KURAI HOSHI GALLERY GUIDE

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You will find many different kinds of things at Kurai Hoshi. Paintings, drawings, electronic and digital art, WebArt, work in different media and styles. And, quite properly in the circumstances, I even attempt a brief justification of eclecticism in the text below. Kurai Hoshi is also a partial history of my activity as an artist, and that history contains periods when I have deliberately decided to educate my hand and eye by exploring a different style or medium. But these are not necessarily the primary reasons for the eclecticism that you will find. The real reason is much simpler: I follow my instinct...
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\|EXPLAINEXPLAINEXPLAIN\|	...at the bottom of nearly every k page of the gallery you will u find a navigational box r containing links to a the various i sections of Kurai h Hoshi. These sections are o organised by media wherever s possible, but are sometimes used h to contain specific projects i or themes that I wanted k to bring together. u Where r it has not been a possible or practicable i to include the navigational box, h a new window is opened o to facilitate s return h to a base point. i

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If biographical information here is sparse, then it is because I face the enticing paradox of being unqualified to do what I have done. Imagine a doctor who performs a difficult eye operation and then turns out to be the hospital porter........ The patient's sight is improved, but at what awful risk ? Far better that such things be done only by those who are properly trained and fully insured.	\|EXPLAINEXPLAINEXPLAIN\|

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I have sought astonishment in complexity, sometimes with amusing consequences. Good life drawing will resemble a Zen exercise in the removal of obstructive psychological baggage to clarify thought and vision. The problem then is to restore the psychological component to a process that, based on anatomical accuracy, descends into an empty stylistic mannerism that 'works' from a merely representational standpoint. Challenged to put 'more of myself' into the life drawing process, I responded instinctively. One colleague commented 'I don't know what you have taken, but can I have some ?' All I had taken was a very small risk. Asked about the 'detail' and its significance in pieces like Thor I have pointed out that I really have no interest in detail. It is complexity, with its myriad implications, that interests me. On a similar note, I was asked about the absence of construction lines and reference marks in my drawings. So as not to disappoint, I produced one piece of work in which I tried to include all the measurements and marks missing from the others...
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We draw and paint in order to escape from the prison of words, but then we must surrender and re-enter that prison in order to explain our escape... Any but the most voluble of artists must feel regret at having to write an explanation of his work. There is an implication that the work itself has failed in some way if it requires verbal support or completion. I have never encountered a better or more eloquent explanation of the reason for an artist's activity than these words by Enzo Cucchi: "A painting is something miraculous. It is a problem of astonishment for whoever makes it. And you only make it because you have to be astonished. Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."	"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough." "Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."

"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."
"Because there are not other things that astonish you enough."

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A good deal of the work here is the result of my own self-imposed regime of technical training. This is particlarly true in the Oil, Watercolour and Liferoom sections. It is not, however, the sole reason for my eclecticism. That derives from an interest in the fact that soon everybody will have access to everything: the proliferation of devices for recording and duplication, together with a burgeoning ubiquity in their production and ownership, has caused a 'Death of History' effect. Nowhere is this more apparent than in relation to the visual image: 14th century religious iconography and impressionist dreamscapes now have the same immanent cultural impact as my neighbour's Jackson Pollock curtains or the Bridget Riley wallpaper in the restaurant nearby. More recently, these effects have been compounded by the possibility of computerised image manipulation in every home. This marks a fundamental and qualitative change that reaches far beyond the mere democratisation of tools and products. Hitherto benchmark terms such as 'modern' and 'contemporary' will become meaningless when it becomes possible for anybody anywhere to have instant electronic access to the whole of art history, retrieve any chosen image, and then have it reinterpreted and reproduced in any combination of style and medium. Against such a background it seems rather quixotic, if not unduly ascetic, for any artist to be restricted to a particular style or type of output. My Cyberart (half hand, half machine) work is an intuitive response to some of the foregoing issues. Iterative processes between computer and easel are capable of suggesting a restoration of that more universal model for the role of the the artist that we fondly imagine to be the renaissance ideal - a model mirrored by the rather older Chinese ideal of the scholar/amateur. (This Chinese ideal has an important resonance for me: certain technical areas that are labour-intensive and of limited economic potential can only be explored and developed by the scholar or the amateur.Free Fall Flow comes into this category. Furthermore, the idea that 'painting is dead' would have amused many of the great old masters of the Chinese tradition, whose response might have been: 'Yes, of course it is dead, but only in the hands of the professional artist and the professional art academic. What else did you expect?')
Liberated from mechanical processes and specialisation, the artist should be free to do what he once did best - see, draw, imagine and interpret.
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Because man is a social animal whose reality is constructed, in part, from the shared experience of the social group, there is often a commonality of aesthetic experience which leads to a fundamental error: the view that there is some external set of qualities which constitute 'the aesthetic'. In truth, 'the aesthetic' is simply a particular state of mind which we all, to some degree, experience. Properly appreciated, this truth puts critical appreciation and related activities into a new context: the need to trace patterns and structures of 'influence'; the need to create league tables of major, minor and intermediate 'greatness'; the curious position of 'originality' as a paradigm of artistic achievement: all of these phenomena are indicative of an animal struggling to interpret its social environment by imposing and maintaining a set of hierarchical relations.	JUSTIFY JUSTIFY JUSTIFY JUSTIFY JUSTIFY JUSTIFY JUSTIFY JUSTIFY JUSTIFY JUSTIFY JUSTIFY	We live at a time when the impact of technology on art has never been more apparent. The artist's toolbox has been extended to sucha degree by digital technology that even the traditional benchmark concept of "medium" has broken down, erasing the possibility of capturing and containing the artwork by describing accurately the physical support system required for communication of the idea that supposedly lies at its core. The current trend towards "conceptual" art can be seen as an instinctive response to this process: artists are moving their activity into new areas in an attempt to isolate this aesthetic core from a series of physical media in which they have subconsciously lost confidence as a storage or communication mechanism. At the same time, this digital technology is revolutionising the basis of human communication. The groundwork was laid more than twenty years ago when the world's telephone companies started the explosive growth of IDD (International Direct Dial) facilities. IDD has freed up international telephony and resulted in a massive growth in international network bandwidth. People started to regard global communication as being normal, natural and direct. Simultaneously, rules (Internet Protocol) have been created for inter-computer communication via this network. Because digital technology enables a combination of store-and-forward and real-time facilities, it is now possible to communicate globally via computer at a previously unimagined level of complexity and sophistication. Thus we have the extraordinary phenomenon of the Internet. The advent of the Internet, and its explosive international growth, has given a powerful new sociological dimension to the changes created by the revolution in digital technology. It has democratised communication to the point where the tools of publishing and distribution are now passing into the hands of the individual who originates the cultural objects that were previously mediated, and hence controlled, by a variety of organisational structures: dealers, galleries, museums, publishers, academic institutions,etc. etc. . This trend is fundamentally subversive, in that it calls into question the role of the entire set of social structures that have grown up between the artist and his audience. And, for that audience, there is now a new possibility of direct contact and communication with the originators of the cultural objects that it consumes.

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"Digital store, forward and retrieve facilities have become so powerful and ubiquitous that we are seeing the Death of the History of Art: everything, from every period, is becoming equally available and present. So the categories of �traditional�, �modern�, �ancient�, �conservative�, �radical� and so on have already become meaningless. Artists feel this intuitively, and it explains there are now people working in every possible style and technique who feel perfectly comfortable about collaborating and exhibiting together. It now feels naive to present a single point of view. The future will not be like that. It will be like the Internet, full of unexpected variation, and a serious challenge to the position of vested interests who have previously acted as judgmental filters and intermediaries between art and the public."

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		Why 'Kurai Hoshi' ? This oxymoron is, in English, the name of a favourite piece of music. Perverse and open-ended, the music reflects much of the spirit of my own artistic activity: it does not matter where you start, because you can measure a circle by starting anywhere.. The Kanji free me a little from the assumptions of an occidental perspective. Perhaps this is important to me because I am out of sympathy with so many of the categories of explanation and socio-aesthetic discourse inherent to 'my own' cultural background. Since the advent of abstract expressionism the art audience has instinctively sought from the artist some form of credentials as an insurance against fraud - that is, fraud in the form of: 'actually, my pet monkey/4-year-old/computer did it !' And recently this has evolved into a more sophisticated form of contract wherein the audience is prepared to become the victim of fraud, but only on condition that the artist has served (suffered ?) an appropriate apprenticeship in the art of forgery. This involves, for example, attendance at an academic art institution where the rules of artspeak are absorbed so as to give the impression of mastery of key 'ideas' and 'concepts'. From here the apprentice can move to a conceptual rationale for failing to paint or draw, and can enter a new universe of discourse and attitude as though fully conversant with the abstract philosophical disciplines that appear to govern its aesthetic practices. Confession: I am appalled and perplexed by the poverty of imagination amongst conceptual artists. Where are the ground-breaking formal and technical developments ? Why is nobody exploring lawsuits as a conceptual artform ? Where are the bold adventures in wholly new media ? Why has nobody declared the world a work of art and claimed a royalty on everything that happens in it ? How about some new concepts ? Hey ! Come on ! If the guests won't stand in line, you can always move the camera... I moved mine to the brutal Atlantic light of Charentes and found a source of astonishment equal to any interior landscape of the imagination... Be my guest, have a click around, see what you find...

gallery guide

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