Snapshot 07: Exhibition Blurb by Maggie Ayliffe

Installation Photo of Snapshot 07: Tales from the Fine Art Studio.

Maggie Ayliffe is a Lecturer at LJMU, who assigned the second year Fine Art students with this project. This is a piece written by her, in the format of a Exhibition Blurb, about her thoughts and ambitions for the work.

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Tales from the Fine Art Studio

The John Moores Painting Prize traditionally selects a snapshot of British painting every two years to exhibit in the Walker Art Gallery. For painters, getting selected is much coveted, but equally, we look forward to the  opportunity to get an insight into what’s ‘in play’ in painting and to enjoy a little window into the studios of our contemporaries. The paintings in the JMPP sit vicariously for all the painters in the country working in their studios but also sign post the ‘performance’ in the studio of the individual ‘painting body’ that can be unpicked through the marks, energies and traces left on the surface.

More often than not, a really good painting – looks effortless, even easy. But for those of us who keep pushing the pigment around – something that looks ‘right’, and right enough to be in the JMPP, is usually very hard won. Many years ago, I saw work by Lisa Milroy and Rosa Lee for the first time at JMPP. The work was troubling, out of kilter, ‘wrong’ even, but also exciting – it spoke of ‘difference’; difference to the established canon of British painting, a different agenda and a different painterly language – these paintings by women started a life time of questioning for me about painting by women, the aesthetics of otherness and the importance of ‘wrongness’ not ‘rightness’ sometimes as a signifier of change. Both these artists have been hugely influential to me, and many years after I first saw Rosa’s work in the JMPP I worked with her on an exhibition project stemming from my own research: Warped: Painting and the Feminine 2001. For me, it was lovely to see the Lisa Milroy painting again recently in the winners exhibition – although it proved very unpopular with the group.

But this is fine, I wanted our Level 5’s in some way ‘to get this’ relationship with other painters and start to enjoy the process of making painting as a significant act. For this project, I asked my group to visit the exhibition of prize winners and just follow their instincts to select a painting to work with as a starting point. I asked the students to ‘reverse engineer’ their chosen painting and to work out from the information provided how to remake the painting. For this exhibition, the students have remade a 12” square section of the painting and reveal some of their tests and research in the studio. We have been struck by how little the artists/galleries reveal of their making process in an exhibition – how little of the story of the studio is told. We have found that sometimes, something that looks easy is very tricky but most of all we have been excited by how this process of ‘remaking’ has provided a launchpad for further and more ambitious work in the studio – so watch this space for the update versions!

This process also, asks questions about the role of collections and archives for teaching studio practice. Many of our art schools have art collections, some specifically named as teaching collections. Today this work doesn’t sit in the corridors of our art schools but has been scurried away to stores and the safer walls of offices. We have perhaps forgotten the need to live with work to really see and understand making as practice and making as meaning in the artwork.

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