EAAF in lockdown
​Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery is currently closed and EAAF events have been suspended as we follow the Government’s advice to reduce the spread of Covid-19 (Coronavirus). Our work continues as we stay in touch with our members by email, profile our artist members through EAAF Presents and provide scholarships at Norwich University of the Arts. We are very grateful for our members’ support and look forward to the time when we can visit exhibitions and gather together again. Amanda Geitner, Director

 During lockdown, East Anglian Art Fund has been profiling artists from the region - this week John Christie

John Christie : ​​architectural shapes and disruptive patterning

John Christie, Geometry & Music, acrylic on board

John Christie has worked for many years as both a visual artist and a broadcast film-maker. A maker of artist's books since 1975, he has produced more than 20 limited editions for both the renowned Circle Press and his own imprint Objectif. We asked John to describe his work - 

I’ve worked for some years now in a number of areas, that for me, relate to each other; book design and the production of artist’s books; formal works in pastel on paper, the images often derived in the first place from my painted wooden constructions, or more recently from larger pieces constructed with corrugated iron (‘My Blue Heaven’), which in turn have come from my interest in and visual enjoyment of architecture and architectural shapes and the disruptive patterning associated with the early camouflage of ships and buildings.

What keeps you up at night?
Mainly the mistake of watching the late news and being reminded once again of the sorry state of the world at the moment and the characters (ranging from the ghastly to the mediocre) who are in power in so many countries (including, unfortunately, our own). Sometimes my thoughts will also be occupied by the piece I’m currently working on in the studio and how it might look when I see it again in the morning. Often something I've been happy with the night before will change overnight into something I’m not happy with. Not sure how or why that happens? I could blame it on a well-meaning, but critical spirit, living somewhere in the studio who comes out at night and in an attempt to improve things manages the opposite? Or, more likely (and this has to be faced) the piece isn’t right in the first place. I generally make one thing at a time, rather than have lots on the go, so if the work I’ve been thinking about has failed that overnight test, I’ll either try working on it a bit longer (this is seldom successful) or, cut my losses, put it out of its misery and start again.
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What is your favourite part of your practice?
One favourite part is the time before the making, when everything is possible; visiting galleries and looking hard and seeing how things are put together, or coming across a passage in a book that sets me off on a new path. I enjoy, for instance, looking at and using plans and diagrams; an example of this would be the series of pastels I made after seeing the isometric drawings of Mondrian’s long-demolished Paris studio at 26 Rue du Départ in a book about the reconstruction of that space for an exhibition. I enjoy too reaching the point of being happy enough with a particular work (if it survives that overnight test) to feel I can leave it alone. The next stage of the process is to hang or place it in a quiet spot in the house or studio so that the sight of it, from the corner of my eye, catches me by surprise. If it still pleases me at that point it can be stored away.

Which artist inspires you most?
An artist who has constantly inspired me over the years is Dóra Maurer. We’ve been friends since the early 1970s after I wrote to her in Hungary and we exchanged prints. Her recent works are large, overlapping painted shapes, often hanging slightly away from the gallery wall, that give the impression that each shape is floating and transparent so the overlapping colours modify each other, they are very beautiful. Dóra has a large exhibition of work covering her whole career currently on show at Tate Modern, this includes a room of her ‘overlapping’ paintings. Because of the closure of the gallery in these recent months the exhibition has been extended until January 2021. I urge you to go and see it.
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If you could step inside an artwork for a day, which would it be & why?
I’ve chosen Van Gogh’s ’The Bedroom’  painted at The Yellow House a few days before Gauguin arrived in Arles on 23rd October 1888 for his fateful stay. In a letter to his brother Vincent described the room: ‘The walls are of a pale violet. The floor – is of red tiles. The bedstead and the chairs are fresh butter yellow. The sheet and the pillows are very bright lemon green. The bedspread scarlet red. The windows green.The dressing table orange, the basin blue. The doors lilac … The solidity of the furniture should also now express unshakeable repose.’ Quite a colourful space! The light in this painting is curious. The shutters are almost closed, with just two vertical bands of yellow light showing. Nothing in the room casts a shadow.
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I’d quite like to sit on that sturdy-looking bed, or perhaps it would be more polite to use one of the rush-seated chairs, and study the room. It would, I’m sure, be smaller in reality than suggested by the picture’s perspective. The door on the right of the painting leads to the landing and stairs up from the ground floor and the one on the left to the slightly smaller bedroom prepared for Gauguin’s stay. In that room would be hanging four landscapes of the gardens close by The Yellow House and the final two of Vincent’s recently completed sunflower paintings including The National Gallery’s ‘Fifteen Sunflowers’ (currently stuck in Japan until next summer because of the pandemic). Would Vincent himself be at home? I’m assuming he’d be out in the countryside working but I’m there for the day so at some point he’s likely to come back. What would that be like? His own brother knew how tricky he could be, ’There’s something in the way he talks that makes people either love him very dearly, or unable to tolerate him…’ I’m hoping I would love him dearly. There are only a couple of known photographs of him at a much younger age and certainly none from this period but I’m confident he’d be immediately recognisable from his own self-portraits that we know so well. Would I be able to talk to him or do I have to remain just an observer? Frustrating if I had to remain silent, but how fabulous it would be just to be in the room.
There’s an entertaining weekly blog about Vincent by Martin Bailey full of interesting new discoveries and facts that I always look forward to reading.
To find out more about John Christie work CLICK HERE