¿Qué es el sitio web?

https://www.facebook.com/103614061764853/

Glenn Harvey Art, Cabo de Palos (2026)

27/08/2026

Untitled, 1976
Oil on board

For me, there is something wonderfully unsettled about this early painting: a house reconstructed by a mixture of dreaming and recollection rather than measured, ‘pure’ recollection.

Untitled was painted at home in Fleet, in 1976, during an early encounter with oils and many years before art school. Its source was a timber-framed family cottage in Isleham, Cambridgeshire that I had visited as a child. I could never summon the building as a complete place. What remained were architectural fragments: stairs, walls, roofs, passages and oddly emphatic details, separated from any reliable floor plan. Memory had kept the pieces and quietly disposed of the instructions for assembling them.

Two objects survived with particular clarity. There was an outside lavatory—a shed containing little more than a wooden board with a hole cut into it—and a small, ancient organ, whose pedals had to be pumped before it would produce a sound. Both required the body to operate the architecture: one through the blunt necessities of childhood, the other through mechanical breath, pressure and effort. Perhaps that is why they endured when so much else disappeared.

Isleham carries a further significance. It is as close as I have ever come to a paternal origin story. My father’s family came from the village and its surrounding countryside, an area shaped by farms and by the generations of people who worked upon them. Harveys remain plentiful there even now. The name occurs on houses, records and gravestones, suggesting a family presence dispersed across the landscape rather than contained within a single ancestral home.

The family genealogy reaches still further back, tracing the Harveys to the Hervés who came to England with William the Conqueror. It also claims a paternal connection to Hervey le Breton, the first Bishop of Ely. Whether encountered through documents, family account or the imaginative pressure exerted by a name, such ancestry arrives in fragments too: a Norman crossing, a bishop, a fenland village, a timber-framed cottage and a child trying to understand the shape of the place from inside it.

In the painting, the cottage has become an impossible structure of stairways, platforms, chimneys and partial rooms. The dark blue presses around it like night, while the white edges give each fragment the insistence of something momentarily recovered. Perspective shifts from one section to another; the eye climbs, turns and loses its bearings. The house behaves as remembered places often do in dreams: every part feels familiar, although the whole has never existed in quite this form.

Seen across fifty years, the painting appears to be searching for an origin while already acknowledging that origins cannot be viewed whole. They survive as names, structures, family stories and peculiar objects: a pedal organ waiting for breath, a hole cut into a board, a staircase leading towards a room that memory has removed.

Long before I had the language for any of this, the painting was assembling its own small archaeology of attention.

19/08/2026

Sometime in the early 2000s, on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Sally, I bought a small scale model of Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. There were quite a few of them in the museum shop, displayed in stylishly designed boxes. I remember it simply as an amusing Duchampian trinket: part souvenir, part model, part art-historical joke. It wasn’t expensive. I liked it, bought it, took it home and, at some point, discarded the box.

In retrospect, throwing away the box may have been the first significant act in the story.

For the last ten years or so the little Bicycle Wheel has lived with us aboard Boschplaat, our vintage Dutch boat. This was perhaps not the ideal conservation environment. Boats move. They vibrate. Things get knocked. Damp and temperature fluctuate. Shelves are smaller than they ought to be and carry considerably more than they were designed for. Objects acquire histories simply by surviving.

And this one did acquire a history.

Gradually the spokes began separating from the wheel. I watched its geometry become increasingly precarious, but did nothing particularly useful about it. It was still recognisably Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, after all, and I rather liked having it around.

Then, the other day, the shelf on which it was stored collapsed.

The model fell to the floor.

Fatally damaged, one might say.

A few days later I began idly searching the internet for a replacement. I assumed there would be another one somewhere: perhaps another old museum-shop example for £50 or £100. Then came the moment of joy — I’d found one.

Followed very quickly by the discovery of the price.

$10,000.

What the f**k?

Further searches produced others. The prices varied, but they remained firmly and bewilderingly in the thousands.

It transpired that the amusing little Duchampian object I had bought for a modest sum all those years ago was not simply some generic museum-shop reproduction. It was an official reproduction, sanctioned by the Duchamp Estate. Over the intervening years these things had become collectible. The stylish cardboard packaging I had casually discarded had become part of its provenance. The untouched object had become scarce, desirable and valuable.

Meanwhile, I had done something increasingly inadvisable in the contemporary art market.

I had lived with mine.

I had handled it, moved it, displayed it and eventually taken it aboard an old Dutch boat and carried it around the inland waterways of France. It had accumulated dust, movement, vibration, accidents and time. Spokes detached. Its immaculate miniature geometry slowly failed. Finally gravity intervened.

Looking at these two photographs now — a kind of accidental before-and-after diptych — something else begins to happen.

The first shows the object behaving itself. Wheel, fork, stool: Duchamp’s wonderfully useless machine reproduced in miniature. And then there is its shadow, doubling the wheel on the ground.

In the second photograph the object has become dysfunctional. The spokes have collapsed towards the hub; others stick uselessly into space. The wheel remains circular but the machine beneath it seems to have imploded. Yet the shadow still insists upon the wheel. It seems almost to remember the geometry the object itself has lost.

And I find myself rather liking it.

Because somewhere during this slow deterioration my copy seems to have stopped merely reproducing Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and started behaving like a Duchamp.

There is an additional joke here that I suspect Duchamp himself might have enjoyed.

The history of Bicycle Wheel is already a history of originals, replicas, authorised replicas and reconstructions. The 1913 object itself was lost. Duchamp made another. Further versions followed. As with so much of his work, the apparently straightforward question — where is the original? — rapidly becomes considerably less straightforward.

And now my ridiculous little museum-shop version has acquired its own minor variation on the problem.

What, exactly, has been damaged?

Financially, the answer is fairly obvious. Had I kept it untouched in its handsome box for twenty-odd years, I might now possess a surprisingly valuable collectible. Instead I have a bicycle wheel on a stool with most of its spokes hanging forlornly around its hub and several detached bits awaiting whatever fate I decide for them.

But the thing I actually bought in Philadelphia — the joke, the absurdity, the pleasure of possessing a tiny Bicycle Wheel — seems somehow still present.

Perhaps more present.

The pristine examples now selling for thousands have undergone an extraordinary transformation of their own. Objects originally sold as accessible museum-shop multiples have become sufficiently valuable that their owners must protect them from the very thing mine has been subjected to:

Life.

The box must remain. The object must remain pristine. Nothing must bend, detach, fade or acquire the smallest evidence of having existed anywhere other than within the conditions necessary to preserve its exchange value.

Mine has spectacularly failed that test.

And so I have decided not to restore it.

The temptation, initially, was to find someone capable of carefully replacing the spokes and returning everything to approximately its original condition. I now think that would erase precisely what has become interesting about it. I’ll keep the loose spokes, tiny nuts and fragments. If anything else falls off, that too can be retained. But no heroic reconstruction.

It can remain as it is: an authorised reproduction of a reconstruction of a lost readymade, bought as a museum-shop souvenir, removed from its packaging, lived with for more than twenty years, transported aboard a Dutch boat through France, progressively dismantled by time and finally subjected to the decisive intervention of a collapsing shelf.

A stoppage, perhaps.

Or simply another small record of attention.

Somewhere, meanwhile, somebody owns a perfect example in its original box, currently advertised at $10,000.

I hope they enjoy it.

But they probably shouldn’t take it out.

12/08/2026

Journal pencil drawing on sketchbook paper - (Châtel-sur-Moselle ramparts) - Saturday 07/08/21.

The fortress here refuses to appear all at once.

A wall, then vegetation. A drop in the ground. A dry moat. Masonry disappearing beneath roots and undergrowth. Another wall where one had not quite expected it. At Châtel-sur-Moselle the remains of the old fortress are extensive enough for any sense of the whole to keep slipping away. Centuries of building, alteration, damage and abandonment have left something that belongs as much to the contours of the ground as to architecture.

The dogs had no difficulty with any of this. History was beside the point. There were tracks to follow, smells caught along the edges of walls, changes of direction, interesting patches of earth and vegetation. Walking with them through the fortifications produced two overlapping versions of the same place: one preoccupied with masonry, scale and the accumulated evidence of time; the other immediate, olfactory and close to the ground.

Then, somewhere along the ramparts, this view.

The wall cuts almost brutally across the drawing, a dense horizontal accumulation of graphite. It is difficult to tell where masonry ends and earth or vegetation begins. Beyond it, the town seems surprisingly slight. The slender spire of the Église Saint-Laurent rises above the roofs, almost too delicate for the weight of everything around it.

The pencil became less obedient elsewhere. Marks scratch through the foreground and vegetation and escape into the sky. Some describe; others seem simply to register the physical agitation of being there. Large areas of paper are left almost untouched while the rampart itself has been worked towards blackness. There was little inclination to enumerate stones or make an archaeological account of the place. Its weight was enough.

Only incidentally was this a maritime journey.

Boschplaat was moored somewhere below. Châtel-sur-Moselle was one of the stoppages during our circuit through the Vosges, eventually taking us out onto the Rhine at Strasbourg. Looking across the journeys recorded in these sketchbooks, it is curious how many such stoppages were marked by fortifications: forts, castles, châteaux, ramparts, fortified towns. The waterways themselves seem almost to have arranged the encounters. Hardly surprising, perhaps. Rivers and canals have always carried commerce, armies and territorial ambition, and the places controlling them accumulated walls.

There is no need to make too much of the recurrence. But it persists. A journey characterised by movement repeatedly brought us alongside structures whose purpose had been to impede it; travelling through open country by water, we kept stopping beneath walls designed to enclose, overlook or defend. The contradiction remained largely unnoticed at the time. They were simply there — another château above a river, another rampart beside a canal, another fort encountered while walking the dogs.

For a while at Châtel the water disappeared altogether. The journey became terrestrial: dogs, paths, steep ground, a dry moat, old walls, a sketchbook and pencil.

Perhaps this is one reason the drawing resists becoming a picturesque record of a medieval fortress. There is no commanding prospect and no attempt to restore what is missing. The ruins remain incomplete, encumbered by the present, absorbed into vegetation and town. Saint-Laurent still punctures the skyline; houses occupy their places beyond the walls; paths continue through what was once organised for defence.

History here is difficult to separate from solidity and texture.

Eventually the ramparts gave way again to streets, the walk folded back towards the mooring, and the larger waterborne journey resumed. But the drawing had already detached itself from that itinerary. It records no arrival and proposes no destination.

Just a place where a walk stopped.

11/08/2026

‘Notes from partial solar eclipse (Mistley, UK)’ - 1999. Pencil on sketchbook paper.

07/08/2026

‘In Lyon’ - Friday. 07/08/2026. Smartphone photo.

27/07/2026

Escatalens, 2018
Canal latéral à la Garonne - journal pencil drawing on sketchbook paper.

Escatalens marks one of the final locks on the Canal latéral à la Garonne before its waters eventually meet the tidal Garonne. Boschplaat lay moored here for a while although, as was often the case, the immediate reason for stopping had less to do with navigation than two dogs in need of a walk. Haggis and Delilah quietly determined many of these pauses.

Only part of the Écluse d’Escatalens appears in the drawing. The lock provides its structure, but the real subject is movement. Locks are machines for regulating water, yet they also reveal how reluctant water is to become entirely regulated. Around gates, walls and projecting timbers the surface gathers, folds, twists and breaks apart. Reflections hesitate. Geometry meets fluidity.

Attention settled on the conversation between solid things and moving water. Every obstruction briefly writes itself into the current before disappearing again. Leaves, feathers, drifting w**d and small fragments of debris become temporary markers, making otherwise invisible forces momentarily legible. The drawing became less an account of a particular lock than a record of these fleeting negotiations between objects and flow.

The occasion itself, however, extended well beyond what could be seen. The warmth of the afternoon, the movement of air beneath the trees, the sound of leaves and reeds shifting in the breeze, the smell of damp earth, grass and canal water, the occasional creak of mooring lines and the patient presence of two dogs exploring the towpath all belonged to the drawing long before the first mark was made. None of these things can be pointed to on the page, yet they remain quietly folded within it. The visible image is only one residue of a much larger encounter.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet paradoxes of drawing. The page records only what graphite or ink can hold, while carrying traces of experiences that cannot themselves be drawn. Weather, sound, temperature, passing time, memory and imagination accompany the hand even though they leave no direct image behind. Years later, returning to a drawing can bring something of that embodied occasion back again—not because it illustrates those sensations, but because it was made in their company.

Canals often suggest order: straight alignments, measured depths, numbered locks and carefully engineered gradients. Water, however, remains only partly compliant. It consents just enough to make navigation possible while continuing to answer to its own quiet physics. Drawings seem to possess a similar character. They preserve what can be seen, while quietly carrying the less visible conditions of their own making: the air that was breathed, the ground underfoot, the sounds beyond the page and the simple fact of having been there.

23/07/2026

Edgar Degas — Sky Study (c. 1869)
🔸 THE WORK

23/07/2026

For Vol 2

Haggis Sleeping (2021)

This drawing was made before any of us knew that cancer had already begun its quiet work. At the time there was nothing unusual about the afternoon. Haggis had simply curled himself into sleep, as he had done countless times before, and I found myself wanting to draw not simply the dog, but the extraordinary calm that seemed to gather around him.

He became less a subject than a dark, gently folded shape. The drawing doesn’t concern itself with every detail of his body. Instead, I found myself circling him with loose graphite marks, trying to suggest something that cannot really be illustrated. Those marks became, almost without my noticing, a way of drawing affection itself. Not sentiment, I hope, but the invisible atmosphere that surrounds someone deeply loved. Love, perhaps, can only be drawn indirectly, as a kind of movement around another life.

Haggis came to us from a rescue centre in Scotland when he was still little more than a puppy. Had we not found him, it is very likely that his story would have ended before it had really begun. Instead he became part of our small travelling family. Together we made the long journey south from the Netherlands, wandered the towpaths of the Canal du Midi and so many other waterways, crossed borders almost without thinking about them, and settled for seasons in places that now seem inseparable from his presence. Wherever we moored, Haggis was part of the crew. In many ways he became our talisman.

Thinking about the drawing now, I realise it is also about rescue, though perhaps not in the straightforward sense. We rescued Haggis from one possible future, but anyone who has shared their life with a dog knows that the exchange is never entirely one-way. They rescue us as well. They draw us outside each morning, teach us to notice the weather, the changing seasons and the small paths we might otherwise have overlooked. Looking back through these drawings, I have come to realise that Haggis is not simply present within many of them; he is one of the reasons they exist at all. So many of these journal drawings began because Sally, Haggis, Delilah and later Else, were out walking together. He was never merely accompanying the journey. He helped make the journey possible.

Perhaps that is why I wanted this drawing to remain so quiet. Adventure is usually remembered as movement, but much of life is composed of these smaller intervals: an afternoon’s sleep while the world carries on outside; the reassuring weight of a familiar body resting nearby; the knowledge that, for a little while at least, everyone is exactly where they should be.

The drawing has changed for me over the years, though the marks themselves have not. It now records a peace whose fragility none of us yet understood. Yet I find myself returning less to the sadness than to a single, unanswerable hope: that Haggis knew how completely he was loved. We could never explain to him the life we had given him after his rescue, or the adventures we would share together. But perhaps he understood it in the only way that mattered: through shared walks, familiar voices, warm evenings on towpaths, the gentle routines of everyday life, and the certainty that he belonged.

As I have assembled these books, another thought has quietly emerged. They have often been described as books about place, memory or travel, but perhaps they are really about attention. Drawing has always been my way of saying, as quietly as possible, this mattered. A lock gate, an old tree, a stretch of canal bank, a plastic chair, a cloud over a river, or a sleeping dog: each became worthy of sustained attention simply because, for a moment, they belonged to the life we were living.

If this drawing preserves anything, I hope it is that feeling of belonging. It remains one of the truest portraits I have made of Haggis—not because it captures his likeness exactly, but because it captures, however imperfectly, the quiet grace of being loved.

22/07/2026

Marcel Duchamp once suggested that art was the one thing that separated man from the animals. It is an attractive thought, though I have never been entirely convinced by it. The more ethologists observe the lives of other species, the more difficult it becomes to sustain the old certainties. Birds improvise songs. Primates pass on learned behaviours. Cetaceans appear to inherit patterns of communication that resemble culture. The boundary has become less secure than it once seemed.

Perhaps the distinction lies elsewhere.

I have increasingly come to think that what makes us human is not art itself but a peculiar dissatisfaction with simply inhabiting the world. We do not merely see; we ask what seeing is. We do not simply remember; we reorder memory until it bears only a passing resemblance to what first occurred. We surround ourselves with stories, rituals, maps, diagrams, equations, photographs, drawings and music—not because they reveal an essential self, but because they continually reorganise our relation to the world and to one another. They do not simply communicate meaning; they participate in the endless production of it.

Art is one consequence of that necessity.

A drawing, at least for me, has never been an attempt simply to record what was in front of my eyes. If that were its only purpose, a camera would usually perform the task more efficiently. The drawing is slower. It asks me to remain with something beyond the point where recognition gives way to familiarity. It allows memory, language, history, accident and imagination to enter into negotiation with observation. By the time the pencil leaves the page, I know rather less about what I have seen than when I began—but I understand more about the encounter that took place.

That encounter is not the expression of an inner life. It is an event of inscription. A drawing leaves a trace of an attention unfolding between a place, a body, a duration and a world already dense with other traces. Its meaning is never complete, because it belongs neither wholly to the object nor wholly to its maker. It exists between them, and is completed differently with each subsequent act of looking.

Perhaps that is what interests me most. We are creatures capable of making things that exceed their practical function. A river becomes entangled with history. A shadow becomes a question. An old olive tree acquires the gravity of a portrait. A forgotten bridge finds itself connected to Roman engineering, Marcel Duchamp, childhood memory and a pair of impatient dogs. None of these relations resides within the objects themselves. They emerge through our persistent inclination to annotate the world rather than merely occupy it.

This seems to me both our blessing and our predicament. We cannot leave the world alone. Every generation writes over the last, while earlier inscriptions continue to show through. Language itself behaves like a palimpsest, and art is one of the places where those overlapping traces become briefly visible. The marks do not reveal an original presence; they remind us that presence is always accompanied by absence, memory, anticipation and loss.

So I find myself returning, not to Duchamp’s distinction, but to a different question. Perhaps what distinguishes us is not that we make art, but that we inhabit a symbolic world in which every mark acquires its meaning only through its relation to other marks. We cannot stop making traces because we cannot step outside that web of relations. We invest ordinary things with improbable significance. We know our inscriptions are temporary, yet we continue to make them—not to possess the world, nor to explain it once and for all, but to participate in the endless play of differences through which the world becomes meaningful at all.

If I have spent years filling sketchbooks with towpaths, locks, dogs, riverbanks and weather, it is not because these modest subjects demanded immortalisation. Quite the opposite. Their modesty is precisely the point. A drawing is simply an annotation—a quiet inscription made in passing. It records neither the world nor the self in any complete sense, but the fleeting interval in which each is altered by its encounter with the other.

Whether that makes us more human, I cannot say. But it may suggest that to be human is not simply to inhabit the world, but to dwell within a fabric of differences, leaving behind traces that will themselves become other traces, read and rewritten long after their maker has disappeared.

Glenn Harvey Art

27/08/2026

19/08/2026

12/08/2026

11/08/2026

07/08/2026

27/07/2026

23/07/2026

23/07/2026

22/07/2026

Dirección

Página web

Notificaciones

Contacto La Escuela/facultad

Atajos

Compartir

Categoría

Solicitud de retirada del anuncio