WHALE TANKERS. TANKER ART.

Naum Gabo 'Circular Relief', 1925. Nina Williams. www.tate.org.uk/Stives.
A work of art.

Gabo and Pevsner ....'space and time are fundamental to life. Art aimed at being one with the esssence of the real must accept this basic premise'......'in London (approx. 1938-40) he was introduced to persex, a new plastic from ICI, and used this material in some of his best known works. He used transparent plastic tubing or plasic sheet made into warped, parabolicx planes, shot through with parallel nylon threading.

www.bookrags.com/biography/naum-gabo

'But what are concepts save formulations and creations of thought, which, instead of giving us the true forms of objects, show us rather the forms of thought itself.? Consequently all schemata which science evolves in order to classify, organise and summarise the phenomena of the real world turn out to be nothing but arbitrary schemes - airy fabrics of the mind, which express not the nature of things, but the nature of mind'.

Ernst Cassirer.

Is this a sculpture or a pile of tanker rears? I love it and think it is worthy of a place in any gallery.

This is beautiful! Inside a tanker waiting for repair or renovation.

TANKER ART?

One of the things that struck me whilst photographing tankers and tanker components at Whale was how sculptural some of the parts are. They are parts of road tankers and yet are or could they not be works of art in a gallery? The quality finish insisted upon by the tanker companies could be the finish desired for an art piece. The question is, what is art?

According to the Collins English Dictionary, a summary of the meaning of ART is:-

'Creation of works of beauty or other special significance'. or

'Imaginative skill as applied to representations of the natural world or figments of the imagination'. or

'The exercise of human skill'.

Everything you look at has been designed by someone. Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.

Some of the rear pieces of the tankers are so amazing to me.

This could surely be a sculpture?
It has been created with a use, a purpose. It will grow up to be a tanker.

A work of art - or a tanker body waiting to be made into a tanker.A beautiful scarlet Hazco tanker destined for a life removing hazardous waste?

An Anish Kapoor Sculpture courtesy of 'Imagine', BBC1.

A stainless steel rear dish of a tanker.

Anish Kapoor sculpture. 'Cloud Gate', Millennium Park, Chicago. (The Bean). Picture courtesy of 'Imagine' BBC1. His pieces are highly prized and a considerable amount of time is spent on the perfection of the finish. This is a reflective walk through piece. The estimate was 3M, budget 9M and it cost 23M.

The steel baffle that fits inside a tank - or is it a work of art? CMG

The store of rusting rings, supports for the tanker body.

Is the stamp 'work of art' governed by the 'Way of Seeing' or is it of 'Intent'.
A defence in burglary is in whether the defendent has 'the intention to permanently deprive the victim thereof' or in murder 'the intention to take the life of another'. so is a work of art intended to be a work of art and thus is?

'Creation is only the projection into form of that which already exists'

Shrimad Bhagavatum

WHALE TANKERS The Paint Shop

PAINTED LADIES.

From the plain metal, shiny tanker shapes in colour emerge.

Firstly, any scratches or blemishes are filled and rubbed down and the tankers are rough blasted.

A beautiful high gloss finish.

In a large paint booth, the tanker body is sprayed. The finish of the tanker is prefect. Anish Kapoor insists his sculptures have a perfect finish and this prefection is part of his art. I see a tanker as a work of art.

Anish Kapoor 'Yellow Hollow' 1999 Courtesy of 'Imagine' BBC1, 2009. A work of art.

WHALE TANKERS The Birth of a Tanker

THE BIRTH OF A TANKER

I had been looking forward to my visit to Whale Tankers for some time. The tankers are festooned with pipes, are colourful and to me, works of art and design.

I had to see where a tanker is born, and where do they go to die? Like most vehicles, they usually become part of the enormous scrap metal pool in the sky. I wondered where they have their tyres changed and was amazed to discover that they go to ATS and other such tyre companies as cars do.

The Whale Tanker site in Solihull is landscaped with a large lake, home to many birds including geese. I was made very welcome and Dean was allocated to show me around. Alas, being overwhelmed by the visual imagery, I have not remembered all of the processes.

The tank is mounted on a Chassis that is either free issued by the customer to Whale, or bought by them, but in the case of a trailer, it is mounted on to a bogey or running gear manufactured by Whale.

TThe bespoke castings are designed by Whale and then bought in.


Flat sheets of Stainless Steel are laid onto this machine, rolled and the joins automatically welded, creating a round tanker shape.

Forming the beginnings of a tanker; the creation of a work of art. You can see where the sheets are welded together, and in the top, shapes which look as if they may be inspection chambers.


And here they are, in the skip, similar shapes. A sculptor would be delighted at all of these! (Or is it just me???)


A tanker showing the strengthening rings.

Tanker before painting.

For me, the shapes, marks and geometry are so exciting.

ANISH KAPOOR

Imagine, BBC 1 Anish Kapoor

Is it that I am a Textile Designer that I did not know about the work of Anish Kapoor. I have been overwhelmed by his work and his words.

“You can’t set out to make something beautiful – I mean, you can’t. What you can do is to recognize moments when it’s there and say ah – that is something I could go after or I could leave it alone”.

As the first artist to be given the whole Royal Academy, his exhibition is of great magnitude.

“The hard bit is how not to compromise”, he said.

In May 2009, on the South Downs, Brighton, he created the amazing ‘C Curve’, which looks like stainless steel or aluminium which mirrors and reflects landscape and people. Upside down on one side – ‘like a spoon’.

“I am very concerned with the ability of art to say, ‘come on in’, experiential. Not just something you look at but a process you go through. One level – engage – another level, seriousness”. He is very interested in the perfect finish of his pieces.

“Work resonates, that simple but poetic quality – that’s what I am looking for”.

‘Living Sky Mirror’ a polished disk which reflects the moving sky. (£1.3 million pounds)

“You can look at it for hours and never see the same thing”. “Extraterrestrial quality, Beguiling – mercurial – puzzling”.

2002 Tate Modern “Marcius” huge red trumpet, staggering complexity and scale. 1.8 million people visited.
A Dutch shipbuilder made ‘Hive’ a huge iron piece formed out of curved plates. Couldn’t make up his mind whether to leave it black or rust it. It was rusted, a beautiful red.

As an Iraqi Jew, he worked in a Kibbutz after going to India’s Eton. Eventually, he was accepted at Hornsey School of Art. ‘Artist’ felt overly serious'. he said.

Affected by Indian culture, watching block printers and fabric dyers, he came back to England to working with pigments, sculptures in brilliant colours in powder form. He felt this was the first time his pieces had a voice. He didn’t have to sell them. A source of wonder. “Pigment and shape are one, sensual”.

“Body” a huge warehouse of scarlet parts which people could walk through and experience.

I so empathise with his comments on the colour red (which he uses a lot). “Red makes a kind of black, a kind of black that blue doesn’t. It’s a black you see when you close your eye. It’s something you know intimately and it’s that ‘knowing’ that is the real subject of the work”.

Ralph Rugoff-Director of the Hayward Gallery said “A lot of his work is like a void – a space without boundary – it never feels like empty space. It always feels weighted and with some life. A lot of the work happens in relation to your response to it”

Homi Bhabha, Harvard University said. “One is always on the brink of being both inside the work and outside the work. You are literally placed in relation to the void on an edge between what you know and what you don’t know. He engages not only the eye, but the nerves and the emotions. It is as if it is four dimensions instead of 3”.

The logistics of transporting and creating 'Scarlet Funnel' on hillside overlooking the sea in New Zealand, so majestic, is almost impossible. "Vagnarian leaning towards the grand"

‘Yellow Hollow’ - ‘Yellow, 1999. B

brilliant canary yellow and so perfect.

“I think one has to have the courage to sit in an empty studio and wait for something to happen. And work, and play, and experiment and try some daft idea out”.

HIS ANALYSIS. “It helped me to understand an inner life properly - seriously, and saying, ‘It is the thing from which all emerges’. Without it there is nothing but at the same time, it’s not on display.

'Cloud Gate', Millennium Park, Chicago. The Bean. Estimate 3m. Budget 9m. Cost 23m! Amazing huge bean, alloy? Mirrored skyline etc. Smooth and uncomplex on the outside, womblike inside. Stunning.

“It seems to me there is no other reason to be an artist. If I know what I know and you know what you know and I tell you what I know, who cares. My instinct is that making work is about daring to go to something I don’t know and hoping that in going where I don’t know, you, the viewer can go where you don’t know too”.

‘Psycho Drama’ A piece at the Royal Academy, showing a cannon shooting scarlet wax through an archway onto a wall. “Blatently Sexual”, he said.

“I don’t particularly have anything to say as an artist. I don’t have some grand message that I want to give you. To me the work is neither abstract, nor is it not abstract. It sits in between meaning and no meaning. Apparently, it’s just a form and then perhaps It’s not a form. It looks like, feels like something I know. The route to meaning may not be direct”.

‘Wax Train’ ‘Spiam’. (Self generating train).

‘Slug’ 2009. Red ‘vagina’ and white ‘worm’ (sperm?)

“Just as you can’t make something beautiful, or set out to, you also can’t set out to make something spiritual. What you can do is to recognize it may be there. It normally has to do with not having too much to say. There seems to be space for the viewer. And that’s something we sometimes identify as being spiritual, and its all about space".

And why does the work of Anish Kapoor affect me so much?

I started the Masters Degree so that I may 'step out of my box', the box which stamps me as a surface designer and he has moved me into the possibility of 3-dimensional imagery, a sort of 'Zen' of sculpture, of pure geometry.