Clive Head
Encyclopedia
Biography
Head was born in MaidstoneMaidstone
Maidstone is the county town of Kent, England, south-east of London. The River Medway runs through the centre of the town linking Maidstone to Rochester and the Thames Estuary. Historically, the river was a source and route for much of the town's trade. Maidstone was the centre of the agricultural...
, Kent, the son of a machine operator at Reed's Paper Mill in Aylesford
Aylesford
Aylesford is a village and civil parish on the River Medway in Kent, 4 miles NW of Maidstone in England.Originally a small riverside settlement, the old village comprises around 60 houses, many of which were formerly shops. One pub, a Post Office and four small independent shops remain...
. Head had a precocious talent in art and at the age of 11 attended Reeds Art Club, a social club organised at his father's factory. In 1983 he began studying for a degree in Fine Art at the Aberystwyth University under the tutorship of the abstract
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
painter David Tinker. Here he also became friends with another realist painter, Steve Whitehead
Steve Whitehead
The landscape painter Steve Whitehead was born in Coventry, England in 1960 and studied at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, with David Tinker, graduating with an MA in the mid-1980s, before continuing his studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art....
. After completing his degree, and a short period of postgraduate study at Lancaster University
Lancaster University
Lancaster University, officially The University of Lancaster, is a leading research-intensive British university in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. The university was established by Royal Charter in 1964 and initially based in St Leonard's Gate until moving to a purpose-built 300 acre campus at...
, Head began showing with the flamboyant art dealer Nicholas Treadwell
Nicholas Treadwell
Nicholas Treadwell owns the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, which started in 1963 in touring vehicles, after which it was run in buildings in London, Bradford and finally Austria. Treadwell has promoted the Superhumanism art movement, which is defined as an art of urban living, conveyed in a vivid and...
.
In 1994 Head founded and became the Chair of the Fine Art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
Department at the University of York's Scarborough Campus where he again teamed up with Steve Whitehead and became friends with the art theorist Michael Paraskos
Michael Paraskos
Michael Paraskos, FRSA a writer on art, the son of the Cypriot artist Stass Paraskos. He has written several books, essays and articles on art, literature and politics, and has taught in universities and colleges and curated several exhibitions...
and the artist Jason Brooks. During this period most of Head's work was in a neo-classical figurative style, and these were shown with Brooks at the Paton Gallery, London in 1995. Head then moved on to producing realist paintings, closer in theme and style to the work he had made as an art student in Aberysthwyth.
In 1999 Head gave up teaching and signed to Blains Fine Art (now Haunch of Venison Gallery) in London and Louis K. Meisel
Louis K. Meisel
Louis K. Meisel is an American published author and the founder and proponent of the photorealist art movement, coining the term in 1969. He is also the owner of one of the earliest art galleries located in SoHo at 141 Prince Street...
Fine Art in New York. In 2003 he joined Paraskos in taking part in the International Photorealist Project in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
. The work produced was later exhibited in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. In 2005 he was commissioned by the Museum of London
Museum of London
The Museum of London documents the history of London from the Prehistoric to the present day. The museum is located close to the Barbican Centre, as part of the striking Barbican complex of buildings created in the 1960s and 70s as an innovative approach to re-development within a bomb damaged...
to produce a painting of Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace, in London, is the principal residence and office of the British monarch. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is a setting for state occasions and royal hospitality...
to celebrate the Golden Jubilee
Golden Jubilee
A Golden Jubilee is a celebration held to mark a 50th anniversary.- In Thailand :King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world's longest-reigning monarch, celebrated his Golden Jubilee on 9 June 1996.- In the Commonwealth Realms :...
of Queen Elizabeth the Second.
In 2005 he was debilitated by a neurological disease that had a devastating effect on his muscles, and it took another five years for him to be diagnosed and treated for Dopa-Responsive Dystonia. During this time, however, he continued painting and the scale of his work became larger. Increasingly he focused on London, and in 2005 joined Marlborough Fine Art.
In 2007 he worked again with Paraskos at the Schwäbische Kunstsommer, University of Augsburg, Irsee
Irsee
Irsee is a village and municipality in the district of Ostallgäu in Bavaria in Germany.The centre of the village is dominated by a monastery , dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was founded in 1186 by Margrave Henry of Ronsberg to house a community that had grown up around a local hermit...
, Germany, and since then they have collaborated in publishing and lecturing on what they call The New Aesthetics
New Aesthetics (The)
The New Aesthetics is an art movement that stresses the material and physical processes in the making of visual art.-Origins:The origin of the New Aesthetics lies in an art summer school held in Irsee, southern Germany, in 2007 and the joint class held there by the English artist Clive Head and the...
.
In October and November 2010 three paintings were exhibited at the National Gallery
National gallery
The National Gallery is an art gallery on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom.National Gallery may also refer to:*Armenia: National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan*Australia:**National Gallery of Australia, Canberra...
, London, which received unusual coverage for such a show, including on October 29th a segment on Radio 4's PM
PM (Radio 4)
PM, sometimes referred to as the PM programme to avoid ambiguity, is BBC Radio 4's long-running early evening news and current affairs programme.-Broadcast times:...
news magazine. and he has been nominated for the 2011 Wolf Prize, a US$100,000 award offered by the Wolf Foundation.
Style and Philosophy
Head’s style of painting is realist, but it has little in common with recent forms of realism such as photorealismPhotorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...
or photography. In terms of artistic practice it is possibly closer to the direct engagement with reality one sees in the paintings of Antonio López García
Antonio López García
Antonio López García is a Spanish painter and sculptor, known for his realistic style. He is criticized by some art critics for neo-academism, but praised by others, like Robert Hughes, who consider him a master realist. His style sometimes is deemed hyperrealistic...
or Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...
than either photorealist painting or photography, although stylistically it is still very different. In this we can see the strong motivating force in Head not to emulate the realist art of the past, but to create a new form of realist painting for the twenty-first century. In this, Head's connection to the New Aesthetics
New Aesthetics (The)
The New Aesthetics is an art movement that stresses the material and physical processes in the making of visual art.-Origins:The origin of the New Aesthetics lies in an art summer school held in Irsee, southern Germany, in 2007 and the joint class held there by the English artist Clive Head and the...
also seems significant as the New Aesthetics is a deliberate attempt to reinvent the concept of the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
.
Despite the source for his work being a direct physical engagement with the material world, in his paintings Head attempts to create an alternative universe that resembles the everyday world, but is spatially very different from it. His starting point is to stand in a specific location, such as the entrance to a London Underground station or a coffee shop, where he will gather information by sketching, photographing or simply experiencing the scene. The end point, however, is never to recreate an image of that location, but to use that information and experience to invent an artificial world that convinces the viewer of its own independent reality. This sets up a complex relationship in Head's paintings, between their resemblance to somewhere we might know, like a London street, and Head's insistence that we are in fact looking through a framed 'window' at another reality.
Significantly this stands in stark contrast to the tendency amongst artists in the latter half of the twentieth century to define art using Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
's claim that anything is art when an artist says it is art. Instead Head has proclaimed that true art works define themselves, and are art works regardless of whether an artist, or critic, or even wider society says they are art works. Similarly a work of non-art cannot become art just because an artist, or critic, or wider society says it is an art work. This self-possession of the status of being art work is, according to Head, either present or not present, and the work either functions as art or it does not function as art, in the same way a tree is a tree and does not require a human or social definition to allow it to function as a tree. It just functions as a tree by itself. This self-definition of the art work is given the name "metastoicheiosis"..
One of the primary differences between Head's painted realities and the reality of every day life lies in the way space is defined. Head does not present a vista or view like a camera, he shows an entire environment, and if we were to try to replicate seeing one of his environments in real life we could not do it by visiting the location and simply looking straight ahead. Instead we would have to look ahead and simultaneously to our extreme left and extreme right, up and down as far as our heads could go, and even behind us. At the same time we would have to walk around the location, peering round corners, and experiencing the passage of time. Head's paintings are in effect more like the record of a living human body wandering around a location, rather than a static snapshot of a part of it. Consequently his work most closely resembles a movie camera panning around a scene, but the closest painting equivalent is in the multiple viewpoints, shifts of scale and games played with time seen in a Cubist painting by Picasso or Braque. Unlike a shattered Cubist image, however, Head uses a realist language of painting to render his experience into something coherent and whole.
In interviews Head has always insisted that the language of realism he uses is not the same as the language of photography, and it is true that his paintings do nor resemble photographs. Indeed, Head has been consistently critical of the futility of painters copying photographs. In this Head's previous work as a neo-classical
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...
painter is significant as his spatial constructions are derived from classical ideas of perspective
Perspective (visual)
Perspective, in context of vision and visual perception, is the way in which objects appear to the eye based on their spatial attributes; or their dimensions and the position of the eye relative to the objects...
rather than being imported from a camera, computer or other machine. In this it appears significant that Head has stated that his use of perspective is not bound by pre-determined rules in a mechanical way, but evolves during the process of making each individual painting a process a camera cannot match. This means there is no pre-determined vanishing point
Vanishing point
A vanishing point is a point in a perspective drawing to which parallel lines not parallel to the image plane appear to converge. The number and placement of the vanishing points determines which perspective technique is being used...
, where all the lines of perspective meet, but what Head calls 'vanishing zones'. Head has also stated he 'rejects the Modernist fragmentation and instead seek a seamless surface.'
In terms of subject matter, Head tends towards cityscapes, particularly London, although he has also painted New York, Moscow, Los Angeles, Prague, Rome and Paris, amongst other places.
Further reading
- Paraskos, Michael http://www.amazon.co.uk/Michael-Paraskos/e/B003J6YJXG/ (London: Lund Humphries, 978-1-84822-062-1, 2010).