Excerpt
from "Fast Medium Slow"
an essay by Jonathan Griffin to accompany "Blitzkrieg Bop"
Clare Price creates rivulets of paint that seem to embody an agonizing torpidity;
a sense that is only compounded by the pixellated lines that seem to flash
across the surfaces of her paintings like digital lightning (I’d guess
at around 200 milliseconds, even on my old iMac). Many of the drips emerge
from areas of aerosol spray paint (hitting the canvas almost instantly). However
she has folded added slowness into the mix: what at first appear to be computer-generated
marks quickly reveal themselves to be carefully hand-painted. Suddenly the
work’s trundling (but genuine) drips of paint seem positively volatile
– and the whole painting a noisy barrage of causes and effects, in which
accident and intention cannot be prised apart for a closer look.
An excerpt from “Ghost Written beginnings”
an essay to accompany “Fresh Air Machine” by Stephanie Moran
Clare Price’s predominantly black and white canvases have the occasional
pink highlight, a gestural flash of hot pink adding to the drama of her large
scale abstracts and have a reference to the landscape tradition whilst rejecting
conventional scenery Price’s pixellated lines conjure up an 80’s
retro-future cyberspace as described in William Gibson’s Neuromancer:
“The matrix has its roots in primitive
arcade games”.
An
excerpt from an essay to accompany “Fresh Air Machine” by Douglas
Parks
Clare Price- Large scale abstraction where darkness gets played against lightness
and more optimistic colours; despite harmony and balance, nothings clashing
or dissonant, instead calm and sensible, regardless of certain (in other ways)
similar work being puportedly “heroic” - or aggressive. Significant
too, are the non fine-art paints and other household products employed - and
the fact that rather than made by improvised, random, unpredictable and intuitive
gestures, much of it is schemingly mastermined in advance, thanks to the miracle
of digital stage-management. Synthetic and toxic formulas and manufacturing
deliver romantic landscapes. Oops! Game given away and spoiled!
An excerpt from an article about Clare Price
written by Gemma de Cruz for the Saatchi Gallery Magazine
A friend described Clare Price’s paintings to me by saying “they
look like they have been made by Courtney Love”. I got it straight away
– baby doll dress, smudged lipstick, messed up hair….it looks
thrown together and incidental but is consciously packaged as a style. When
I saw Price;s paintings in he flesh, that’s exactly what they were like-
a blend of computer generated image and something handmade realised in a well
match pick-and-mix of abstract painting styles and techniques……………..
I find Price’s paintings incredibly seductive – layers of colours
feed in and out of carefully drawn doodles, effortlessly pairing strong gestural
brushwork with precise colouring in. When I look at them I feel like I’m
getting all the aesthetic plus points of abstraction but without having to
care about the intellectual purity of that.
To make her work Price uses a dated computer programme called Claris Works
and roughs out an image from diagonal lines and random squiggles. These are
then printed on acetate and projected onto canvas, and become the structure
for the final painting. Price, like many formalists, follows a set of applied
rules. The final painting hardly veers from the original grid despite being
worked into with a variety of mediums from Japanese acrylic and aerosol paint
to Hammerite and garage door paint.
The rudimentary nature of the computer programme gives the drawings a pixilated
effect which when meticulously transcribed onto the canvas, adds a nostalgic
‘80’s feel, wheras her palette actually
seems very current: black-and-white, dayglo-and-silver colours that feel fashionable
and are applied
(like Courtney Love’s make up) in intentionally messy ways.
An Excerpt from “Parrot Halva” an essay by Stephanie Moran to accompany a two man show of the same name with Howard Dyke at Studio 1.1
“What makes a painting beautiful is the way the paint’s put on, but I don’t understand how women put on makeup... It’s all so heavy.” Andy Warhol
Price’s use of paint has been compared with Courtney Love’s makeup (Gemma de Cruz, Art & Music magazine), and the paintings to her whole look - makeup, hair, dress - and certainly Price’s paintings, although they are all paint, are built up like a well-constructed clothing ensemble. They hang on a structured framework, as specifically and painstakingly tailored as a couture garment. And, like a carefully selected outfit, they reflect a state of mind, acting as moodscapes, capturing shifting and subtle changes in emotional terrain; we read the subtleties of their painty differences in the way we read each aspect of an outfit which adds up to its whole feeling and message. But Price’s paintings take each emotion to its extreme, there is an overload of high-octane colour, combinations of unnatural acid hues, neons and metallic silver, with stark black and white as the neutrals. They can be stormily angry or ecstatically happy, in fact often both at once. They are made up of complex emotions, a whole complicated state of mind: in ‘Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeah’ there is tempestuousness with underlying melancholy, yet optimism is breaking through the storm clouds, and tranquillity is threatened beyond the manic immediacy; ‘You’ve got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky’ is crying with blissfulness, while the highlights of pulsating neon pink and yellow practically purr.
In Price’s work, gesture is like dance, the paintings become a light-up disco floor in the sky. ‘The Devilish and Charming thing’ pounds like a power anthem with a deep bass and soaring high notes; in fact, they all have a strong bass line. This could be a party in an 80s idea of cyberspace; the figure is implied, by the ‘landscape’ and by the gesture - for a virtual or emotional landscape, a disembodied subject, a post-Pop emptiness and unrealness. They remind me of the Idoru in William Gibson’s novel:
“He fell through her eyes. He was staring up at a looming cliff face that seemed to consist entirely of small rectangular balconies, none set at quite the same level or depth. Orange sunset off a tilted, steel-framed window. Oilslick colours crawling in the sky.”
The Idoru is an electronic construct, a mass of data whose image is a holographic projection; she is an intelligent, ‘desiring machine’ - the question is, what desires lie beyond the projected image?
Price achieves a new rendering of the grid, opening out into new dimensions. There is such control and obsession in the structure, the arduously hand-painted pixellated lines of her wildly pulsing, irregular grids; a tightly restrained framework up to a point where it explodes, there is release, it shouts out, it screams - quite possibly it screams along to an early Hole track as it dances...
“Good sister, bad sister. Better burn that dress, sister. Scar tissue, blood blister. Suck up on the dregs, sister. But I can't and I want to so bad and, I try but I can't and I want to so bad and...”