Film and Video |
Clive WalleyAlthough the greater part of Clive’s reputation is derived from his film-making the better part of his inspiration, even for films, is from painting. Between the production of the films mentioned above and during the main film-making period of his creative life, the 80’s and 90’s, he continued to make paintings and to show them. The films are a development from this interest in painting, to him more a way of continuing to paint, than a way of making films. A selection of Clive's films are currently available and more to follow as DV mp4 downloads (720x576) via payment through PayPal. On confirmation of payment the download will be sent by 'YouSendIt' There also two
DVDs available, one being a selection of Clive's
films simply entitled Clive
Walley and the
other being a double DVD where
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Y Rhaeadr |
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As a result of his previous reputation with the Welsh Arts Council, Clive was asked to make a short film for S4C, the then new Welsh Channel 4. Y Rhaeadr is a five minute film about the making of a landscape painting. |
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Quartet |
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Prelude~
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Adagio~
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Caprice~
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Finale~
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After the modest success of the
Waterfall film it became possible to pitch
for more TV commissioned moving-paint films.
Channel 4 and S4C commissioned the Quartet
in 1987 and immediately the first film Prelude
won the Rank Award for Best Production on Film
at the Celtic Film Festival 1988. It was seen on Channel 4 and S4C as a full length TV programme scheduled for a wide viewing public |
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With
the help of his engineering knowledge Clive
designed and built a new-concept 4D multi-plane
rostrum rig which introduced the effect of
infinite forward and reverse camera moves.
And Now You (1991) was the first
film to be made on it, although there was
still not enough money to finish the camera
traverses on the top before starting work.
Consequently the film makes emphatic use
of the one effect which was operational,
the one for which the new system was intended
anyway, moving endlessly into and out of, the
painted “tunnels” in front of the camera. For its originality this new machine earned
its own individual award. An Invention in
Industry Award from the National Eisteddfod
of Wales was granted for the rig in 1990. |
Winds and
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Love Song~
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Brushwork~
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Life Study~
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Slap Stick~
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Dark Matter~
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Finished in 1994 'Divertimenti'
is a unique and beautiful sequence of films
where the viewer is taken on a journey into
a 4-dimensional abstract and painterly world,
where animated brush strokes dance and dart
across levels of glass in perfect synchrony
with the music. Mostly appearing as abstract
shapes and lines, occasionally the paint
takes on other forms, metamorphosing into
human and pictorial images. The Divertimenti
is a sequence of six three minute films made
in three intensive years of work with six
different composers. A new composer for each
film helped to ensure the variety in the
series which is now its hall mark. The “rig” had now got its camera moves fitted to the top and the series is also an exploration of the creative domain that opened up. “The Divertimenti” has been widely exhibited in festivals, galleries and on TV. The films were first seen on TV embedded
in a BBC2 program called Space, Time and
Paint in 1998, which included footage about
the process used to make them. 'The Divertimenti' collected a total of six
awards, including the Experimental Film Award
at Ottawa. The Divertimenti and the artist are the subject
of an extended interview with David Erhlich
in Animation Journal March 1999 USA. In the same year (1995) the Irish Animation Festival hosted a Clive Walley Retrospective. |
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Using the methods developed
in the making of the Divertimenti (plus back-projection),
Clive made a new ambitious piece for BBC2 and
S4C. It was about the use the modern spirit
might make of the seventy five year old news
from quantum physics, and for the first time
made use of specially shot live action material
back projected into the multi-plane image. In March1998. National Film Theatre. Light of Uncertainty, won Best Film at the Cutting Edge at the British Animation Awards. It was nominated for an award at Bradford Animation Festival in the category “Professional” and appeared at several prestigious International film festivals where the previous work was already well known. It has appeared twice on
BBC2; once on its own, and once as part of
“5 films by Clive Walley” along with four
of the previous series. It won Best Animation at Avanca, Portugal. It is the subject of a long article in Filmwaves
No.6. In 2005-6 the film and some of the associated art-work was included in “Space-Tricks” – Zurich and tour. |
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| An Art commission for the Mostyn Art Gallery for tour to Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff. An interactive digital Concept-art piece, it was included in a show called “A470”. The visitor to the show could drive themselves down the whole length of the A470, the main route down the length of Wales, at any speed up to that of the RAF jets which are often seen in the skies over Wales. It was immensely popular at both venues arousing much interest in the public and media. It was revived in order to be featured in the exhibition area of the Millenium Centre in Cardiff as part of its opening festivities. |
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A four minute film, in which the landscape is inhabited by the imagination. Clive always planned to make a trilogy of films, with a classical musical form, which dealt with the spiritual implications of the major intellectual movements of the present time, as identified by him. Light of Uncertainty was the first of these three pieces and indicated his sense of the serious work animation-as-art might aspire to. Unfortunately this “last project” was never realised in its proper form, and this Adagio is a replacement for a more ambitious film would have taken the central place in the final trilogy. It uses the medium of moving paint to suggest the thought processes of the viewer contemplating Nature. |
Tai-Chi |
Tea Cup |
Particles |
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~ excerpt ~ “The Teacup” a solo exhibition in “Five”, a new gallery near Brick Lane in London, which showed one of a set of works made by the artist for distribution on DVD or for show in art spaces. It is called “The Teacup – sixteen watercolours on Bockingford paper”. It brings extra dimensionality to the traditional medium of watercolour painting by a simple engagement with digital techniques. The exhibition also included a retrospective of work made by the artist for TV and the international festival circuit over the previous 10 years. |
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Adverts ~ Commercials |
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'Sephora' |
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| TV Commercial for Procter & Gamble – Silver World medal, New York Film & Television Advertising Awards and a nominee at the British Animation Awards for Best Advert 2000. | TV
Commercial for the Aim Investment Fund |
TV advert for major USA retailer |
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'MTV Channel Ident' ~ excerpt ~ |
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Installations
'Disciples' |
DISCIPLES This is a video installation made by me, Clive Walley, artist and film-maker, with Michael Bennet’s paintings as the manifest content. Some paintings very similar to those in the video are here in the gallery space with it. This piece is the result of a studio visit I made during Somerset Art Week 2006. Michael was showing the tree paintings in groups of a dozen which he had arranged in rectangular patterns. To a film-maker the visual connection with film-strips was too obvious to miss. After some proper professional discussion he became the most willing of collaborators. For him the original paintings were to be taken as signs for the individual human psyche as much as trees, and his arrangements in dozens is part of the reason he has called them “Disciples”. Because the film is very nearly only his paintings and nothing else, I have used his title for my piece as well. For many years I have been involved with the overlap of film with painting. When I was making my films for TV I wanted film to mobilise the art of painting; to make the films look a little like paintings look to painters when they are in the process of making them. I wanted TV to open up the experience of making paintings to wide audiences, who perhaps weren’t aware that much of modern painting’s meaning comes from reading them as if you were, yourself, the maker of them. I was always aware though, that painting as an art form was thousands of years older than film, and was responsible for creating a large part of the sensibility we employ for looking at artefacts and the world in general. That world now includes film, both as artefact and sensibility creator. This roundabout of influence and counter-influence appeals to something in me and the collaboration with Michael Bennet has allowed me to move into a new corner of this fascinating territory. One of the first things which will be obvious from this show is that the paintings and the video address the viewer in different ways, though I have done as much as possible to make them the same. The video is “spectacular”, that is, larger than life, magically unreal, and floating in a sea of artificial sound which moves us out of our normal experience. The sound was composed by the sound designer, Graham Bowers. The paintings belong in the world of material and we sense the wipe marks and dabs of colour as real things, things we might have physically done ourselves. Though the paintings have equal powers to make us wonder at them, their power is mediated through their material facts, facts we feel in our finger tips. The video has other powers but not those. This piece should be treated as you would a painting in a gallery and, as with a painting, spend as long with it as it holds your attention. By virtue of the sound design and the edit there are “events”, but there is no beginning and no end. |
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'Sanctuary' |
SANCTUARY This installation is housed in Michael Bennett’s studio and his paintings feature in the show. The sound you will hear has been constructed by Alastair Goolden from recordings he made while Michael was working on the paintings. We are grateful to Michael for the use of this room because it adds reflexive context to our work as we can show our piece on the same wall the original work was made on. As a grid of separate paintings, eight wide and three high, they made a deep physical impression. At the heart of our piece is the idea of translating and borrowing within the arts. Its first surprise is that Alastair and I can claim credit for making an art video whose subject is so perversely the work of another artist. Not only that but we have taken over his workspace! The purpose of this non-originality is to focus attention on something else. I have always taken the position that painting is the key visual art form. The evident fact that it has been upstaged by other visual art forms in the last half century is not the problem it might seem because art is a rhetorical process in which argument and position-taking play a very constructive role; off-beat viewpoints can inspire whole careers. So, if painting is the central informing visual art-form, then its borrowings from other media might be seen as increasing its remit, widening its range, not losing ground. The paintings at the centre of this show have acquired new meanings by virtue of being moved into the world of video art. They can borrow its form of address, its transience and its theatricality while maintaining their place as the original inspiration. The film language I have employed is minimised to just two forms of mix, with each painting appearing only once and only in full frame. For all that self-effacing focus on the original work, the video does not reproduce the experience of seeing the paintings in this room. They have been translated. A new experience of them inhabits the space in which they came into being; an experience which is perhaps closer to the world our imagination currently lives in, but is both less and more than the experience of a visit to this room, with the real paintings on this wall, a fortnight ago. |
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'Refuge' |
REFUGE Three paintings intended to be seen side by side are called a triptych and carry allusions to the altar pieces of Christian art which date back to the Middle Ages. Today the form is more likely to indicate a more general spiritual intention as do Michael Bennett’s latest three paintings which are the source of this “triptych” of films. The scale of Michael’s paintings and their conceptual discipline makes clear their relationship to the iconic American Abstract Expressionist works of the mid 20th Century, perhaps the last major art movement which emphatically identified with the spiritual dimension of life. However the references here go back further than that. In Michael’s studio Constable, Corot, and Turner lie around the floor as well as Rothko, de Kooning and Newman. In Barnett Newman’s “Onement” paintings the visual contest between the totemic central stripe, or “zip”, and the rest of the painted surface is central to their artistic purpose. If the tree trunk can be read as the Newman “zip”, so it is in these, but the near denial of gesture and the chosen naturalistic colour pallette also help link them back to Corot and others. The ambition here to sum up and to include across such a wide range of history and philosophies is marked. Yet the pictures are modest and beautiful; there is no bombast. In my installation I have matched the shape and size of the paintings exactly and we are using the same wall in the same studio that Michael uses. Alastair Goolden has set the visual experience in a sound world created specifically for the room and the images. It is spacious and still. I have an abiding interest in the relations between the camera and painting. With pictures this large the camera cannot reproduce the meaning of the painting; in the presence of the actual work the eye recognises the palpable construction of the painting and includes that knowledge in its search for meaning. Cameras reduce large paintings to images; you are not allowed close enough to appreciate how that image is held in the web of creative work. By engaging with this “web” of marks and layers of colour I wanted to make a work which immersed audiences in this particular quality of painting. In that regard it is of a piece with all my previous films. Remarkably, with these three paintings, there is a definite resonance between what I have found in the detail and what is expressed by the whole ensemble, a kind of fractal distribution of meaning, which has allowed me to create an autonomous piece from the parts which carries some of the meaning of the whole. CEW 09 |
Clive Walley ~ DVDs
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Select the Links below to view details of Clive and his work