Painting on plywood
A lot of my recent abstract paintings are on plywood. There's something architectural about them, it feels as though I can expand outwards from the surface. I feel as though that surface can layer with others. The ply gives me a really solid and resistant base whereas canvas gives and feels more fragile.
This has become something of a trend for me. Traditionally I've always used canvas - high-grade artists canvas on bespoke frames. But not as of the last few years.
Modern acrylic paints have a range of abilities and very satisfyingly they suit ply, and ply works well with my hard-edged geometric lines. The paint goes on super smoothly and the edges are much cleaner. I've been working with the ripples in the wood to help determine which areas of the surface I want to 'save' and which I want to obscure. This sometimes dictates the composition which gives me restrictions I have to work within - external controls if you like - of which I help to make and guide the decision.
Here are a few medium-sized pieces from 2015. There is some structure, there are divisions, there are omissions to the surface.
I once had a conversation about how I develop my paintings, do I plan them? The suggestion was that I could plot them up on on a computer before painting.
But despite the time to learn a way that suits me for this to work, I struggle with that as my brain works better by using the paint itself. And actually a lot of the time what I plan changes as I’m doing the painting.
I can lose the impact if I try to plan too much. Perhaps you could say it was a 2-way conversation with the painting where it starts to guide you. You could say this was an intuitive approach but I think it’s more of a collaborative process with each piece.
Or maybe I prefer to just enjoy the moment or the instant that something reveals itself to me. A bit like running. I hate to run out and back on the same path, the run back is too difficult or painful to endure, I like the constant change of the new all the time. To plan a painting and then paint it, I think kills the joy and the thrill/ tension in the moment of actually getting the idea direct to the painting.
But I do use a sketchbook so that I don’t lose ideas and thoughts when they hit me or when I want to work out how something is going to work.
And so with the development of paintings, I love nothing more than to work on several at once. If my mind goes off on a tangent with an idea I can do it on another painting instead of being solely tied into the one and then losing the idea by the time I’m done. And I can develop nuances I think of once I’ve started by running those thoughts and ideas across a group of paintings at once.
That’s what’s happening in this picture, several pieces in development at once feeding into one another, a neon hotbed of ideas!
Inspirations from Tate Modern
Inspirations from the Tate Modern, November 2015
On my day out to see Ai Weiwei’s exhibition I took the opportunity to do some further research and to look for painting inspirations in the Tate Modern. Limiting myself to the free exhibits I was interested in narrowing it down to just the Energy and Process and Making Traces rooms. I was a bit disappointed in the painting selection, but there were a few key items that took me, and one completely unexpected body of work encompassing drawing, sculpture and performance by Rebecca Horn that was a real surprise.
First of all, the paintings.
Giorgio Griffa, Segni Orizzontali, Acrylic paint on canvas, 1975
This piece was of interest to me initially because the painting isn’t attached to a canvas stretcher, it’s simply painted straight onto canvas and pinned to the wall. There is a relationship between Griffa’s use of the canvas material as a raw object to how I apply gloss paint in the more process-led paintings where it wraps around the surface sides of the painting to amplify the three dimensionality of the painting’s surface.

Cy Twombly Untitled (Bacchus), 2008
I was particularly looking forward to re-acquainting myself with the work of Cy Twombly; massive, expressive canvasses with giant gestural marks of free flowing paint. Immersively large scale and full of impact.
I’ve always enjoyed doing large canvases, they are expensive to make and quite a big gamble to undertake given the cost involved to do one but when I do it pays off, the bigger paintings always lend themselves to space and freedom well for me and I feel able to stretch out and explore the space. I never like to waste resources or money so I know if I don’t get it right I won’t be a happy bunny.


Tomma Abts, Zebe, 2010
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Making Traces exhibit
Mark Rothko (late 1950s)

Rebecca Horn


This is what the plaque says about House of Pain and Waiting for Absence, both 2005 (having read this after seeing the pieces):
‘to look inside bodies and meditate one’s own way into them… you approach a hidden centre, maybe the solar plexus, and follow the circular motion or energy threads of breathing’.

There were some other items in the exhibit that were quite scary and intimate. A video of Rebecca in the 70s making a drawing wearing a cage of pencils on her face, a Cockatoo headpiece that had ‘wings’ to envelope/embrace a partner into a kiss (this was really voyeuristic and a bit shocking) and then also, the piece that to me was the most raw and shocking item, a sculpture called Overflowing Blood Machine, 1970. This was bloody and to me, almost torturous looking, perhaps this was what gave such an impact of all the items that perhaps the mechanics had been inspired by medieval creations and inventions.
Overflowing Blood Machine was a plinth with transparent tubes that encased a wearer. I thought this looked less like a therapeutic hospital device than one of dystopia and torture or perhaps even unnatural genetic engineering or some other sinister device. The wearer (a performance artist) is ‘tied down on top of a glass container, tubes are wrapped around his body. Blood is slowly pumped from the glass container through the plastic tubes. This garment of veins encases his body, wrapping him in a pulsating skin.’ I think this is the stuff of horror movies, see what you think from the photos!
I’m now looking forward to my next gallery visit, but first some more painting of my own!
This blog post was first published by myself 23rd Nov 2015 at http://trudiemooreabstractpaintings.blogspot.com/2015/
Barbara Hepworth Studio
A rainy day in St Ives.
I once visited the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St Ives with my Mum but it was such a distant memory that now we are living in Cornwall and I have a local’s pass for Tate St Ives that this would be a great little hangout with a toddler in tow – if we could get there walking …
So after a trip around the gallery this summer, we walked over the cobbled streets and took a look around.
Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic.. here was a studio, a yard and garden where I could work in open air and space.
Barbara Hepworth
Trewyn Studios.
Once you’ve gone through the museum you can go straight into the garden (safest bet with a small live wire). It’s not immense but it is well packed with hardy tropical plants which thrive well in the humid conditions in Cornwall, and Barbara’s substantial sculptures. Clearly the sculptural nature of the plants sits well with the sculptures themselves.
Now please bear in mind that with a toddler in tow I’m not stopping to have the opportunity to read the blurb and critically assess each piece (and it’s raining), I’m casting a swift impression and grabbing a few moments to take some photos as it’s really photogenic!
Sculpture Garden and studio.
The garden is a lush green space with a rooftop view and the studio placed towards the top by the house. There’s a simple loop around the garden with planting that creates vistas to enjoy the sculptures which make for a good photo composition. The bronze and stone pieces fit so naturally within this setting.
If you peer into the studio, you can see a large white piece and all Barbara’s tools laid out. This isn’t how they would have been placed while she was working, it’s definitely been lined up to look good as a museum piece to viewers as the placement is far too composed to be a realistic work station, but what is clear is that this was a large space in which to accomplish grand plans.
And grand plans take some money, which Barbara must have amassed some of over her career, I can’t imagine someone without great sales success (or being bankrolled) could have dreamed of getting a 3m or so high bronze sculpture (Four Square, 1966) cast and craned into position anywhere, let alone their garden.
So with the rain now parting we escaped back home – I feel lucky to have this so nearby even though it’s an exhibit that won’t change much over time.


Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 2015
Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 2015
I picked up my camera and headed off to the Big Smoke for a day of treating myself to art gallery mooching.
I didn’t know an awful lot about Ai Weiwei before I spotted his exhibition was on at the Royal Academy of Arts, but I did know that it would be good with well executed work that would make me think harder and deeper not only about the work, but about its context.
He's the Beijing Andy Warhol... he wants to shock you
Never Sorry
Never go unprepared

The show opens with the first big piece, Bed, 2004 which is a piece recycled from Qing Dynasty timber, like much of Ai’s work, reclaimed salvage.
Headphones on
Detail from Kippe, 2006, on show at the RA, November 2015


For Ai Weiwei he felt that he couldn’t understand the event and the devastation of it and the Government’s response without going to see it for himself and so he travelled to the area with a team and they started to collect names of those children who perished which were collated and read out by followers of his blog. The blog was later shut down by the Government for revealing “state secrets”. This resulted in Ai Weiwei being beaten by police and denied the ability to give evidence in support of one his assistants, he was then hospitalised for bleeding on the brain.

Moving on from Straight, we move into a room that talks about Ai’s struggles with the Government, his oppression as an artist and the Government’s attempts to constrain his work by bulldozing his studio. Ai had criticised the Beijing Olympics internationally, fought for those who suffered as a result of the earthquake and for over 300,000 children who had been harmed by infant formula. He utilised this as an event to commemorate the studio and hold a feast of river crabs. Of the items in this exhibit, He Xie, 2011 is a pile of 3,000 crabs clambering over one another, I think is the most interesting part. The translation for river crab ‘He Xie’ means harmonious, which is a concept of the Communist party’s slogan ‘The realisation of a harmonious society’ and this is taken to denote censorship within Chinese society. The feasting on river crabs, to which he was then, due to the Government, unable to attend becoming a piece of performance art and defiance by those attendees. The crabs shown were anatomically correct and made of hand painted porcelain, a mischievous edge I believe is shown in the escape of one of the crabs up the wall. I later felt like one of the clambering crabs on the tube in the midst of the madness.
More references to surveillance, challenging traditional values and oppression follow, the use of craftsmanship carefully executed in the work, Ai’s art business giving work to skilled individuals using high value materials, marble, tea, crystal, Han urns and the highly crafted Treasure Box, 2014. All traditional Chinese items.
The exhibition becomes renewed when we get to one of the last galleries featuring the S.A.C.R.E.D. 2012 diorama depicting torturous aspects from Ai’s incarceration such as interrogations and being watched using the loo. These could be viewed from the side, but if you were tall enough (I barely was and I am average height) you could peer in from the top by standing on a step and experience the pieces in an ‘out of body experience’ kind of a way as though you were either Ai witnessing his own life, or a video camera surveilling the situation. This room was decorated in a blingy, gold-coloured wallpaper of handcuffs and Twitter logos with Ai’s face as the bird. I feel it is demonstrating that he can overcome the authorities and this treatment by still getting his message out through Twitter. The image of this was quite sinister, Ai playing the Government at its own game and by putting his face on the wallpaper as the bird, he’s become the more powerful force. The fact that the paper is only printed gold and not actually made from gold shows that the luxury material itself is unnecessary, but also refers to mass production techniques and mass distribution through social media.

More photos of Bicycle Chandelier
Finally the mass production is addressed again through the giant Bicycle Chandelier, 2015 commissioned to be re-fashioned with crystals for the Royal Academy, made from Forever Bicycles historically ridden all over China but ridden less in recent times due to increasing modernisation while riding a bike in China has become a luxury and not a utility. This piece suits the elegance and luxury gold leaf of its position under the atrium roof, the commissioning of the piece by the RA feeling like an act of extravagance by the gallery itself, possibly funded by sales of merchandise in the gift shop as you exit. I wondered whether Ai Weiwei embraces corporate souvenir sales to help fund his mission (given that some of the books themselves are his work) and the partnerships with galleries seeing it as a necessary way to enable art, or whether the monetisation of art, art galleries and the link to consumerism is seen as an additional issue, perhaps one not to be addressed given the number of problems he is already tackling.

I first published this blog on Thursday, 12 November 2015 at http://trudiemooreabstractpaintings.blogspot.com/2015/11/ai-weiwei-at-royal-academy-of-arts.html
Neon linings
Back to school! Not the kind of BTS post that everyone else is sharing at the moment though!
I’m very excited to say that today I picked up the keys to my new studio space @krowji_ in Redruth. After putting my back catalogue paintings into storage, my artistic move to Cornwall is complete.
This is a new phase for my art career in Cornwall. The Krowji is a redeveloped Grammar school and home to around 200 other artists and creatives, I can’t wait to meet all the other tenants, see their work and businesses and get restarted.
Every cloud has
a neon lining
So here’s to the neon lining on that cloud that’s emerged after saying goodbye to @twoqueensstudio 🥂
Watch this space!
