Exhibitions visited before and after lockdown

In January I visited the William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain. Which I enjoyed because of his amazing penmanship. Below are some photos I took in addition to buying the book of the exhibition.

I particularity enjoyed the sense of dread and discord in Blake's work. The image above illustrates that element in his work well.

The other exhibition that I went to in February this year could not have been more different in terms of both scale, attendance and public awareness it took place in Orleans House Gallery: please see link for details. https://www.orleanshousegallery.org/
This exhibition was a collection of self taught and so called outsider art, a term I get abit irriated by because I am on the Autistic spectrum myself.
The gallery produced no catalogue for the event and very little in the way of publicity, I literally walked in off the street and found a really diverse collection of works including a bizarre yet well executed landscape. In addition to a finely detailed made up cityscape. See below, and apologies for the poor quality of the shots.

I also made use of Google Arts and Culture tool to look at the collection at the RijksMuseum in Amsterdam. Covid 19 allowing I plan to visit the museum in person in the next year or two.
Here is the link to the collection. https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/rijksmuseum
I had some difficulty navigating through the museum, however that had more to do with the limitations of my laptop than the museum's site.

Preparing the Exhibition Proposal

The following represents my thought processes that led me to the idea of siting my Degree show in a fictitious World War 2 bunker.
My practice over the past three years has to a greater or lesser extent been dominated by three themes, primarily landscape with history, both personal and national being a major contributor and finally conflict or discord. Therefore it seemed right to set my final exhibition in a bunker and one of the Atlantic Wall fortifications seemed appropriate because the Atlantic Wall was constructed by the Nazis using slave labour to stop any attempt by the Allies at liberating Europe.
The first group of pictures below are a  mixture of my own photos and Google search results.

This picture is of a 'Verdun ' Type bunker. There is an online community of Bunker explorers and spotters that is very well developed and because of the web very international
Below is an sculpture called called Bunker/mule that I found while researching the Atlantic Wall and typifies what I want to do with my fictitious exhibition that is to repurposed a structure that was intend to ensure the power and dominion of Nazi Germany over Europe to something creative and even humorous or kind, I think Bill Woodrow's 1995 work, Bunker Mule,  located at Blavand beach that added Mules heads and tails to Atlantic wall bunkers on the coast of Denmark,  achieves this very effectively.

 By Bill Woodrow - Own work; photographed by Matthias Süßen on 22 July 2012, 10:11:43 (according to Exif data)., CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20676136

Ged Quinn also successfully carries this subversion out by creating bunkers from cakes, and painting them almost as still lifes. I would like to thank Zoe Mendelson for bringing Quinn's work in this area to my attention.

This picture and the one below were both taken by me on the Island of Schiemonikoog off the Dutch coast and these bunkers were part of a large network of bunkers and other structures that supported two powerful Radar antenna sited on the Island.

Some of these images shaped what I did in Stage 2, pictured below.

When we were asked to produce an exhibition proposal that suited our work, but could be based in our imagination I settled on the idea of an exhibition in a beach side bunker and decided to build a diorama. See below for pictures of the process.

The completed work will be in my submitted proposal.

Sketches and paintings from August 2019 to the present.

The works below represent the work that will go into my Exhibition Proposal document.

A preliminary painting of theCuckmere bunker underway in my studio space in my flat, in early May 2020 

A picture of the small Martello tower painting in progress in November 2019

A sketch of Cuckmere Haven from last year.

A sketch of Pevensey Castle from September last year

Featured below are some photos from the 1950's that I found interesting and my drawn response to them.

The three photographs were taken in Las Vegas during the series of nuclear weapons tests in the 50's my response was to do the sketch, pictured above. The burned or burning figures were an attempt (that didn't work) to juxtapose the reality of nuclear weapons, that is that what they mainly do to people or living things nearby is burn them and the bizarre glamour of the black and white photos.

Source photos for the Degree show

Featured below are the primary source photos I took in August and September last year that are the basis of my final pieces of work for this Degree.

This is Flak Battery Fiemel, near the village of Termunten in the Netherlands, I took this in August 2019

This is the shot I worked on as a final piece.

This is the Flak stand and ammunition bunker seen from the top of the sea Dyke.

This is Cuckmere Haven on the South Coast of the UK. My Maternal Grandparents lived near here until 2000, when my Grandmother moved to a home in Kew near my Mum's flat.

Tank stoppers at Cuckmere, I used a cropped version of this picture as a basis for one of my first paintings in October.

All of the above pictures were taken in September at Cuckmere Haven.

The following Pictures were all (with one exception) taken at Pevensey Castle in September last year. 

The photos featured above were all referenced in some way in my subsequent paintings, that are featured below.