musicalpamphlet:

A couple of years ago I had a website. It was kind of a fallow period, but I kept my hand and brain in writing on various subjects, including folk music and The Unexplained, among many others. For about a week or so I wrote about a couple painters that I was interested in.

I visited a Brighton art fair in 2007, a pretty dispiriting experience except for Christopher Noulton's paintings. I loved that Noulton looked for and found the invisible context of the startling realist illustrations in Ladybird Books, which I remember from my childhood.

Here's my text, which Noulton kindly used on his site for a while:

Hauntiquarianism in The Arts — Signposts and Memorial Reportage: Christopher Noulton's Revisioning of Commercial Art.

Following hard on the trail of my previous post about Edward Summerton, on Friday evening I encountered another artist working in the long gouache shadow of Ladybird book images.

Christopher Noulton's recent paintings begin in the viewer's mind with the commercial style of 1960s Ladybird book illustrations, although he starts the ball rolling with with careful research and 3D models and works on to produce pictures comprising intertextual images that reappear in multiple canvases. Taken individually and/or collectively, Noulton's narratives revision the mundaneity of image-nostalgia by making realistic representations of his ideal originals that underscore their great affectivity. He creates dioramic narratives that figure in minute detail the decal-perfect imaginary of a historicist enthusiast.

Noulton figures the comings and goings of an extended ideal community acting out an ideal past of utopian possibilities long after its historical moment has departed. His characters are lit from within by his manipulation of pigment, his understanding of their historical image provenance and by his technically brilliant refiguring of the commercial art techniques used to animate their Ladybird forebears.

But Noulton is not reproducing idealised versions of childhood or attempting to recreate intact moribund representations of ideal rural or suburban locations. He prefers to isolate his characters and images and pull focus. Pulling back, he reveals the precise location of Davey the milkman's milk float on a Y-juntion, for example. And, focusing further in, he lights on a unhappy-looking child from the 1950s stands uncomfortably outside a 1930s deco detached house. Doing so, Noulton calls to mind and questions the strangeness in conjunctions of images — of childhood, ideal landscapes, utopian architecture, etc. — that are often subject to nostalgia. We should question why TV prgrammes about the 1970s, for example, tend not to feature images/products/landscape interventions from previous eras.

In other paintings, Noulton's weird landscaping — placing a 1960s Commer milk float in front of a 1930s white deco house or block of flats, or locating the aforementioned deco building on a lonley green heath or moor — queers the pitch of those who may want to bandy accusations that he's appealing to people's cultural homesickness. His conscious confusion of image subjects and subject positions — placing familiar types in unusual locations or using The [generic, recent] Past ironically as the context for specific interventions — directs the viewer to the intent and affectivity of his own works and those he's working from. He paints signposts to and memorials for nostalgia.

Noulton's previous work has included paintings of his findings during road trips up and down and side to side throughout the British Isles in search of rural ritual happenings, including one of the Whittlesea straw bear. His graphical website, Rite Peculiar, is a fictionalised version of this series of investigative journeys.

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For nostalgic context and comparison, if you doubt my antiquarian way of seeing and doing things, you might like to see how others choose to ride The Past without the benefit of hauntology or psychogeography — or, indeed, anything — in which case, go to Yesterday's World. I've a lot more to say about The Past and I'll do so in future posts.

Honk for hauntiquarianism!

ENDS

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So, what's Hauntiquarianism? It's something I set up to counter the quotidian cybernetic take on Hauntology, but that's a subject for another post. As is the work of Edward Summerton, which I found while doing further research into the use of Ladybird Books illustrations in modern art. I'll try to find my text on Summerton.