Article for Tennis.net
Extract of Article for ART UK
‘Autumn in Scotland is a tonic for the soul.’
It is the crisp air of the new season that has always reminded us of change - often in the slower sense of the word. A new set of colours creep into the world's palette, and each resting tree merits observation.
James H Fairgrieve was one of the most notable still life and landscape painters in Scotland of his time, he knew that the darker seasons brought with them new challenges, and new focus. The attention to detail in his acrylic paintings were so pronounced, they captured the physicality, texture, and patterns of objects which were so often side stage rather than centre. His mixture of style meant he had a way of changing the lead of the story. Would it be a dramatic sky, a solemn shell or singular leaf which caught our attention? He had the creative arsenal to decide.
Growing up in the small mining town of Prestonpans in East Lothian, Fairgrieve had access to the wide open skies he went on to paint so often. Not only did this influence his landscapes, but they were mirrored in the muted tones and composition of his still lifes’ - large spaces were allocated to the backdrops, a vastness that drew your eye to its smaller counterpart objects.
What could be considered an eyesore to many, was turned into a common motif within his art, the wooden slabs of fences and metal posts. Interested in the flattening of the foreground in much of his work, these shapes peeked into the bottom of many paintings, acting as a structural beam for the rest of the composition to stand upon. The lower third seemed to be the busiest in almost all of Fairgrieves pieces, giving them weight that matches the heaviness of a coming winter. Not a romantic view of the season, but an honest and simple depiction of its beauty. The calm presentation of found objects is never clearer than in ‘Pretty things - Eilidh’. A family portrait of sorts created using a selection of bits and bobs chosen by his granddaughter, and the walking sticks used by other members of his family. It represents the location, the time, the feeling of a place.
The censored photograph.
The well known and highly successful platform OnlyFans, received a new client last week when Vienna galleries took a new tactic to reduce censorship of their 30,000 year old nude paintings recently banned from Facebook. The over regulation of such images has been brought back into debate in a completely new sphere of social media, where we find ourselves in a sanitised version of reality produced and primped by algorithms yet to find the right amount of nuance that satisfies a human world. Should the computer detect ‘too much skin’ it is marked as erotic content and thus deleted. Protecting an audience from adult content has become the job of a series of 0’s and 1s, leaving much room for mistake, or potentially, manipulation.
It brings to the forefront of the discussion the ways taking and distributing such imagery has somehow become an act of protest to this in and of itself. Few contemporary scholars of art and photography would attribute monolithic power to images' ability to shape public opinion, however we find ourselves in an image saturated era, meaning although it’s easier to find inappropriate and pornographic imagery, there is a huge level of hypocrisy in the kind of censorship we’ve been cornered into as an audience. Members of the public in Tiananmen, China have found new ways to share meaningful imagery online, even under the intolerable levels of censorship they experience; the Tiananmen massacre remains unacknowledged by the vast majority even today after the government worked hard to remove all mention of the massacre from Chinese media. Images of candles are banned during the anniversary of the event, and journalists are only able to keep photos online by adding distortive brushstrokes or flipping it sideways. Although this is far from the removal of ‘too much skin’ from a facebook wall, After Peter Paul Rubens painting has found a new home on Only Fans, a private company, will there be a new place for politically charged visual media to exist which is, dangerously, only accessible to a select few?
Lack of imagery is consistently compared with lack of both aid and education, smaller or more obscure parts of the world experience horrors which remain unseen and therefore are ultimately forgotten. Images are a privilege which, when used correctly, can determine the fate of people and countries - 60% of the UK’s aid money goes towards Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Syria, places which also occupy a large portion of the UK’s photographic projects. The wider point to be understood here, is how small acts of regulation can turn into large scale removal of information to the public, leaving a taste of censorship in the mouths of an audience unaware of when it started.
