Thursday 22 September 2011

Me and Thee


text for my latest show starting 1st October
Click for Online Catalogue

An exhibition of Drawings in Colour and Sculpture by Carol Peace

This new body of work has not only been created through clay but also through oil paint, always with an undercurrent of drawing. The oil paint is like the clay, it is slippery, moveable, the image is there and then it’s gone. It’s easy to pile on, scrape off, smudge, and draw in to. I seem to be sculpting like a painter and making drawings in colour.

For my degree thesis I looked at Rodin’s work and the theory of representing movement. I realise now, some 20 years later, that I had asked the wrong question, it’s not about representing or ‘capturing’ movement, it’s about trying to respond to it in an intuitive way. A new piece called Attempting Sirsasana is like a drawing of movement, rough lines and plains form quickly, areas are left blurred, only the essence is there.

The new pieces Him, Her and Them are raw because life is raw. Broken, cracked in places, deep scars run over the work but the deep ruts and scars reveal the form; reveal the life, the frailties and the power. I try to make the marks strong like using charcoal; there are areas of focus and areas that fade.

In the drawings in colour, the subject matter changes from the life room to the still life but in changing the objects I see more clearly my interests. When I draw cherries they are in love, in a painting of tomatoes their shadows nearly touch. Peaches rest their soft flesh on one another for support, which gives over time.  Bright happy lemons jostle with blue shadows. A lone tomato is still attached to its family tree, they are not present and yet always there. In something ordinary there is often sadness and a beauty.

Relationships and our interaction with other people dominate us and in turn form the basis for much of my recent work. The extra ordinariness and magnitude of the simplicity of the touch of a partner, the closeness of love, it’s basic.

The work is about everyday life, in its minutia, the sheer fantasticness of it all. It’s about the flash of a look, a small gesture, the pressure of a hand in yours, of skin resting on skin. It’s about the rawness and confusion of being alive, the beauty and the complications of it, the freedom, exhilaration and the insecurities. It’s about death and about life, the fear and the joy.

This is not to say that all this is apparent in a piece of bronze or a painting of two peaches but it is what I am aiming for and it makes me go to the studio.

Carol Peace
September 2011

Tuesday 13 September 2011

Keeping paintings


Getting paintings ready for my show with Fairfax at the end of the month and each image that comes up for framing I don’t want to let go of. Its either the photo does not capture the colour or the pallet I want to save to use for another time. I need the real thing not an on screen replica. Its like they are part of something not yet done and selling them would break it up before it’s come to anything. I have had them for ages now and never let anyone buy them, I need to give myself some time to use these sketches in colour for bigger paintings and then may let them go. But for now this pallet, this reaction to life, in front of life is not the painting, it only informs the future one and for now will not go in the show.

Saturday 9 July 2011



Thank you for being there in the wind.

Thank you for letting my hair
flick in your face and
my thoughts trample in the space
of your head.

Thank you for letting me lean on you
when you were finding it difficult to stand.
Thank you for being there with me
and thank you for being my friend.






















http://www.carolpeace.com/detail.asp?tc=13&mc=1&sc=44&w=608

This piece ended up taking until 23 April 2012 to get the first one made but I posted it the date I wrote the poem (if you can call it a poem) as that was when I made the work. Language wise its a terrible poem but it means a lot to me.

Tuesday 21 June 2011

Mother and Child




Finally finished this piece before I went away to France, the head used to look up
http://carolpeace.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html

I think within a lot of my work I keep returning to an overall feeling. The championing of the ordinary. The extra ordinariness and magnitude of simplicity. The touch of a partner, the closeness of love. Basic.
I remember many years ago being really irritated when one of the royals or some celebratory had a baby and it was made into such a big deal. My friends had just had a premature child and had terrible difficulties but she was alive.....that was a huge deal.

Monday 28 February 2011

Shouting not Singing

Three new block people for Nick Woolff, these will be going to his American art fairs this year.














This last piece 'Man with mouth open' I called 'Shouting not Singing' after the poem 'Not Waving but Drowning' by Stevie Smith. In the end it remains the descriptive title as sometimes I think its best to let the viewer make up their own minds, it will be their sculture after all. 

If you follow the link below you can listen to her talking, she has the most amazing voice and what she says resonates strongly with me and my work

"They are written from the experiences of my own life, its pressures and fancies, and they are
written to give ease and relief to me: while they are being written I’m afraid nobody
else comes into it at all. I want to get something out that is working away at me. I
think pressure is the operative word here: the pressure of daily life; the pressure of
having to earn one’s own living, possibly at work that is not very congenial; the
pressure of one’s relations with other people; the pressure of all the things one hears
about or reads about in philosophy, history and religion for instance, and agrees with
or does not agree with; the pressure of despair. And the pressure too of pleasures that
take one’s breath away – colours, animals tearing about, birds fighting each other to
get the best bit of bacon rind. And the funniness of things too…"
Stevie Smith

Thursday 27 January 2011

Never alone again



Working title - Never alone again








  

I have worked on this piece since this post, the mothers head now looks down, more in thought than at something, someone. I loved it like this but somehow it seemed too much.
The working title, is named after someone close to me, her overriding feelings about bringing her baby home from the hospital, she was at last relieved that she would never again feel alone.

Friday 21 January 2011

Heart Beat

Heart Beat

I have never known the touch of my own child
but I have heard a heartbeat.
I will not hold the fragile yet feisty promise of youth.

My heartbeat shall not be reformed
and shall not be heard through tiny new ears.
My mummer of voice will
never be heard.





Thursday 20 January 2011

Train Journey

Train journey to london, had done a lot of work with the Bristol Drawing School, given a lot and maybe not left much for myself. it left me vulnerable so when criticised even for the tiniest thing, it hurt.


20 Jan 2011


A clear crisp morning
but the crispness is softened by mist.
A not quite white land with
grey green, grey blue ground.

The sun rises turning paler
as it seeps through grey-blue
puffs of cloud to reveal a white disk.

Sometimes a clear round,
sometimes masked by a shroud.
Concealing the land’s look
in a bright white light.

An aeroplane makes it’s way
through the down, small
silver, silently gliding.
Blocks of lorries travel east west.

The first hint of man-made colour
over a bridge are the cars
blue, yellow, red at the lights
Chimney, chimney, spire.

Still blue grey with just a hint of
dark green ivy crawling up the trees.
Cars in the car park at Swindon
are muted by frost.

Reflection of glass, mirror
onto red brick revealing the
true colour of a yellow sun
as if somehow the city has warmed its look.

The nasty purple, pink of a first great western fades
and we are back to
chimney, chimney, now tesco spire
Group logistics, pedestrian bridges.

Flat ridges of corrigated buildings and
then dark passages of train

Nature still remains but not the
open plains untouched by man except the farmer.
His blocks of sheds steam
with unseen contents.

Now dark forest, open land,
bright white mist. Skeletal trees
and thick lumps of tomorrows steak
lick hot mouthed at cold grass.

Bright water lay in tracks
revealing the farmers path,
the farmers touch, his borrowed land.
His flat clean soil, his pride.

Ah romance, at last a dark square church
stands protective of a gathering of houses
white fog silently hangs around
up to it's waist.

Push, shudder, purple pink, pushes past
buffeting air in between
and then out again, gliding
the sky reveals blue,

the deeper blue of the working day.
Small clouds shuffle up against one another
trying to close in and keep out
a clear day.

Bosh. Bright light again. Too bright
to look at the sun with a halo.
An avenue picked out on a brow.
Momentum lessons, the brakes applied and
my seat's the last to see our next stop.

Diggers move earth on the horizon, no
not moving, awaiting instruction.
A full load, hanging mid air.
A crow watches.

Pink purple, didcot parkway,
not a stop but a slow.
Next, Curry's, Sleep Shaper.

Lonely trees, midfield are black brown now
and the grass is green.
the grey blue frost has gone and
left a dull January day.

Springs sleep unseen below seeming dull earth.
Tired, coping.
But underneath working, preparing
for springs light. A longer day.
Less night.

Yellow digger. Blue generator.
mans colours take precedent now.
A paper, flat and unseen lures as the landscape dulls
and then

A golden labrador, a girl in wellies in a wood.
Paddocks, houses, mole hills.
Nosey passengers stare at imagined lives.
Pink purple, whoosh, whoosh.

Purky little houses open to a
fat
wide dirty white mansion
sitting heavily amongst some loyal trees.

Embankments hide the pace we pick up
but purple pink bashes at the window streaking past west.
The white puffs of cloud have been bullied away by big dark ones,
the sun is trying but decides to shine elsewhere.

The white ball peaks through
over the top of now all consuming dense grey
but at Tilehurst it is all gone.

1930's triumph's architecture cling to the roads.
Family houses. City link. Self storage.
Saab. Audi. Dull day.

A solitary bird flies over, if only it knew the landscape of the previous seen.
Reading.
Services to gatwick airport.
Cross country, manchester train, grey yellow.

Reading. Why Reading not reading?
Lift to footbridge. Shops. Subway.
Coins and cards. Purple pink.
Still now.

Flat clean paper still unread.
Safety information.
Please read these instructions, which are provided
for you safety in the event of an emergency.

3/4 full bladder from an over ambitious latte,
a sleeping passenger
I'm too polite to disturb,
I reflect on last nights tears.

Bullied by my own middle class desire to please,
to 'do the right thing'
I take the opportunity to cross a pedestrian crossing
I bike over as she crosses one way.

But she leaves
before I do
and I am exposed.
'The bad cyclist'.

To the old man
the 'just had to say'
late middle aged
'needed to say', old man.

I know it was wrong,
I was flustered by night.
By cars, by proximity's and the closeness to the
pavement, to last thoughts.

Yellow fronted
Maidenhead, Reading ( A4 East )
We are off again and the buffetting
from the right seems so frequent now it is less shocking.

The people who 'just need to say'
Last nights class
Wed. night. It's just a break " get my life back "
Seems like the end of an era

I just have to say
Well don't.

Too much time given away makes you
Oversensitive, overstreched
Vulnerable.

Then a foot out of place and
'I just had to say' The shame.
The crinkled face.
Bang. Purple pink.

Both hands on the bars and a wet face.
Gliding past pedestrians
a face creased up, breath
hijacked by the stammer of stupid sobbing.

Perplexed but unstoppable. Turn right.
To home.
To composure. To love. To talk.
To joy.