Clive Head: Modern Perspectives | Exhibitions | The National Gallery, London

[pingtran]

FAO Cheadism.

It is a shame after all that hard work people will think it is just a view from a vantage point of one person rather than an impossible perspective for one human eyed being to perceive it from. Brilliantly executed though and I really love all the work I have seen of yours. Have you always done such, dare I say it after what has gone before, photo real paintings?. What would you categorize your art style as?

[cheadism]

@pingtran Seen here, it is inevitable that it will be thought of in the context of photography. That is the predominant mode in common culture. Most realist painting today also aspires to be photographic. But the history of representational painting is very different, each artist re-inventing the language of painting to resolve their own experiences. If cited in this context (as at the National Gallery) it does hopefully elicit a different response. I don't categorize, it just must be credible.

[cheadism]

RayandFare is factually correct, though for a fuller account Michael Paraskos' book on me is excellent. The nub of what I do is in the use of a different way of making space to that which underpins photography and CGI. It is open ended, not fixed and different in each painting. Canaletto does this too. Also many decisions are made to create harmonies and rhythms that do not exist in reality. The location is real but this view is an invention based on. Others must judge if that is valid. C Head

[pingtran]

Oooh get you! arent you the arty farty critic Mr RayAndFlare or should I say Mr Sewell.

I see you are using the old chesnut of spatial algorithms and other art critic speak which does not make a lot of sense if one analises it. It is just art snob talk. The view is not invention, I have seen the photos that this work is based on and it is a real location as shown in the painting and as could be reproduce by a panoramic camera. Cannaletto (sic) rules!!!

[RayAndFlare]

@pingtran To be honest I think you're using the "art snob talk" card because you really don't know what you're talking about. The special effects you get with your camera can't really be projected onto a canvas the exact way the human mind pictures it. Head creates his paintings using his mind, not some cheap effects with a camera. There, I didn't use any long scary words, did you find that easy to follow?

[RayAndFlare]

Sony have programmed a formula for stitching together photos that crudely abutt to extend the panoramic photograph. Head does not use photographs that always abutt, often they do not as they are taken from different positions. Head does not assemble this information in accordance with any known fomula. No formual could possibly exist and each pictorial solution is non-transferable to another painting. This is remarkable, way ahead of photography, elitist and not of our popular culture.

[nicholi2789]

That is exactly where my mind ran for defense of photographs, was PANORAMAS and you can get that effect that the painting had. Yet it was done by hand, and that is what makes it more unique aside from photography. The act of man made art entices me more than photos! I find it fascinating, this type of art! Good stuff! It is like Castle of Illusion, MC Escher

[pingtran]

Try using a Sony HX9V camera with its self stitching panorama mode. You could definetely take a photo which encompassed this entire painting scene with that camera. I wonder if mr Head has one?

[RayAndFlare]

@pingtran This makes no sense. Head rejects all known spatial algorithms, be they perspectival, photographic or digital for a unique invention of space in each painting. His paintings offer a resolution to his movement through space. The locations exist but the view is an invention. This an art of defining space and defining existence, not the assertion of known conventions. Have we forgotten the human enterprise of the artist who can draw afresh rather than render dumb and common solutions?

[SurfacePrimer]

@RayAndFlare In simple terms. Head creates a drawing based on a London scene. He experiments with the perspective of the drawing - the creative stage - then colours it in copying photographs! this is just a slightly more creative version of photorealism

[RayAndFlare]

@SurfacePrimer I'm more than aware of what Head does. You don't have to explain it to me. Copying photographs is a part of it but he creates a view which is unseeable. And it's not really just a "slight" change. Perhaps you should try doing what he does, or looking at his work in more depth rather than just dismissing him as just another photorealist? I've seen your other comments, they show quite a lot of ignorance sir.

[SurfacePrimer]

@pingtran haha exactly !

[artcyprus]

Realist7250's comment doesn't really make sense unless there is a judgement being made on seeing a painting in a grainy Youtube video. If you have not seen the painting in real life I cannot see how it is possible to judge it as Clive Head did not make a video as his art work, he made a painting. Seeing his paintings in real life at the National Gallery and then going to the actual locations was an astonishing experience as you really do get a sense that these are not reproductions of our world.

[artcyprus]

They are creations of new worlds in which the sense of space is very different to anything you experience in our world. To put it very simply, they do not look like the places depicted because the sense of space is so different. Stitching together a few photographs is a hackneyed old technique that even Victorian painters used to do, and it would not achieve the same effect because it would not come near this level of creativity. This is the creation of a new space.

[artcyprus]

Unfortunately taking a single photograph or even simply stitching together photographs and painting the result does not really cut the mustard, as the painter of such images never escapes the shackles of photographic space. They simply reproduce it, in all its dull predictability. Head does not reproduce photographic space, nor does he reproduce actual space from the real world. He creates a new painted space unique to each particular painting. To suggest this is unremarkable is simply foolish.

[realist7250]

Although some photorealists' work does use mutiple photographs, specifically in order to provide changes in perspective to achieve certain effects, I can't really see that the method shows up very much in this picture. It seems to have involved standing in one spot and taking shots in different directions and 'stitching' them, as in a panorama, to avoid the distortion from using a wide-angle lens. Manipulation obviously went on, but changes to the scene, I would imagine, are fairly minimal.

[maugaw]

impressive

[Caspar33]

I saw Mr. Head's work yesterday. There's always a moment after that initial positive first impression before a painting begins to really speak to you or permiate your senses and your being. These works were very effective indeed - as I shall explain. After going on to the Caneletto's it became clear that light was the key here and there. Perhaps it always is? It was a shock to have the so very familiar (I've lived only a few minutes from the Gallery for over forty years) utterly metamorphosed++

[Caspar33]

I saw this painting and others only yesterday and was drawn to them. It always takes a while after that positive first impression to reach a stage where

the painting starts to speak to you and in this case grip you. I did go on to study some of the detail in Caneletto's large canvasses and came to the conclusion that light, for both artists, was the inspiration and the key. But something else happened...(contd)

[Caspar33]

Ascending the stairs I was quite transfixed by the sudden, astonishing sunlit view of the square outside the gallery, through a conveniently spotlessly clean window: the continual movement, the extraordinary detail, the brilliant colour, or if you like, the glory of the scene. I remained there for some considerable time. This is the power inherent in the Mr.Head's work. The familiar fountains, people buses; my perception and feelings transformed.. Testament to the power of the work, thanks !

[marsarkis90]

He is obviously very talented in painting & realistic rendering, but in his insistence that photography gives a limited view of a space ("Photography enforces that idea of a very single perspectival structure"), he fails to consider panoramic photos.

It's interesting when he states "artists do not have any special insight into the world at all", as art history may say otherwise. Can't observation/imagination bring about insight? Then again it depends on what exactly he means by "insight"...