'And Breathe...' : Art and Mindfulness

Certain words and associated concepts are forever linked to a particular moment in our collective history. It is hard to think of a more suitable candidate for a 2018 buzzword than 'mindfulness.' 

It appears to have started out as a well-intentioned proposal that everyone should find a period of mental calm from the stress and bullying demands of the everyday. 

Unfortunately, it has morphed into something altogether different; a kind of zen indifference to reality and a social-bonding session for middle-managers in denial about any personal ethical responsibility for their actions.

The 'And Breathe...' exhibition currently wedged into a room at Manchester Galleries (Manchester, UK) tries the unenviably difficult job of cello-taping a relentlessly positive interpretation of 'mindfulness' to selected paintings and images from the galleries collection. 

Predictably the repetitive slap and curl of rolling waves are insinuated in a number of works referencing that holiday-makers favourite anaesthetic the sea. 

Ben Nicholson's 'St Ives Bay, Sea With Boats' (1931) oil and pencil scene of distant sailboats bobbing on a watery green sea has the unnerving charm of a child's painting. The fleshy pinks of a foregrounded rock, the organizing of the view by the framing white window-frame and window sill along with the suggestion of a reflected cloud and bulbous land mass make it a slightly disturbing rather than a becalming experience.

Henry Moore's 'Mounts Bay: Early Morning - Summer" (1886) dispenses with anything but horizon-line, sky and sculpturally heavy ridges of dark sea. 

Similarly weighty J.D. Innes oil painting  'Bala Lake' (1911) is a dark blue, purple and mauve bay with a sickly green-yellow sky, a weird gothic Fauvism. It's ornately elaborate frame makes the whole thing look like an indigestible pastry, but an intriguingly odd one. It is a style of painting which tends to attract the description 'brooding.' The connection to any notion of calming 'mindfulness' is again questionable.

In Tristram Hillier's 'Le Havre De Grace' (1939) parts of a large disassembled ship have been left like enigmatic chess pieces cluttering a dockside. The result seems like a De Chirico seaside scene.

Albert Irvin's abstract oil and acrylic 'Untitled' (1973) shows a wash of Naples yellow, a hazy caramel tissue, anchored at the top and bottom of the slightly bowing stretcher by large daubs of watery paint. The colours of these are uncomfortably muddied as though the paint brushes had not been properly washed.

Catherine Yass's 'Split Sides' digital inkjet of distorted reflected images of skyscrapers is fairly underwhelming and blandly decorative.

The piece which accidentally hits the critical mark by noting humans actual inability to completely edit the badgering tangle of accumulated worries carried around by our grey matter is Marcus Coates 'Sea Mammal' (2003). 

A suited character in front of a cold slate grey sea has its head encased in a tangle of primary coloured sausage shaped balloons. The comic befuddlement radiating from the work combined with its visually seductive simplicity at last begins to address the contrary impulses which co-exist in the 'mindfulness' industries.