Here are some pictures of the team helping us, special thanks go to

Tiffany with City AV Oxford – great job!

City AV Oxford for going way beyond the call of duty on Friday before the bank holiday weekend, – you saved the day! –

and to Cath and Matthew from the curatorial team for bringing out the beautiful Manet sketches to hang next to the video portrait.

The lovely Manet sketches waiting to be hung

Delicate calibration of the moving umbrella

Mr Payne at the Ashmolean

Thanks so much also to Tim Payne our long-time collaborator and engineer extraordinary for the design and production of the umbrella sculpture mechanics –

and to brilliant Matt who stepped in to complete the install when Tim was laid up.

Andrew and the video portrait

Tiffany and Matt with the umbrella sculpture

Andrew Brown and Harry Phythian-Adams managed the installation despite having a delivery of extraordinarily large and precious display cases, for the same floor on the same day – no easy task!

Ashomolean director Xa Sturgis and Tiffany Black discuss the installation. Thanks to Graeme Campbell, Design for lovely panels he created

Sarah and Tiffany

Sarah Mossop and Helen Ward, who have nurtured and encouraged the project from the start were invaluable this week, oiling the wheels and giving feedback and support.

Last September the gallery looked like this –

our proposal was to transform it to this:

To find out what it actually looks like now – come and visit!

sketching with ballustrades and mirrors

One thread of early research lead us to thinking about the strange perspectives in Manet’s work e.g. Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/index-of-works/notice.html?no_cache=1&nnumid=000904&cHash=0ac4f8868a

and the debate about Manet’s the Bar the Folies-Bergère

http://courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/collection/impressionism-post-impressionism/edouard-manet-a-bar-at-the-folies-bergere

– is the view possible or not? – having always understood that the perspective was thought to be impossible and part of the mystery, meaning and of the importance of the painting we were interested to come across this link http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/manet_bar/looking_glass.html which demonstrates an angle of view that might make the picture possible…

In any event, the final impression of the compositions in some of Manet’s work, including the Portrait of Mlle Claus, is widely recognised as uneasy, almost a collection of collaged perspectives, which presents a new ‘Modern’ sensiblity, detached and isolating… it seemed important to root our work in the contemporary as much as the past

Ideas about lighting, viewer and composition continued to develop as we read Foucault’s “Manet and the Object of Painting” ………. his idea that the bright flatness of the front-on lighting on Manet’s models implicates the viewer – who was previously concealed in the darkness of the theatrical lighting of chiaroscuro – in a direct and confrontational line of view, that in part explains the outraged public response to works such as Olympia, and Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe….. this prompted a line of thought in our research that might have continued into the territory of exploring ‘the Gaze’ – on the balcony, who/what are we looking at, at what and how is Fanny looking, how is the painter looking at her?….and then the research took another turn.

Photograph of Sophie Prins Gapinski http://iswinoujscie.pl/artykuly/15082/ http://www.cultureinside.com/348/section.aspx/ViewProfile/5976

On a web search we discovered that Fanny Claus played in the first ever all-woman string quartet, which had great success and in a website, http://www.sophie-drinker-institut.de/cms/ an independent research institute specializing in musicological women’s studies we found that she had great great grand-daughter still alive, a painter, who had recently had an exhibition in France in a gallery in Cordes sur Ciel, in the Tarn district, close to brook & black’s studio, in the same gallery where Tiffany had organised a show of her mother, Jacqueline Black’s paintings a few years ago.

This descendant of Fanny Claus, Sophie Prins Gapinski, was the same age as us, and was living in Paris. We left messages through emails on several websites that may have been able to contact her, and then struck success through telephoning the mayor of Cordes and asking if Sophie’s email could be sent to us from the gallery records. We were in contact.

The violent events in Paris in November, asserted a darker backdrop to the project and brought the focus back to the present context and tension in so many of our cities’ streets…..and when we eventually organised to visit Sophie in January, on the drive to Paris we passed the gathering mass of people at Calais, police, wire, fences …when we arrived at Sophie and her husband Tadeusz’s flat in Boulogne Billiancourt, for the first part of our visit the conversation circled around the current anxieties and tensions, the movements of people and the Syrian war.

Sophie and Tadeusz Gapinski

On arriving at Sophie’s home ­we were surprised by another ‘coincidence’. We had decided by this point to ask Sophie to continue a line of work that brook & black had used in previous installations:

painting on the picture glass – early sketch

the motif of the woman who paints onto the glass of a window or screen, and then having painted herself out of the picture, cleans the surface to re-emerge from the painted surface.

We had planned to ask Sophie if we could video her squeezing paint from the tube out onto the window/picture glass in front of her and then start to paint. It was a jolt of surprise to walk into her flat – before we had even talked about the work – to see this image in her living room.

Beyond this visual surprise we could never have predicted or hoped that Sophie and Tadeusz would be as welcoming, enthusiastic and helpful as they were, and that Sophie would have played her part so imaginatively and sensitively, creating, undirected, moments in the video that are really poetic and surprising, and for finding and reading the text that forms part of the soundwork for the installation in Gallery 65.  We cannot thank them enough and we are really delighted that they are both coming over to see the work on the week of Live Friday.

We’re really pleased to that the two films made by YDUK and MIND with us as a result of the workshops earlier this year are now up and running in the Education Foyer at the Ashmolean.  On the evening of Live Friday (13th May) the two films will run one after the other and be projected large in the main museum space – so we’re really looking forward to them seeing them there too.

a snap of the final double video installation – come and see it in the Education Foyer!

A chosen view collaged with the balcony motif from Fanny Claus’s portrait

Greenscreen of Liz and LIz during YDUK workshop

Early digital sketch of the collaged video

Dave working on the animation of text

A lovely job – thanks Dave

With the wonderful help of Dave Farnham over the last few weeks we have assembled the videos as the groups directed, using their artwork, poems and photographs as the content of the videos.

Accompanying the films is a collage of sounds collected from the workshops, of the voices of all the participants as they went through the creative journey, along with other sounds and textures from the project.  We were really impressed with the work that came out of the workshops, and we both enjoyed working with all the participants so much.

Tell everyone to come and visit!

During the workshops Calvin brought in a great painting he made of Berthe Morisot from Manet’s ‘The Balcony”, which is in the Musee D’Orsay http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/search/commentaire_id/the-balcony-7199.html the background reminded us of Van Gogh’s brushwork also!

It’s a vibrant work, full of intense colour and life, and there’s more news as we heard that the MIND group, inspired by the work done for ‘Beyond the Balcony’ are starting their own new ‘Impressionist Painting’ group with ongoing meetings at Cowley Road.

We (brook & black) missed seeing everyone and working in the workshops this week, really sad the workshops are over!…but are happy to be surrounded by the results as we work with the images and words the workshops produced, to bring them together into the video sequences that all the participants designed in the last workshop.

We’re thinking of you all – see you soon!

Maralee at the poetry workshop

Maralee, one of the participants has kindly sent one of her poems that she wrote during the time she was coming to the workshops.

Here it is.

BELIEVING IS SEEING

If eyes are windows to the soul, I peer inside to ask –

Soul, are you there?

What do you see?

What do you see out here?

Horrors?

Beauty?

Possibilities?

Obstructions?

Mysteries?

What’s there inside you, soul?

Who’s in control?

Questions only you can see.

Questions only you can answer.

Questions only you can change.

What do you believe?

What is true?

Doors and windows everywhere –

Are they gateways to other souls

Or extensions of your own?

What do you see?

What do you believe?

Doors can bar, or be broken

Imprison, or liberate.

Do they protect, give us peace of mind

Or do they suffocate?

Doors to past, present, future

Which option will you use?

How powerful you are

You can always choose!

Windows can be closed and locked –

Let breath in, or out.

Are they hiding secrets

Providing soft barriers for growing hearts?

What do you believe?

What do you see?

See – that window opens!

See – that door’s ajar!

Kaliedoscopic changes

Reforming, near and far!

Colours brighten, dark recedes,

What light is thus set free!

Are you beginning to believe,

Believe what’s there to see?

Watch closely now, and

Know it is your right.

Create it now, choose it now,

And watch it come in sight

Colour in that bright new world –

Paint it, thought by thought.

By magic you create it –

All you’ve ever sought.

Hooray!  The future beckons

Just as you believed.

Revel in your brave new world,

Creator of all you see!

— Maralee Gibson

Oxford, Feb. 2016