Hello, my name’s Rob Wilmot. Over several brandies, Tref persuaded me to take on the role of Art Correspondent on his blog, Philosopherontap. He and I are a bit alike, as we’ve both made our careers as technologists whilst at the same time allowing our artistic souls to surface occasionally.
So here I am. I thought long and hard about what to write as my first post, and I’ve settled for introducing myself via my artistic journey. A bit pretentious maybe… but authentic I hope.
When I was young I used to love the paintings of Constable – I vividly remember being transfixed by the ‘big canvases’ at the National Gallery. My outlook on life was pit village, working class narrow. There was no World Wide Web and I liked what my art teacher said I should pursue, which was the art of the traditional realist persuasion.
At the age of eighteen I focused my Art ‘A’ Level thesis on the work of John Constable. I recently dug it out to jog my memories for this post. It’s so naïve and sweet, but it does have some ‘gems’ in it which still ring true for me. With my limited resources – a local library (there was still no WWW) – I discovered other works by artists like Claude Lorrain, prominent three centuries prior to Constable, and was delighted to recognise the similarities in their perspective and composition. Both were literal landscape painters, though where Lorrain fixed mythical figures in his vistas, Constable added the exquisite normality of the child and the dog playing in the river. I learned the lesson that the new often borrowed from the old. It was through my exploration of Constable that I discovered Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and it was the intensity of his depiction of light and shadow that transfixed me. One of my favourite paintings of all time is Corot’s painting ‘The Cabassud House, Ville D’Avray’. Oddly, I can’t find it online but here’s a link to a similar painting of the same subject. For me this places the artist at the intersection between literal landscape and impressionism – a line almost, but not quite, crossed by Constable in his later paintings. Corot and Constable never met, but they both visited and painted scenes of the Forest of Fontainebleau.
In my early twenties I discovered the possibilities of multimedia. By serendipity rather than good judgement I landed on a course at the University of Bradford grandly entitled ‘Electronic Imaging and Media Communications’. This course was ‘new age’ – a science degree, but with a cohort selected from both arty and scientific candidates. It presented a melting pot of ideas and it was here that I discovered the work of Bill Viola on a field trip to an exhibition at the Albert Docks in Liverpool. His Audio Visual installations struck a deep chord with me: the perfect convergence of poetry, art and technology on a majestic scale. It was after this discovery that I created my first ‘real’ work of art – an interactive graphic novel based on a story I wrote about a scientist who digitally encodes his DNA and his consciousness. Having beamed these into space, they are picked up 26 years later by aliens who recreate the scientist from the digital patterns and return the doppelgänger to earth 54 years later.
It can’t have been complete tosh as it seemed to catch the Zeitgeist of the coming of the home computer age, winning the IBM’s International Leonardo da Vinci Awards for multimedia. A proud moment for me: not because I won but because I got to meet Terry Pratchett, an up and coming author at the time. He was one of the judges and he made a special point of approaching me over drinks and nibbles to divulge that he’d voted for me because my work was ‘disruptive’. Well that’s been me ever since 🙂
I bypassed the likes of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. I still to this day believe that their patron, Charles Saatchi, was the real artist persuading us that the ‘work’ of these conceptual artists was indeed worthy of being called art: The epitome of the emperor’s new clothes woven by the consummate brand man.
And then I discovered the World Wide Web… well it discovered me really, but that’s another story.
I began an online exploration and found the works of David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Marc Chagall, and Francis Bacon. I’ve been fortunate in that the second half of my life (so far) has taken me around the world and I’ve been able to stand inches from some of the great works of the artists I admire. I love to analyse brush strokes, to see paint in relief: the circle created by the impression of the baked bean can, and the fingerprints of the artist abandoning the brush for the freedom of skin on canvas.
My unplanned career in technology and business has more often than not steered me away from creating my own art. But in 1996 both worlds intersected when I had a chance epiphany at the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE). I was building a web based stock trading news and prices system for a client at the time and needed some pictures for the homepage. I wanted to capture the intensity and passion of the trading floor and the IPE was one of the last places in the UK that still used the ‘open outcry’ method of trading. Open outcry is the trading you’ve seem in films and TV where representatives of firms dress in distinctive, brightly-coloured, jackets and scream and shout at each other, waving their hands with frantic gestures to indicate the option to buy or sell. I spent a day there taking pictures but, as there were no digital cameras that could capture action based stills back then, we shot on standard film. Luckily I had a professional photographer who could get the right exposure for the lighting conditions of the vast trading floor, but I also took pictures with my bog standard Olympus Mju compact camera. After getting the snaps back from Boots, I found that many of the pictures had motion blur. One of the designers on my web team at the time commented that they we’re reminiscent of some of Francis Bacon’s work. Something in this caught my imagination and I rented a studio in Harrogate and got to work. Two months later I had created a series of large format triptychs using acrylic and oil paints on canvases that I had stretched with my own hands. An exhibition entitled “Oil on Canvas” (get it?) was staged in what was a bit of a blur, and to my amazement, everything sold (except two triptychs that I held back because I had fallen in love with them).
Several years later, I got and email out of the blue from the Chief Executive of the IPE. He was moving jobs and had not stopped thinking of my paintings since viewing them years before. After a private showing in London Docklands he persuaded me to part with one of my remaining triptychs. His name is Dr Richard Ward and he moved on to the role of Chief Executive, Lloyds of London. For many years my (now his) pictures hung in pride of place on the wall of his office at the top of the Lloyds building. They now hang in the study of his London home, apparently because he loves them so much. Other people have their work on their walls, but Richard is the only one who has made a point of telling me he would never part with them.
So there you have it, a potted history of me and the art that has helped shape the way I think and work. I continue to paint and take photos. Two of my children, Sam and Tom, will soon graduate from university as hard scientists: zoology and forensics respectively, though the artistic gene seems to have asserted dominance in my daughter, Grace. We sometimes paint together – though not nearly enough.
I’ll be posting reasonably frequently from now on …well that’s the plan anyway.
In the meantime, you can also follow my tweets @robwilmot and learn more about me on LinkedIn
And finally, as a way for me to get to know you, why don’t you use the comments area below to tell me about your favourite artist and how they have inspired you?