Interpretation of the Meaning a new work by Sara Choudhrey

Interpretation of the Meaning, Sara Choudhrey

Watch the full piece here.

Still from Interpretation of the Meaning, Sara Choudhrey, 2020

Layering, displacement, and motion are key elements explored in Interpretation of the Meaning, an animation produced in response to the early work of David Bomberg and his contemporaries engaged with the Vorticist and Furturist movements. It is a consideration of alternative ways of looking, of materiality, technological advancement and our perceptions of time and continuity.

David Bomberg is often portrayed as someone who was in lifelong search, in contemplation of a truth and seeking a sense of belonging. His work produced in response to time in the Middle East, and Toledo in Spain also resonated with me. There is also his diaspora identity whilst living in London, and his having travelled to locations significant to Islamic history, including Jerusalem. Of course, the contentious situation in this region has evolved greatly, and with a change and movement of time, one wonders what the futurists may have made of the world in which their works are viewed now.

The title of the piece:

There is also a strong theme of spiritual and religious heritage in the work, and is conveyed through the title ‘Interpretation of the Meaning’, a phrase that is used for explaining and translating sacred text, often from one language to another. It implies that in the process of translating, there is a limitation in portraying the original intended meaning. Those who are multi-lingual will appreciate this, where there may not always be an equivalent phrase or word to describe the extent and essence of the original, however, in using the phrase ‘interpretation of the meaning’ there is an implied acknowledgement and value for authenticity. The play on words continues in the notion of artistic movements, movement as portrayed in the audio, in the animation format, with its own timeline and the movement of the geometric forms.

The audio:

The audio for this artwork uses the sounds of various clocks ticking in and out of sync, with additional chimes and sounds of timepieces and machinery. They are as abstracted as the sense of the space that is being explored in this virtual and unknown landscape. The viewers movement and that of the geometric shapes is an investigation of what we perceive of as our surroundings and how a space is to us as we are to it. The sound is heavily influenced by my current surroundings at home, where my father, a horologist, has set up many clocks in the midst of repairs. They have not all been set up with the same times. The correction of the time shown on the clock face is almost arbitrary. These clocks embody their own timelines, speak of having their place somewhere, belonging to someone and therefore being of material significance. They act as both props and reminders of the passing of time.

The geometry:

The animation presents what is known as an Islamic geometric pattern. It is an expanded design from an in-laid panel from the early 16th Century Al Ghuri complex in Cairo, Egypt. I chose this pattern as I found the formation of shapes and structure intriguing. It is not common to find pentagons on a 6-fold composition yet upon analysis there appear to be hidden correlations in the structure of the design that allows the 5-sided shapes to become apparent through divisions in a 6-fold layout. The geometers from this period and region would have cleverly discovered these hidden properties but did not leave many clues behind regarding their construction methods, and so there is a further connection to the idea of interpretation here. It is only through deconstructing and analysing which allows for possibilities in reconstruction of the pattern, an aspect of my practice which I wrack my brain over but also thoroughly enjoy.

My interest in the Vorticist movement:

I am in awe of artists who were inspired and exposed to cubism and the style that developed into Futurism and Vorticism. There is an abstracted conveyance of the world through this style yet it is not entirely unidentifiable through the sliced forms. The style also lends itself to an acknowledgement of the geometry present in our habitat, whether spaces of nature or those which are constantly manipulated by humankind. I feel the success of the movement centred on a strong understanding and contemplation of the way we engage with spaces through movement and also our understanding of spaces centred on a perception of light.

Still from Interpretation of the Meaning, Sara Choudhrey, 2020

Still from Interpretation of the Meaning, Sara Choudhrey, 2020

Still from Interpretation of the Meaning, Sara Choudhrey, 2020

Naming With Care Game

You are the curator of a digital collection. Trace the speculative provenance of the image and decide where it might go in the future.

Play Naming With Care Here

Stevie Rae Hope Scanner GIF

In examining the works of Bomberg, I found myself most interested in the textural quality of the work, which acts as evidence of the process of creating the painting, and of the painters presence within the work. Keeping this in mind, I chose to work with a scanner, creating my own self portraits and scanning as I painted, and also as I removed these paintings from the scanner bed in order to create the next one. I animated some of the painting process, to show how the buildup of paint works to create an image. The paintings created only exist permanently in digital form, as each is wiped away upon completion. 

See more works by Stevie Rae Hope here.

Why Did Dorothy Mead Experience Less Success Than Her Male British Modern Contemporaries?

Why Did Dorothy Mead Experience Less Success Than Her Male British Modern Contemporaries?

by Alice Mcleod-Bishop

Dorothy Mead was a loyal student to Bomberg and championed his work and methods even when the wider British art community was staunchly against Bomberg’s teaching methods and philosophy, leading to Mead being asked to leave the Slade before completing her studies there. It is difficult to know why the art-world failed to appreciate Bomberg’s works despite his students and friends being able to recognise his skills: perhaps they found his teaching style too unorthodox or were threatened by his approach and philosophy. Whatever the reasoning, the establishment was against Bomberg and the Borough Group as a result, which arguably hindered the flourishing of the group-members’ careers as galleries refused to exhibit their work. 

According to Borough Group founding member Cliff Holden, some of those who were in close contact with Bomberg made a mockery of his practice, by recreating (arguably, cheapening) Bomberg’s stylistic affects. One of these individuals is world renowned artist Frank Auerbach, who was an avid student of Bomberg’s from 1947-1953 and the most successful of Bomberg’s students. Auerbach did not join the Borough Group or Bottega during their existence as it seems he intended to not be as closely associated with Bomberg and his followers. It is quite clear when examining Auerbach’s work how heavily he was influenced by Bomberg, especially when you compare Auerbach’s paintings with Mead’s, who was proud to be Bomberg’s student. 

(left: Mead, Reclining Figure, 1954; right: Auerbach, E.O.W Nude, 1954)

(left: Mead, Self Portrait, 1960; right: Auerbach, Julia, 1992)

(left: Mead, Industrial Landscape, Evening, 1947; right, Auerbach, Building Site Earl’s Court Road: Winter (Replica), 1955)

Auerbach’s style does differ from Mead’s – for example he depicts less form and uses thicker or more paint – but the Bombergian influences in both their work is clear on examining some of Bomberg’s paintings in the Borough Road Gallery’s collection. So why did Mead find little success where Auerbach found fame and fortune? It is certain that Auerbach’s distancing from Bomberg and the groups associated to him allowed for his career to flourish since critics, galleries, buyers, and others were unbiased regarding his art since they generally held a strong dislike toward Bomberg. Those who were part of the Borough Group and the Bottega failed to break through because Bomberg’s methods and philosophy were misunderstood, explaining how Auerbach, who had similar stylistic techniques and subjects in his paintings compared to Mead, was so successful despite being taught by Bomberg. 

It can also be inferred that Mead’s gender had a great deal to do with her career not finding the success it had the potential to. Female artists have had the odds stacked against them for as long as society itself has been patriarchal. Until recently, non-male artists were rarely commissioned to make work, and ratio of male to female artists in galleries always shows there are more male artists being exhibited, sold and critiqued. The men who were influenced by Bomberg and were closely aligned to him, such as Holden, still found more success than their female counterparts. And the men who were influenced by Bomberg and distanced themselves from his philosophy, such as Auerbach, found even greater success. Considering that Auerbach was three years younger than Mead, they were certainly contemporaries and so the comparison between their works is relevant, highlighting the distinct differences between their careers. If Mead had distanced herself from Bomberg and continued to study at the Slade, as Auerbach did, she might have been a considerably more well-known and successful artist; and yet, maybe her allegiance to Bomberg and her respect for his teachings made her the artist she became. 

Is Life Drawing the Same During COVID-19?

Is Life Drawing the Same During COVID-19? by Alice Mcleod-Bishop

“The exercise of drawing from life brings out the individuality of the artist in the man”[i]

Left, via Zoom; right, from life

This collection of life drawings aims to examine how artists can use technology to overcome the constraints of the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and how this has affected the practice of life drawing and the drawings themselves. Life drawing was an integral aspect of Bomberg’s teaching and he valued how one can learn to depict a subject through drawing them from life, moving the artist and the subject to gain a full perception through different physical perspectives of the sitter; it is considered by most artists to be a valuable practice in learning how to visually depict a subject. 

Sketches done from life

Given the social distancing aspect of managing the pandemic, and the encouragement to stay inside with little to no contact with other households, life drawing in the traditional sense is somewhat an impossibility. However, video-calling technology (Facetime, Skype, social media ‘lives’ and most commonly Zoom) has enabled people to have some normalcy in some aspects of life, and people have hosted virtual life-drawing classes to continue their practice.

Left, via Zoom; right, from life

This collection of life drawings demonstrates the difference between drawing sitters in person compared to drawing the same people via Zoom. I found that in drawing via zoom, I struggled to really grasp an accurate perspective of my sitters, and I found it hard to make my subjects look like themselves in their bodies, in comparison to drawing the same sitters in person. When drawing them in person, I saw more shading and shapes, thus making the drawing itself and the drawings more interesting.

Process documentation of life drawing via Zoom (left to right: 3 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes)

An example of a sitter over zoom

I also found it difficult to capture my sitters’ essence and understand how to represent the ‘Spirit in the Mass’ in the subject, particularly when I compare that experience to drawing my sitters in person. While I am close with both subjects, it was hard to portray some evidence of their selves in my works over Zoom, and the drawings seem decidedly flatter and colder when observed in comparison to drawings done in person. This is likely because one’s physical view of the sitter is 2-dimensional, and thus it is hard to gain a full perspective of the sitter from various angles, something which Bomberg defended when it came to his life drawing classes.

Process documentation, drawn from life

Overall, the experience of life drawing and being able to gauge a person’s essence was unmatched via Zoom. Drawing over a videocall felt far more like drawing an object as a still life rather than drawing a person. Using Zoom felt incredibly impersonal and stilted, whereas life drawing in person makes it easy to capture the Spirit in the Individual. Despite this, I was able to maintain my style and stylistic approach to life drawing and enjoyed the experience. If one can practice life drawing in any capacity it still has value, especially during a pandemic; it allows you to connect in a time where people have become so unnaturally disconnected.

Drawn from life.

Thank you to my lovely sitters.

[i] (Bomberg, quoted in Buchowska ‘teaching art in post-war Britain: the case of the Borough Group’, p. 115)

Virtual Backgrounds

Back in April we reimagined digital images in the archived collection as video call backgrounds that fit standard conferencing platforms. The images are inserted in the generic interiors and are stretched beyond the size of the original dimensions of the work. The virtual backgrounds become potential backdrops for users to demonstrate their knowledge of the collection or mask their domestic spaces.

The Spirit in the Mass in Dorothy Mead’s Paintings

by Alice Mcleod-Bishop

Dorothy Mead (1928-1975) joined the Borough Group in 1946 as an original member of the group which was dedicated to portraying David Bomberg’s (1890-1957) Modernist teaching methods and his philosophy known as the Spirit in the Mass, until the group’s dissolution in 1951. The notion of Spirit in the Mass was primarily about the connection between art and wider life, where he aimed to capture someone as they are in the world rather than as a subject. He understood the ‘self’ as a conditional relationship in consideration of its surroundings, taking into account the artist’s perception of the subject, as well as the phenomenology (the experience of experiencing something) of the subject – to capture what it is like for the sitter, landscape, cityscape etc., to be and exist as itself rather than solely the artist’s depiction of what it might look like at face-value. The idea of mass specifically relates to the synthesis of thought and feeling: the artist must assume ignorance about the subject whilst not being ignorant, and show the world as we see it, as uncertainty. Bomberg believed that modernist drawing is seen “as a deliberate distortion of optical truth”[i], and thus one must be classically trained if aiming to distort; yet if the artist is concerned with how things ‘feel’, then what they draw will naturally be a subjective and therefore distorted view of reality. 

This is what drove Bomberg to teach his anti-establishment methods, which in turn meant he was met with distaste and disapproval from the contemporary art community and was not recognised as a legitimate teacher. His views were widely misunderstood due to the lack of clarity surrounding his ideas and the somewhat confusing way in which they are worded in the Bomberg Papers. Contemporary critics and teachers failed to ascertain what Bomberg’s philosophy entailed, and to this day his teachings are confused by many[ii]. It is highly difficult to truly grasp exactly what Bomberg aimed to portray in his classes and what is the Spirit in the Mass; it seems that only those who were his students managed to understand Bomberg’s revolutionary methods and accurately capture what Bomberg perceived to be the Spirit in the Mass. 

One of these students was Dorothy Mead, who was especially dedicated to Bomberg’s methods and was forced to leave the Slade art school because of her allegiance to the British Modernist artist. Bomberg’s influence on Mead is evident in her paintings, particularly her depictions of bodies, figures and landscapes: stylistically, Mead’s work is reminiscent of Bomberg’s post-war paintings, using thick expressive brush strokes and dark colours to portray a sense of the subject and its essence, an idea that was integral to Bomberg’s philosophy. It is difficult to delineate precisely how far Mead was able to capture the Spirit of her subjects, since we cannot know in detail her relationship with what and who she painted, nor how far she allowed her subjectivity to distort her reality. One can assume with some confidence however that she aimed to exact the Spirit of her subjects through her use of colour and the presentation of form in her works. In her 1955 work Portrait[iii]  (left), she uses bold yellow and blue brush strokes over a dark red and brown background to create the suggestion of an anonymous sitter. Compared to her undated self-portrait titled Self-Portrait[iv](right), it is clear she perceived herself quite differently to her sitter in Portrait. The use of duller colours and more succinct brush strokes in Self-Portrait might suggest she had a less-than passionate view of herself, while the vibrant, even violent feel to Portrait implies a potentially tumultuous or impassioned view of her unnamed sitter. This short comparison highlights how Mead attempted to portray her perception of her subjects and thus how she interpreted Bomberg’s philosophy of the Spirit in the Mass; the different stylistic techniques in her depiction of herself compared to that of her subject is evidence of an attempt to capture the essence and phenomenology of the individual.

[i][i] Roy Oxlade, Bomberg Papers: The Spirit in the Mass, a commentary, together with transcriptions of various previously unpublished notes, p. XIV (introduction), Royal College of Art, 1980

[ii] Cliff Holden, Bomberg’s Teaching – Some Misconceptions, p.3, 2004, Cliff Holden

[iii] Dorothy Mead, Portrait, 1955, Borough Road Gallery Archive

[iv] Dorothy Mead, Self-Portrait, (undated), Borough Road Gallery Archive

Dennis Creffield - Abstraction and Spectral Architecture

Dennis Creffield, Beauvais Cathedral (East End) - 1990

Dennis Creffield - Abstraction and Spiritual Architecture by Fraser McFarlane

The ‘David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection’, held by the Borough Road Gallery, contains an assortment of works by David Bomberg (1890–1957) and his students from Borough Polytechnic (later London South Bank University). One of these students, Dennis Creffield (1931-2018), is represented by at least fifteen works, typically characterised by monochromatic charcoal markings, with seven taking cathedrals as their subject. These were part of a larger project which gripped Creffield for much of his career, might all too easily be dismissed as simply conservative in their institutionality, or uninteresting in Creffield’s persistent iteration of the theme. However, I would like to reclaim these works from those dangers, and offer interpretations which might in some small way offer a fresh perspective on these works.

The two booklets on Creffield’s cathedral series.

There are taken to be twenty-six remaining examples of medieval cathedrals in England. Constructed between 1040 and 1540, the vast majority of these are built in the Gothic style, which was disseminated across the Channel in the second half of the 1100s, and emphasises height and light with arches and pinnacles. These cathedrals continued to have an enduring impact in subsequent centuries on national identity, and have often been interpreted as living historical testimonies. In 1987, Creffield was commissioned by what was then The Arts Council of Great Britain to draw these cathedrals. This two year undertaking, during which he lived in a campervan, is perhaps the most remarked upon project of Creffield’s life, and it was a foundation towards later artistic exploits, even spurring him to draw the cathedrals of Northern France in 1990. The scarce literature on the subject consists of two small catalogues, French Cathedrals (1991) for the French project and English Cathedrals (1987) for the English antecedent. The latter, published by South Bank Centre, features Creffield's own writing, which resembles both a manifesto and a journal in tone, and provides an account of his road trip in a campervan with little more than an easel and paint. Often composed in the manner of a personal saga or epic, the image conjured resembles that of other (slightly macho) creatives, such as Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer, who embark on pilgrimages to respond to environments and subjects that others might be unaware of: ‘Each day I drew them – each night I slept in their shadow – and their shapes filled my dreams.’1 These cathedrals, though man-made monuments, came, in the relative claustrophobia of England, to be seen as naturalised behemoths, or essential parts of the landscape. Creffield had said of the English Cathedral series ‘it was like wrestling with an endless succession of giants (or angels). And needing to come back each time with a hair from their head.’2 This similarity in attitude between draftsman and land artist brings forth an undercurrent of both, which is a desire to make contact with a supposed deep history, to generate ‘authentic’ experience within a context of encroaching postmodernity.

Fig 1: Dennis Creffield, French Cathedral - No Date

Creffield’s depictions of religious and ecclesiastic buildings housed by Borough Road Gallery (six drawings and one painting) were undoubtedly spurred on by the commission from the Arts Council, but they also differ in many respects. Whilst Creffield continued to make cathedrals his subject well after he finished his Arts Council commission, he was no longer bound to the expectation of an institution whose role it was to promote and appreciate the individual character of each cathedral, or any duty of documentation. Crucially, the lack of duty to a patron afforded a greater degree of freedom in his tendency towards abstraction. This had developed during Creffield’s time as a student of Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic, where Creffield studied modernist expression, claiming he belonged ‘to the progeny of Cezanne’. Rather than create an illusion of reality in a photo-realistic depiction, or a symbol of it by emphasising signification, Creffield tries ‘to find substantial form for [the] substantiality’ of religious buildings, a conjuring of a rawer experience of the weight and immediacy of the medieval behemoths. The impression of this ‘total response’, or what Bomberg elsewhere famously described as ‘the spirit in the mass’, can vary in the extent to which it deconstructs the subject.3 In the Borough collection, Creffield’s French Cathedral (fig. 1) is only loosely defined as a unitary entity amidst its fragmentary structure and diffusion of marks, which is perhaps the reason for its generic title. The only definitely recognisable features are the forms of the pinnacles and jutting out of the mass at the top, and a few short hard marks which distinguish their crockets. This is unlike his depiction of St Paul’s (fig. 2), in which the iconic dome is clearly depicted. Yet both these works’ monochromatic quality and use of charcoal impress upon the viewer a foreboding through their dwindling scale in relation to these structures, and the dynamism of the invisible forces which pervade these buildings and keep them upright against the odds.

Fig 2: Dennis Creffield, St Paul’s Cathedral from Clifford Chance, Aldersgate - 1998

The style of the Gothic was intrinsically linked to the forest; often columns are cosmetically split and carved to look like clusters of tree trunks. Perhaps ironically, Creffield lambasted the ‘English’ tendency of planting trees around cathedrals, likening it to ‘putting a pot-plant in front of a Giotto’. Significantly however, trees offered a relatively lightweight material and were often used in the roofs of cathedrals, which was all too often hazardous to the buildings due to the risk of fires. The Gothic St Paul’s Cathedral, which was later replaced by Christopher Wren’s Baroque design, was a victim of this in 1666 during the Great Fire of London, as was Notre Dame in Paris more recently. The traces of such incidents pervade Creffield’s drawings, which seem to show the buildings as scorched, burnt out and collapsing. Bourges (West Front) (fig. 3) in particular slumps towards the bottom, where the smoky smudged quality solidifies into sketchy marks which look as if they are residual remains after a fire. I appreciate that this reading is not sanctioned by any statement of intent on the part of Creffield, but the smoldering orange which peers out from the rubble certainly makes such a reading enticing. Furthermore, such a link between the cathedrals, forests and fire is historically and artistically richer than one might initially think. The material of charcoal saw a rapid increase in use during the Middle Ages (when these structures were built), primarily for its ability to be burnt at high temperatures efficiently for forging. Creffield’s use of charcoal itself can thus be seen to presence further connotations relating to the ‘Arboreal Gothic’ and fire, contributing to the multi-layered force of the cathedrals’ petrified skeletal forms.

Fig 3: Dennis Creffield, Bourges (West Front), 1990

Fig 4: One of the first photographs taken after the 2019 fire at Notre-Dame de Paris which showed what had survived inside the building.

Fig 5: Photograph of St Paul’s during the Blitz.

Advancing this post-pyrokinetic vein, Borges (West Front), has an uncanny resemblance to the widely viewed image of the altar Notre Dame after the devastating fire of April 2019 (fig. 4). The flurried cascade of marking overlap and entwine as if deconstructing, and resemble pieces of fallen burnt timber. The sense of spatial depth is also similar, with both images creating the sense of still emergent glimmer of something hitherto overwhelmed. Out of context, it would be understandable if Creffield’s drawing was taken to be a response to the image of Notre Dame, though this of course cannot be the case. As with the Notre Dame image, Borges consists of two main compositional features, signalled by a darkening of tone: the lower slumped mass which contains a warm orange flicker within it, and a levitating eminence around the center of the image. The association of these markings with spirituality is comparable with other artworks, notably Francis Bacon’s Innocent X in 1953; the works share a spectrality which dissolves the material contours of a subject but allows its presence to linger.

Fig 6: Plan of the base of the dome of St Paul’s showing the extent to which the rotunda had become warped.

One may elucidate the manner in which Creffield reaches into history with his treatment of these monuments by considering his treatment of the more modern (though Baroque) St Paul’s. Whilst Creffield takes care to allow parts of the paper to peek through and preserve a trace of St Paul’s classical whiteness, much of the lower half has been smudged, evoking the tarry blackness that hundreds of years of London’s smog had left until the buildings deep clean, initiated in 1996. Notably, Creffield has the recognisable and iconic dome climb out of the darker density at the bottom of the composition, in a manner that wields similar language to the famous photograph of St Paul’s during the blitz (fig. 5). Here the leaning and buckling of the dome of St Paul’s suggests (intentionally or not) the restoration work undertaken in the 1920s. Despite many of Christropher Wren’s technical innovations, by the twentieth century, the condition of the dome was beginning to deteriorate, and the survey shown illustrates the extent to which the rotunda was coming under unequal stress from the weight above (fig. 6). The work was nationally discussed, with plenty of visual material that make the usually static dome appear like the leaning tower of Pisa (fig). In the end, the solution was to put a chain belt around the base of the central structure, effectively to ‘cinch’ everything into place. To a contemporary viewer, Creffield’s work thus destabilises and reappraises the structural integrity of St Paul’s in a way that estranges an iconic and familiar image

The works by Creffield in the Borough Road collection which take cathedrals as their subject are boldly different to the other artists and works included. These examples are fertile pastures for interpretation, and the prominence of cathedrals as a collective historical locus only encourages this. Through his use of charcoal, a product of the materials which inspired and then built these cathedrals, Creffield presences a conversation that began before any of us were born. By drawing attention to how the works contain thematic and visual suggestions of recent events and the continuing issues of preservation and conservation of these buildings, I have hoped to show how Creffield’s works continue to be provocative participants in a conversation that will continue long after we pass away. 

1 English Cathedrals (South Bank Centre: London, 1987), 6.

2 Ibid, 6.

3 Bomberg also drew Notre Dame, Chartres and other cathedrals in 1953.