_1215_fine_art_catalogue

Perpetual Year Planner
by Rachael Macarthur, Associate Fellow in the Colour Studio, Northumbria University
‘Fringe’, 2014 (acrylic on neon card)
A place for making art, for looking at and recording
the world, changes with each year passed. I equate
the time when I was marooned unwell in bed aged
5 years old, colouring drawings on paper = with a
routine of painting expediently onto paper on the
floor of the Colour Studio Northumbria. The
paintings I make change with each new place I live
in, with each new place I paint in, with each new
person I meet. I cannot forever count on what I call a
‘studio’ from one year to the next (home/ library/
alone at bedtime/ thoughts on the cusp of sleep)
but I can count on the forever-changing of myself,
and my place within these spaces.
Myself + paint + support + colour = I can transfer to
each new place I choose to call a ‘studio’, in the same
way I can count on the matrixial effects of reflecting
on a colour, which I carry as postcard reproductions
in my pocket.
‘Collared’, 2014 (acrylic and neon poster paint on navy
sandpaper, mint green polystyrene foam frame)
* Fehler blue: c. 2001, I am 20 and I am learning to
paint in oil. I trail a heavy sloe-black paint into my
parents’ house, home from the studio, stuck on my
shoe, caught there; I traipse it up the stairs, all over
the ivory cream carpet (brand new). Later, the blue
oil is stepped deep down into the warp-weft of the
carpet and, lying to my father that it is tarmacadam,
my mother and I scrub at the puddled marks in
angry silence (hers) while he watches telly behind
the living room door.
* Jubilee grey: c.2012, a friend has a baby and a 9-5
job. A time for making painting, now, is travelling to
and from work on the bus. Little paintings are made
with his trigger finger, over the bright white screen
of the iPad. The sun shines over the screen; the
white-on-white cancelled out to a dull transport-line
grey. There is his studio.
* Preferred red: c.2014, my thoughts of a red
reality are twisted by Matisse when I read that his
studio was not red at all. It was always grey.
Matisse turned it red for his painting “The Red
Studio” (1911) in a delicious choice of freedom, to
allow for harmony and for the buzz of the black
outlines to buzz blacker and harder. A funny
expectation (mine) now deadened.
* Manet’s black: c.1997 a stifling vermilion-hot
day in the art classroom at high school sends a
kaleidoscope of orange-red spectrum across my
retina. I am angry with the teacher who says we
are not allowed to use black in our paintings.
Why not? The answer does not suffice and years
ahead in future days, I think of Manet’s paintings
and the particularities of their black which seems
to be always truly his, like the black of Spanish
lace or the black of Japanese lacquer, and realise
he was correct in his singular, out-of-style usage.
* Helsinki white: c.2014, the Finnish crystal white
sun glows around me and you: in the cool of the
lake; in the garden; in our temporary bed; in the
forest; along the path with the tiniest frogs I have
ever seen. At the festival, the sun shines my eyes
to an all-white surround, and the sound makes
me remember and long for a place I do not think
I have ever known: longing reaches up from my
gut, into my heart, into my eyes, out into saltheavy
tears which must be the colour of
quarried chalk.
‘Untitled’, 2015
Perpetual Year Planner
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