first attempts at pictorial representation of his world 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. The footprints reference the tracks made by two individuals on a soft bed of clay which were shortly afterwards filled in by fine volcanic ash and lay undisturbed until they were unearthed 3.5 million years later by Mary Leakey in Tanzania. It is not impossible that those hands and those feet could have contained a blueprint for you and for me.
When I say I only think the work may have something to do with the comprehension of time, however, it is because one can never be fully explicit about any work of art. There is always something at one remove, something which cannot be quite pinned down. All the constructs built to describe a thought or feeling are, of necessity, parts of the map and not the territory.
Writing about Richard Diebenkorn's 'Ocean Park' series of paintings, Robert Hughes wrote that one heard ' neither the chant of surging millions, nor even the chorus of a movement, but one measured voice, quietly and tersely explaining why this light, this colour, this intrusion of a 30 degree angle into a glazed and modulated field might be valuable in the life of the mind and of feeling'.
I am interested in the life of the mind and of feeling, but, nevertheless, people confronting the work will make of it what they will.
CAREER PATH
I studied at Sunderland College of Art and, apart from several years teaching, I have been a full-time painter for over 25 years. During this time, my work has gradually moved from a fairly tight realism to abstraction.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2009 The Red Box Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
2007 Witnesses, Frost and Reed Gallery,London SW1
2006 Edinburgh Festival, The Wonderful World of Crystals, St Mary’s Cathedral
2005 The Riverside Gallery, Richmond on Thames
2004 The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
2001 Witnesses, installation, St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham
2001 Witnesses, installation, Ely Cathedral
2000 Witnesses, installation, Durham Cathedral
2000 The Mall Galleries, London
1998 Traces, installation, Durham Art Gallery
1998 Collingwood College Durham University
1994 Exhibition Hall, Durham Arts Festival
1990 Washington Arts Centre, Tyne And Wear
1987 Whitehaven Museum and Art Gallery, Cumbria
1986 Bury Art Gallery
1986 Hereford Art Gallery
1986 Wolverhampton Art Gallery
1985 Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery
1985 Chelmsford And Essex Art Gallery
1984 Buddle Arts Centre, North Tyneside
1983 Sunderland Arts Centre
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2007 Sheridan Russell Gallery, London W1
2006 Northcote Gallery, London SW3
2005 The Cupola Gallery, Sheffield
2004 Fi Fie Fo Fum Gallery, Northunberland
2002 Circle Gallery, Edinburgh
2002 The Unicorn Gallery, London SW10
2002 Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Hexham
2001 Paperworks, Bury Art Gallery
1998 The Music Room, London E1
1998 Atlantis Gallery, London E1
1996 Visual Arts’96, Brancepeth Castle, Co. Durham
1994 Middlesbrough Open - Prizewinner
1992 Richmond Gallery, London W1
1988 Pride Gallery, London W8
1988 Piccadilly Gallery, London W1
1984 Darlington Arts Centre
1980 Durham Art Gallery
1978 Northern Artists Travelling Exhibition
COMMISSIONS AND COLLECTIONS
Goldman Sachs International, London EC4
Colchester General Hospital
Sunderland Postgraduate Medical Centre
J.D. Wetherspoon PLC, Watford
Northern Rock Building Society, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Ernst & Young, London SE1
Reed International, London W1
Barclays Development Capital Limited, London SE1
Investors in Industry, Solihull
Bury Art Gallery & Museum
Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Northern Arts
PUBLICATIONS
2007 The Public Catalogue Foundation
| | 15 artworks.
|
Size: 12.00" x 22.00"
Price: £350.00
