The Alchemy of the Surface: The Paintings of Pip Dickens
by Roy Exley
Critical Text for catalogue: 'PIP DICKENS' by Luke Elwes
by Fay Blanchard, Dig Yorkshire
Review .2.
at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, 2012
'Boteh Beauty' by Rich Jevons, Dig Yorkshire
Review .3.
at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, 2012
'Pip Dickens: new Work' , Leeds Student Newspaper
Review .4.
solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Pip Dickens
published by Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford,
ISBN 9780946657650
Supported by the Arts Council of England and Museums and Libraries Archives Council. 2010.
To order a copy contact
The Alchemy of the Surface: The Paintings of Pip Dickens
by Roy Exley
'The omnipresence of chance: the unpredictable, unavoidable and uncontrollable contingencies always around us and within us, offer variables of which we may be hardly if at all conscious but which nevertheless affect the outcome of everything we do.'
David Batchelor [1]
Painting, as an art form has certain things in common with the transformative science of alchemy, they share an esoteric aura, there are certain secrets, tricks and illusionary effects that they each accumulate through the sequential experiences of experimentation and discovery, they generate intrigue and wonder in equal measure in the viewer or the audience, they both invite us to question our jaded perception of the world. Alchemy has been denounced and disowned, painting has repeatedly been declared dead, however, they still both fascinate, as they empower and seduce our urge to imagine. The realms of possibility have always been more engaging and attractive than the archives of certainty, fact and fiction have always had a complicated relationship within which, nevertheless, divorce is unthinkable. The realm of the possible has always to be anchored in reality, but things only get exciting and unpredictable when possibility begins to drag that anchor, Dickens paintings, it must be said, both stretch possibilities, and drag the anchors of expectation.
Pip Dickens is an inveterate flirter with the alchemy of paint. In her paintings the hegemony of surface is constantly usurped. If the alchemist was consumed by the desire to convert base metal into gold, then Dickens is consumed by the need to transform a flat two-dimensional surface into a platform from which the access into an ambiguous three-dimensional space can be achieved. Her paintings operate on several levels, however, not just those of dimensionality, but also those of meaning, reference and the aesthetic. The laminae of their complex ontology perform a slow choreography in Dickens' paintings, we are offered various options as to how to perceive them, there is the abstract, there is the topographical and there is the narrative, each offering us an entry into either the reality of the illusion or the illusions of reality. As in Salome's 'Dance of the Seven Veils', as we accept the invitation to enter into her paintings, Dickens reveals to us layer after layer of meaning, leading to an ultimate essence, the perception of which will always be uniquely our own.
If we are to give credence to an artist's vision we are obliged to enter into a suspension of disbelief. We are not witnessing here simply the adroit application of paint to a two dimensional support, we are not even witnessing the pictorial reproduction of some 'thing', but we are being allowed the privilege of entering into a private world, where any 'thingness' is not only unique, but mutable, this is a world that most of us keep hidden, not necessarily because we are secretive, but because we don't possess the means or the skills to express it.
Dickens' 'Katagami' series of paintings and sketches are predicated on the precision of Japanese aesthetic parameters. Katagami stencils have been an integral part of the Japanese textile industry - an essential component in the printing and dyeing of fabrics, particularly those used in the creation of kimonos - over the past five centuries, their aesthetic is rooted therefore in the expediency of the textile production process, they are the means to an end, namely the creation of patterns for the printing of textiles. Dickens, in her paintings based on this art form, has set free the rather rigid, expedient rhythms, of these stencils and, without diminishing their perennial aesthetic appeal, she has transformed them into something far looser and more poetic, something more intriguing, while both respecting, and empathising with the power of their inheritance, she has loosened and opened up the incipient energies of Katagami stencils without denying the integrity of their sources.
Harvest of the Bees, oil on paper, Pip Dickens , 2009
Dickens demonstrates a genuine sensitivity for the traditional precursors of her work, while making them totally accessible, and relevant to a contemporary western audience. Her painting, 'Harvest of the Bees' exemplifies this approach perfectly, poised precariously between the predictability of pattern and the play of permutation, this work draws us unflinchingly into the ambivalence of abstraction - it is a visual strategy that plays on our need to classify, we are caught short here by the pure serendipity of floating forms, with their seductive surface textures, and the lure of a predicated limbo. The freedom of her brushstrokes contradicts the demands of the pattern that they extemporise upon. Intuition comes into play here as it both transcends and undermines the structure of intention. This is process painting bowing to the kaleidoscopic and its appeal is a mesmeric one, this could be an homage to the American painter Ross Bleckner, a series of anarchic organic diversions from that painter's repetitively monochrome syncopations, or perhaps the flawed, smudged patterns of that other American, Gary Simmons.
The 'Moire' series of striped paintings emerges, so it would seem, to impose one surface upon another to such an extent that we cannot be sure of where each meets the other, so ambivalent are their inter-relationships that complex narrative traces begins to emerge from their interaction. We become transfixed by the inter-weavings of their pictorial connotations. To describe something as esoteric is a cop-out, these paintings that Dickens presents us with are something more insistent than that. They entreat us to make a detour from our daily perambulations, they ask us to question and challenge the ordinary, they present the divergent, without any qualms or traces of self-consciousness, they matter-of-factly challenge the quotidian, trash the taken-for-granted, transform the traditional. Dickens' paintings are more than just interesting - a concept that damns with its faint praise ' they are insistent, incised through intimations of the infinite, inscribed by the playful marks of the indefinite, layered by superimpositions of the supernatural, their message has been won through complex negotiations between the rational and the intuitive, the contingent and the rash. Any beauty here arises not merely from an urge towards perfection, nor any preciosity, but is simply a resonant spin-off from this process, it excels itself through the denigration of deliberation, through the play of serendipity, the slipperiness of chance. In his work, The Psychology of the Imagination, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "Beauty is a value applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure"[2]. It seems that Dickens' paintings corroborate this statement perfectly. We become mesmerised by the dazzling display of her deliciously repetitive marks and lines, repetitions that, skewed by her imagination are, however, predicated upon the variations and evolutions within the pattern - once again the oxymoron strikes. We become grist to the mill of the negotiations between the random and the repetitive, between fantasy, fiction and a rapidly diminishing factual. As aesthetic as they might seem at first glance, Dickens' paintings are underscored by an anarchic yet subtle wilfulness that undermines any tendency towards perfection, they live more as co-ordinates than objects, they guide rather than define, they please rather than predicate, they are soul rather than scientific dictum. Most of all they image, or rather imagine the 'other'. In his book, The Ground of the Image, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes, "In the ground of the image there is the imagination and in the ground of the imagination there is the other, the look of the other, that is, the look onto the other and the other as look... The image is first of all other and from the other, altered and altering."[3] The 'other', as conveyed in Dickens' paintings is a compilation of depictions of the other that continually surprises, and continually alters our conception of the other.
Venus Freak, (Moire series), oil on canvas, Pip Dickens , 2006
Pip Dickens allows the paint to lead her negotiations; hers is neither a safari through the indefinite, nor a perambulation through the ordinary, but an adventure that explores the plasticity of paint against the potential intractability of the painted surface. She loves the imponderables of the painting process, thrives on the permutations triggered by mistake and accident, pays homage at the shrine of serendipity and swears by the play of chance.
Just as alchemy carries metaphysical connotations, so do many of Pip Dickens' paintings, and here I refer to the series of paintings from 2008-2010 which include 'KING KONG', 'Miss Havisham I and II', 'Mrs Danvers', 'Madame Bovary' (and the 'Elephant Man/Cloud' drawings), where the paintings surfaces have been transformed into a series of superimposed ethereal layers which offer hints of those 'ectoplasmic' apparitions that accompanied Victorian seances where they gathered in dimly lit parlours to purportedly commune with the spiritual world - here, ghostly, spectral images challenge the insuperability of the physical world. In these inspired paintings it is as if the paint itself has coerced and cajoled Dickens' brush strokes - just as the ouija board might have guided those trembling hands in Victorian seances - to create these images spontaneously - not simply the spontaneity of 'process painting', but something more significant, something with far more esoteric implications than this. These painted surfaces have, it seems, taken on a life of their own, their picture planes exhibit a depth and complexity that appear to transcend the purely physical, they have achieved an ontology - loosely based on their literary sources - that hovers somewhere between the palpable and the possible, they visit that miscible threshold where fact and fiction, reportage and fantasy, the extant and the imaginary, the physical and the metaphysical, meet.
Miss Havisham II, oil on canvas, Pip Dickens , 2010
The evolution of her works suggest a spirit of adventure on Dickens' part, they are not quite of this world, but their achievement demands an intricate knowledge of this world in terms of its pictorial and aesthetic diversity. She seems driven to explore and to stretch the boundaries of pictorial representation as her painted surfaces oscillate wildly between the figurative and the abstract, however this quality of drivenness eschews violence or ferocity, it is a gentle drivenness whose paradoxical qualities infuse her paintings with a sense of the enigmatic, they court mystery, there is something elusive about them that never lets our eye rest. The viewer's eye is entreated to search for their meaning, a meaning that always seems just beyond our reach or maybe a suggestion of meaning that merely proves to be a decoy. Our inquisitive look restlessly searches for a resolution, seeking out the familiar from the conundrums that Dickens appears to have set. This brings to mind the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty from his book, The Visible and The Invisible, "The look envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relationship of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them, it moves in its own way with its own imperious style and yet the views taken are not desultory - I do not look at a chaos but at things - so that finally one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command" [4].
Although at times we might suspect that Dickens is simply having fun with paint, being carried away by the process and its possibilities - there is no doubt that their execution is accompanied by a good deal of passion - the results belie any such conclusions and are undeniably more challenging to the eye as our look and the 'thingness' within her paintings intertwine to create an impression that exceeds any outcome of such a prosaic activity as 'simply having fun'. There is indeed often a sense of joy within these works, but that is subtly different to fun.
As we move on through Dickens' oeuvre and come to a painting titled 'Oki-Nami', we feel the 'cosmic' taking over from the metaphysical, we experience, in the ethereal layers of paint, a dilation of the real, the horizon seems to have expanded, and the infinite beckons. Time becomes a mutable commodity here. Time is an aspect of painting infrequently touched upon, but Patrick ffrench in his essay, 'Time in the Pure State', addresses this negligence when he writes, "We must affirm the distinction between the sign of Art and its Original Absolute Time and the sensuous sign with its Time Recovered at the Heart of Lost Time. For Art and Original Time do not depend on memory for their experiencing, nor on the contingent materiality of a sensation". [5] The painting process is both relative and relevant to the passage of time. The alchemy of paint continues to open up a whole tranche of possibilities and parameters, pointing towards a divergent range of ways to go, both spatial and temporal, and artists such as Pip Dickens are helping it on its way, through the synergy of technique and imagination, and a dialogue between the literary and the aesthetic. Pip Dickens, like many committed contemporary painters has an intuitive approach to the painted surface, this, combined with her inherent skill leaves us anticipating and wondering about the directions that her painting will take in the future, as it continues to evolve.
Oki Nami (after Hokusai), oil on canvas, Pip Dickens , 2009
References
[1] David Batchelor, ‘In bed with the monochrome’, in From an Aesthetic Point of
View, edited by Peter Osborne, Serpent’s Tail, London, 2000. Page 161.
[2] Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination, Routledge, London, 1995.
Page 225.
[3] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, [Trans. By Jeff Fort], Fordham
University Press, New York, 2005. Page 97.
[4] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible, [Trans. By Alphonso
Lingis], Northwestern University Press, Evanston Ill., 1968. Page 133.
[5] Patrick ffrench, ‘Time in the Pure State’ in Time and the Image, Edited by
Carolyn Bailey Gill, Manchester University Press, 2000. Page 165.
Roy Exley is a freelance writer, art critic and curator based in London
Solo exhibition of paintings by Pip Dickens
Cassian de Vere Cole Fine Art (ELGIN), London
'GALLERIES' magazine
1 - 24 February 2001
Some artists find their voice later than others, which is as it should be, despite the pressure to arrive as a fully formed practitioner by the time of your degree show. In Pip Dickens' case, this has been greatly to her benefit. Now in her late thirties she has had the time needed to deepen her enquiries - in literature and music as well as painting - and to pull off quite rapidly a body of rich, mature work to coincide with her graduation from the Slade last summer...
...In the spare elegance of its white space hover six large black canvases, four square and two double squares. The impact would be overwhelming were it not for the fact that the paintings release themselves slowly, revealing patterns of refracted light as you move among them, with something of the same absorbing effect as a room full of Rothkos. These are carefully wrought images, playing with the effect of busy and dense, or loose and sweeping, brush marks on a black surface.Sometimes she paints wet on wet, disturbing the newly laid surface, and sometimes she builds on a dry base with blacks subtly modified by a little coloured pigment. Sometimes she will even punctuate the dark patinations with pale openings in the canvas. Always she works quickly and decisively, rubbing out a day's work to start afresh, and completing the image at a single sitting to achieve the desired delicacy of effect.
What she achieves are pictures of paradoxical beauty. With her brushes she disrupts and explores the darkness, thereby turning a negative into a positive and making her blacks shimmer with light. Within a single colour she can also suggest many colours. Aware that no black is pure black, she hints at the chromatic ranges that lie within it, as in the 'coloured' gardens of 'Retiros' and 'Acanthus'.
What might appear to be a limited field of enquiry has yielded many surprising possibilities, from the tightly controlled checkerboard surface of 'Essential Solitude' to the wide open space of 'Legerdemain', with its floating baroque patterns. Her scope is both narrow and wide, and in an exciting first show recalls something of the work of Therese Oulton and Estelle Thompson.
Luke Elwes is a freelance writer, and artist based in London
Critical Review: 'TOWARD THE LIGHT BY PIP DICKENS' by Fay Blanchard, Dig Yorkshire solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Pip Dickens
Supported by the Arts Council of England and Museums and Libraries Archives Council. 2010
Star rating: 4 out of 5
In a sun-drenched Bradford, a contender for
Britain’s Nicest Cabbie drove me to Lister Park where families were enjoying the flash of
summer. My exploration of two of the
city’s
contemporary art exhibitions was off
to an
uplifting start.
Perhaps understandably few people were actually venturing into Cartwright Hall gallery, so I had Pip Dickens’ Toward the Light largely to myself. The exhibition shows 45 new paintings and drawings created during a residency at the museum, accompanied by sound works by composer Monty Adkins. Sadly the soundworks weren’t working on my visit, to the confusion of the sparse scattering of children playing with the headphones. Furthermore, I was unclear on the relationship between the paintings and Bradford Museums’ collections, which was explained only by a few photographs of chandeliers from Cliffe Castle.
Nevertheless Dickens’ work certainly evokes the ‘the dramatic relationship we have with light and darkness and the dramas, real and imagined, that are played out in between’. Chandeliers morph into sensuous abstractions reminding me of mushroom clouds, deep sea creatures and Miss Haversham-style derelict grandeur. Particularly gorgeous were a series of large all-black paintings, glinting with psychedelic patterns in their vinyl-textured surfaces
Critical Review: BOTEH BEAUTY by Rich Jevons
Dig Yorkshire 2012
Caption: The World Within Us, oil on canvas,
copyright Pip Dickens
Rich Jevons finds out about the beauty of
‘boteh’ in new work by Leeds-based painter
Pip Dickens at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery in the University of Leeds.
Painter Pip Dickens’ New Work at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds, is based on literary research (the likes of Balzac and Henry James) and inspired by the Michael Sadler Kashmir Shawl Collection at ULITA (University of Leeds International Textile Archive). The Kashmir shawls have an incredible amount of work put into each square inch. Pip enthuses: “People just don’t make shawls like that any more.”
Their production is a complicated process using vibrantly coloured threads built up to make elaborate patterns using the ‘boteh’ motif. This is known as paisley in the West and the word ‘boteh’ is a Persian word meaning bush, shrub, a thicket, bramble, herb, palm leaf, cluster of leaves or flower bud.
“I started thinking about these ‘boteh’ shapes almost like little figures, thus traversing and making a journey. They all seem quite individual despite the fact that they have the same shape. They became a metaphor for people who have skills who are thrown out of their work ethic due to oppression.
“So a lot of these works are about the recession we’re in. They come across as very bright and positive almost celebratory paintings but I wanted it to be so that if you peel that back there is something more serious about the human condition.”
Pip has always had a very textural element to her work, building up layers on the canvas, just the way a weaver would build up colour on a loom. “A lot of my paintings use light refraction, starting with a single layer of a very vibrant colour and building up layer upon layer of varnish to give it that effect. So it might look simple looking at it face on but as you study further there is a great deal of luminosity and intensity.”
In The World Within Us the ‘boteh’ motif resembles closely the yin yang symbol (in this unbalanced world); in Mother and Child seeing the sizzling pregnant parent against a Venusian landscape; and in The Shadow Followers could be a line of goslings following mother goose.
For Dreams Nascent Pip “wanted to hark back again to when we were a small child. When we were born we had so much potential and untainted by this world we were thrown into. So it’s an idea about purity.” And if Blake saw the loss of innocence to be a fit subject for a poem, why not for a painting?
Pip’s work may be on a slow fuse – not that your meant to take your time and ‘get it’ – but both in the light and shadows a fire burns strongly, like any alchemist’s furnace. And please don’t think she is a Symbolist, using symbols is far more interesting than presenting them for their own sake. If you haven’t started off the season yet, start here!
Until 14 April 2012, Stanley & Audrey
Burton Gallery, University of Leeds
www.leeds.ac.uk/gallery/
Catalogue available: ‘Pip Dickens – New Works’ with text by curator, Layla Bloom, ISBN
-13-978-1-874331-47-6
To purchase a copy email gallery@leeds.ac.uk
or telephone 0113 343 2778
Pip Dickens website www.pip-dickens.com
Special thanks to curator Layla Bloom
and
the artist.
Critical Review: PIP DICKENS: New Work, Claire Nayor
Leeds Student 2012
"In appreciating and celebrating a lost art, Dickens has in fact created her own, full of life in vibrant, rich technicolor"
Thought shawls were only for your Nan? Think again. Pip Dickens’ oil paintings, in The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, are inspired by the Kashmir Shawl Collection from The University of Leeds International Textiles Archive. The exhibition forms part of an ongoing celebration of Sir Michael Sadler’s artistic legacy here at Leeds University.
The history behind the shawls is echoed in Dickens’ work. After being discovered by Europeans in the 18th Century, the shawls became fashionable and British mills quickly imitated the style. However, as with all fashions, they fell out of popularity in the late 19th Century. This, coupled with a devastating famine in India, resulted in the loss of a traditional craftsmanship. A subsequent sense of isolation and upset is projected onto the ‘botehs’ or the paisley motifs that feature in her work. They appear almost human, as bowed and weeping figures or companions. Dickens also uses a grid like pattern of stripes and backgrounds of woven cloth, upon which sit her botehs. In Fabricator, a small curled boteh sits alone, conveying the idea of a prison, its trail of thread could be a chain attached to bars.
However, for all this sad history and deep thinking, her paintings really are joyous to look at. In appreciating and celebrating a lost art, Dickens has in fact created her own, full of life in vibrant, rich technicolor. A prime example being Mother and Child; as threads entwine a flame headed boteh, inside which is a squashed heart shape, energy radiates from it like an orange and pink sun. Moreover, the texture Dickens crafts using thick paint gives a marbled effect, making the botehs to appear as glass, shimmering with light.
If only there were more paintings in this feast of colour and vivacity, to counteract those winter blues.