Journal of Contemporary Painting - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2015

Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology Film (1979 [1971]) is patient with the ways in which common sense is threatened by our experience of film. The book offers a perspective rather than an overview, foregrounding its own conditions – working mostly from the memory of films, for instance, and seeking to focus Cavell’s sense of a discontinuity in his moviegoing experience. Questions of cinematic ontology, held at an experiential level, join a broad philosophical-historical narrative concerning our lack of presentness to the world. Both of these strands develop preoccupations and discoveries found in Cavell’s reception of ordinary language philosophy. Disclosing the contours of the cinematic through juxtapositions with other media, in ways evoking both medium-specific and post-medium concerns, Cavell’s study of film further establishes the reach of his key term, ‘acknowledgment’.

This visual essay explores the themes discussed in the accompanying essay, Jackson Pollock and Piero della Francesca Ride Lonesome and in particular the relationship between David Reed’s painting and the cinematic practice and space in Budd Boetticher’s film Ride Lonesome from 1959.

The article discusses the relationship between cinematic practice, space and painting and in particular Budd Boetticher’s film Ride Lonesome from 1959, Jackson Pollock’s paintings and Piero della Francesca’s The Story of the True Cross that was painted between 1447 and 1466. The CinemaScopic landscapes of Ride Lonesome are discussed as a touchstone to explore the western genre’s relationship to Pollock’s painterly spaces as well as the psychological integration of the characters into the film’s locations. The Story of the True Cross, like Ride Lonesome, uses objects to represent the hidden powers at work in the landscape.

The article takes as its starting point the assertion that the question of surface is inseparable from the question of the human body in respect of painting. Surface in painting exists as the interface between a possible virtual, projected space and the painting’s material skin – which, at least in principle, is accessible to bodily touch. The understanding and meaning of this point of interface undergoes complications and shifting formulations over painting’s history, however. The engagement of the paintings of David Reed with the transformed meaning of the painted surface via the mediation of the screen in contemporary culture, in particular that of the cinematic image, forms the main object of analysis of the article which draws upon art historical analysis, film theory and phenomenology.

This article explores how painting was an important visual source in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007), through case studies dealing with three painters whose work he was interested in and whom he was personally acquainted with: Renzo Vespignani (1924–2001), Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) and Mark Rothko (1903–1970). The question of when and how contacts occurred between the director and the artists has been carefully analysed, by way of a detailed examination of published sources as well as unpublished eyewitness accounts.

The article compares and discusses Ken Loach and Mike Leigh’s very different and distinct strategies for realist film-making. Loach’s use of the script is compared to the use of photography in painting with reference to ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (2007), and Mike Leigh’s experimental, improvised and unscripted approach is compared to Carel Weight’s painting The Friends (1968) that uses observation and experience.

This article looks at ways in which a number of films have employed painting in order to substantiate the aesthetics of cinema that they envisage. The focus of the article specifically concerns the differences between centrifugal and centripetal forces at the edges of paintings and the limits of the film frame. Beginning with examples from narrative cinema, the article turns to look at crossovers between the aesthetics of painting and cinema in the context of experimental film, from early exponents of abstract cinema in the 1920s through to more recent examples.

The Journal of Contemporary Painting invited painters to reflect on how cinema influences their practice. Nine statements are collated here from the artists Mario Rossi, Lydia Dona, Denise Green, David Salle, Jeremy Sharma, Matt Saunders, Dan Hays, Olivier Gourvil and Kaye Donachie. Each offer their own reflections on how film, as both a medium and cultural phenomenon, can be situated with regards to their own practice as well as with respect to how we understand the medium of paint more broadly. The commentaries offer personal, even frank remarks attuned to the specificities of both mediums. The commentaries are introduced with an overview by Sunil Manghani, which includes an account of the film-maker Martin Scorsese remarking on the revered painter, Caravaggio, as a means to turn the lens around to look at how a film-maker regards painting.

The article is a conversation between the author Daniel Sturgis and Donald Smith on the occasion of an exhibition of work by Derek Jarman: ‘Almost Bliss: Notes on Derek Jarman’s Blue’ at Chelsea Space, London (29 January–15 March 2014). Smith curated the exhibition, which focused on Jarman’s notebooks for his seminal late film Blue (1993). The way the exhibition was displayed disrupted the architectural spaces of the gallery and immersed spectators into a charged environment. The conversation illuminates Jarman’s working processes, his influence from the work of Yves Klein and reflects on how the exhibition space and installation can speak around its subject.

‘The Show Is Over’, Gagosian Gallery, London 15 October–30 November 2013

‘I Cheer a Dead Man’s Sweetheart: 21 Painters in Britain’, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 15 March–29 June 2014

Rudolf Stingel at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice 7 April–31 December 2013

‘Paul Boston: Stone Clouds’ at Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, Australia 4 February–1 March 2014

‘Painting in Singapore’, Equator Art Projects, Singapore 2 August–8 September 2013

‘Melbourne Now’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 22 November 2013–23 March 2014