HARRY PYE BOBBING IN THE WAVES OF ART by Ansri Ksenofontov
"Whose Go Is It Again?"
"Whose Go Is It Again?" is a painting by Harry Pye and Rowland Smith (with apologies to Miró). Harry Pye himself describes the painting as follows: "A painting based on my memories of being a teenager and playing chess with my Dad. My mother and sister went to Spain and brought me back a Miró T-shirt. I drank my Dad's cider. The label on the bottle (Strongbow Cider) was designed by an artist called Barney Bubbles. The title comes from the frustration of playing chess with my Dad. Because he was tired he would forget whose turn it was to make a move. I remember being happy at this time though."
We are always in a hurry. This did not start with the replacement of snail mail by e-mail as general opinion would have you believe. The internet, browsers, the wild array of web page hyperlinks to useful information and annoying advertisements simply make us impatient. Our modern busy lifestyle was ushered in with locomotives, automobiles and aeroplanes and left its imprint in the culture of the 1920s when comics started to flourish in the entertainement market at the expense of the novel. This busyness was twice entangled in World Wars and a third time in the thickets of the electronic media. Pixel graphics with exceedingly high resolution deceive more convincingly, reduce credibility more rapidly, and download more slowly. While the amount of information coming into the home used to be limited by the size of the postbox, nothing now limits the flood of incoming information. List members of social media come to visit us in our homes like crowds of deliriant pink elephants in a drunk's flat. It becomes perplexing, whose go is it?
I do not want to give the impression that Harry Pye's work contradicts the development of the electronic media in any way. His works simply contrast with it. How is it that Harry Pye frees the viewer's impatient mind from the time-lags in contemporary communication and the hassle of technological processing? How does he manage to attract the attention of impatient children? With poster style. These paintings take us back to unfiltered human values, directly to people themselves. How can happiness be depicted in art? Take a thick brush and draw a red line on a face like a wiener on a grill with both ends curling up. How can a face be depicted? It is a pink circle which represents happiness as described above, and unhappiness when the two ends of the "wiener" are turned down. Harry Pye depicts himself a lot. As Oscar Wilde said, "all artistic creation is absolutely subjective" and "out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not." This way of portraying anatomy and emotions may sound primitive, yet it is a style that allows Harry Pye to create a likeness of himself and his personality. At the same time, his art is not a pink bubble intended only for his own troubles. In this simple and candid style, Harry Pye depicts relatives, friends and people from the art world in which he circulates. He finds inspiration in the most everyday things. Not only is the subject matter open, but even the authorship – he welcomes co-authors. Also, his pictures do not make special demands on the audience, they can be grasped easily by everybody. This is something worth taking into account because even art critics do not have time to visit exhibitions. Another of Oscar Wilde's principles seems fitting here: "Art does not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one."
We are always in a hurry. This did not start with the replacement of snail mail by e-mail as general opinion would have you believe. The internet, browsers, the wild array of web page hyperlinks to useful information and annoying advertisements simply make us impatient. Our modern busy lifestyle was ushered in with locomotives, automobiles and aeroplanes and left its imprint in the culture of the 1920s when comics started to flourish in the entertainement market at the expense of the novel. This busyness was twice entangled in World Wars and a third time in the thickets of the electronic media. Pixel graphics with exceedingly high resolution deceive more convincingly, reduce credibility more rapidly, and download more slowly. While the amount of information coming into the home used to be limited by the size of the postbox, nothing now limits the flood of incoming information. List members of social media come to visit us in our homes like crowds of deliriant pink elephants in a drunk's flat. It becomes perplexing, whose go is it?
I do not want to give the impression that Harry Pye's work contradicts the development of the electronic media in any way. His works simply contrast with it. How is it that Harry Pye frees the viewer's impatient mind from the time-lags in contemporary communication and the hassle of technological processing? How does he manage to attract the attention of impatient children? With poster style. These paintings take us back to unfiltered human values, directly to people themselves. How can happiness be depicted in art? Take a thick brush and draw a red line on a face like a wiener on a grill with both ends curling up. How can a face be depicted? It is a pink circle which represents happiness as described above, and unhappiness when the two ends of the "wiener" are turned down. Harry Pye depicts himself a lot. As Oscar Wilde said, "all artistic creation is absolutely subjective" and "out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not." This way of portraying anatomy and emotions may sound primitive, yet it is a style that allows Harry Pye to create a likeness of himself and his personality. At the same time, his art is not a pink bubble intended only for his own troubles. In this simple and candid style, Harry Pye depicts relatives, friends and people from the art world in which he circulates. He finds inspiration in the most everyday things. Not only is the subject matter open, but even the authorship – he welcomes co-authors. Also, his pictures do not make special demands on the audience, they can be grasped easily by everybody. This is something worth taking into account because even art critics do not have time to visit exhibitions. Another of Oscar Wilde's principles seems fitting here: "Art does not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one."
Getting Better by Harry Pye and Rowland Smith
So, "whose go is it again?" As Harry's white bishop is checking his father's black king, then it obviously black that has to move. But I am not sure whether the boy is in any hurry to point this out, it looks more like he is going to empty another glass of cider. His father too seems to be more interested in another puff of his cigarette than the imminent checkmate. And why apologies to Miró? Because the central motif of the picture is a reproduction of Joan Miró's "People and Dog in Front of the Sun" on the wall behind the chess players. Actually, this is Harry Pye's interpretation of the painting turned upside down. As a result the people and the dog are no longer in front of the Sun, it is shining from behind the cider bottle on the father and son killing time together. Never mind that it is late at night, as the father's wrist watch shows.
Poster style does not only have purely artistic value but also applied value. Magazine covers are designed in poster style. Harry Pye painted a portrait of an issue of I-D (along with Rowland Smith). I-D publishes stories about trendy singers, film makers and designers, and Harry Pye hopes to be featured there too one day. In any case, the art event "Keep Feeling Fascination," organized by him, was covered by I-D. Harry Pye's dream issue, or "the bird issue", which rhymes with "the third issue", features his personal exhibition "Getting Better", his biggest to date, in the Sartorial Gallery March – April 2009. Harry Pye opened the exhibition and presented a new issue of his own magazine "The Rebel" in one go. Similarly to I-D, this magazine also disseminates the ideas of creative people.
Poster style does not only have purely artistic value but also applied value. Magazine covers are designed in poster style. Harry Pye painted a portrait of an issue of I-D (along with Rowland Smith). I-D publishes stories about trendy singers, film makers and designers, and Harry Pye hopes to be featured there too one day. In any case, the art event "Keep Feeling Fascination," organized by him, was covered by I-D. Harry Pye's dream issue, or "the bird issue", which rhymes with "the third issue", features his personal exhibition "Getting Better", his biggest to date, in the Sartorial Gallery March – April 2009. Harry Pye opened the exhibition and presented a new issue of his own magazine "The Rebel" in one go. Similarly to I-D, this magazine also disseminates the ideas of creative people.
I Still Miss Someone
While Harry Pye's companion on the "I-D" bird issue cover was a bird, or more precisely, a bird's head peeping round the edge with her eye superimposed on Harry Pye's eye, then in "I Still Miss Someone" the bird who is seen round the edge has another bird for companion. And a honeybee has a honeybee friend. Only Harry Pye is prancing around alone in the form of a deer, as full of arrows as St. Sebastian. The magazine-cover Harry's mouth has upturned wiener corners, the deer-Harry, left without his bird-friend, predictably has a downturned mouth-wiener. The key to the painting is in the exotic foliage that draws a parallel with the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who depicted her constant pain with medical graphicness. As Harry Pye himself says, his chagrins are a parody of Frida Kahlo. "Although I am joking – there is many a true word spoken in jest. I wanted to do this painting alone. I did about 80% but then reluctantly I had to ask my friend Rowland for help. He basically spent an afternoon tidying bits up and doing the more detailed bits. Normally painting with friends is my favorite activity but this time I was annoyed with myself for not having enough time or skill to make the painting how I wanted." Harry Pye also provides some general data about himself for the background to the picture: "I started painting around the age of 30 (which is 8 years ago), my favourite painters are Rousseau, Picasso, Guston, Alfred Wallis. I value children's book illustrators, comedians, musicians and cartoonists as highly as painters, my favorite colour is Prussian Blue." This is a kind of light and balmy picture postcard sky colour.
Every Relationship Has A Clock Attached To It
The Painting "Every Relationship Has A Clock Attached To It" is painted along with Kes Richardson. Although as mentioned above Harry Pye's pictures do not demand deep engagement, this does not mean that there is nothing to scrutinize should you wish to. The author says: "This was painted for a show I had in Brazil. The show was called "Sleepless in Sao Paulo". The guy who ran the gallery in Brazil was very wealthy and he was a big movie fan. His favorite director was Bergman. Although I've never seen Bergman's "Scenes From A Marriage", I really liked the title and it inspired a series of paintings of artists and their muses. This painting was of Man Ray with Lee Miller." The half figures are depicted from the waist up. Man Ray, in colour, stands on the left en face, obviously painted by Harry Pye himself. His hand is on the shoulder of his nude assistant and muse Lee Miller. As a photographer Lee Miller was the equal of Man Ray, even some photos that were originally attributed to Man Ray were actually taken by her. She is photo-artistically black-and-white in the painting. The woman looks towards Man Ray with a metronome in her hand, her own eye attached to the pendulum. This is one of Man Ray's most famous works, significant not only in art history but also for its own exciting history. In order not to burden the reader with details, one can read about it in a Wikipedia article "Object to Be Destroyed." This metronome's life had a time of its own during which it multiplied and changed its name. The final name was "Perpetual Motive", a word play on perpetual motion. Pop culture looked on bemused by the metronome, a device of quite limited use, and gave prominence not to the pendulum but to the attached eye. The eye is known as the "perpetual motif", Man Ray's immortal motif. It features in another landmark work by Man Ray, "Les Larmes (Glass Tears)." A melodramatic eye with painted lashes and surrounded by artificial glass tears – very memorable. The model was a French cancan dancer Lydia whose photos were taken in 1932 when Lee Miller left Man Ray and Paris and returned home to New York. This is when Man Ray cut an eye out of a photograph of her, attached it to the pendulum of the metronome with a paper clip and named it "Object of Destruction." Man Ray wrote the following instruction on the original "Object to Be Destroyed" of 1923: "Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow." The metronome was originally intended as a ticking witness in his studio, watching him paint. Only nine years later did Lee Miller give him reason to take the instruction seriously. Then eyes started to replace one other in such profusion that nobody knows for sure which of Man Ray's female acquaintances' eye is the eternal one. To the extent that, although this does not work in French, the metronome's eye has been interpreted as Man Ray himself, because "eye" sounds exactly like "I". And so we return to Harry Pye's favorite motive, the author's "me."
This last conclusion is too speculative to be taken seriously as a straight interpretation of the painting. Still, one thing is true: Harry Pye feels with every fibre of his being for everything that is connected to art and artists. For him, a gallery is not just an extension of the ego, it is a place where he lives and breathes. He needs help from his friends and other artists, but he repays it all in abundance: involving them in his events and exhibtions, interviewing and publishing them, loving them. "Optimism & Joy", painted with Marcus Cope, probably describes the world of Harry Pye in its truest sense. It depicts his newborn nephew Albert. With happiness come exhibition openings with smiling faces and wine drinking.
This last conclusion is too speculative to be taken seriously as a straight interpretation of the painting. Still, one thing is true: Harry Pye feels with every fibre of his being for everything that is connected to art and artists. For him, a gallery is not just an extension of the ego, it is a place where he lives and breathes. He needs help from his friends and other artists, but he repays it all in abundance: involving them in his events and exhibtions, interviewing and publishing them, loving them. "Optimism & Joy", painted with Marcus Cope, probably describes the world of Harry Pye in its truest sense. It depicts his newborn nephew Albert. With happiness come exhibition openings with smiling faces and wine drinking.
