Artist puts city sights in lights

Dec 5 2007 By David Whetstone, The Journal

As NewcastleGateshead are bathed in subtle light, David Whetstone talks to Glow 07 artist Lothar Götz.

THE art of illumination has been taken to a new level of sophistication in the North-East this winter. Complementing the jolly seasonal brashness of the Christmas lights are more subtle works by artists who rose to the challenge of using light as their medium.

A clutch of them gathered at Baltic last night for the switch on of Glow 07, one of the three main strands of the NewcastleGateshead Winter Festival.

For most of them, it was the climax to an intellectual process which began several weeks ago.

First there was the brief, then the idea and finally the technical challenge of making it happen.

Lothar Götz, who describes himself as a painter first and foremost, talked about the Glow 07 challenge on one of his Tyneside reconnaissance trips a few weeks ago.

He said: “My main thing is colour but a lot of the work I do is interlinked with architecture, responding to spaces and situations. You could say it’s a colourful response to spaces.”

To Isabel Vasseur, who had worked with the artist before, he was a natural Glow 07 candidate. His ideas were big enough and striking enough to make an impact.

Her own brief from the NewcastleGateshead Initiative was to illuminate the urban heart of the region in an imaginative way, turning it into a winter attraction for tourists and local people.

Lothar was born in the small town of Günzburg, near Munich, but came to Britain 12 years ago to study for an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. For the last six years he has been teaching at Sunderland University, and two years ago he announced himself as a future Glow 07 candidate by creating a light installation in the city. He called the work Capri.

Lothar has come to know the North-East pretty well and was glad to accept Isabel’s commission.

Her brief to him, he said, had been pretty broad. But how did a painter who describes himself as “pretty traditional” approach the task of lighting up a city?

He said: “I always do a lot of drawings so I decided I would start with a sketch.

“I got a good map of NewcastleGateshead and put tracing paper over it.

“Then I outlined certain areas and buildings and coloured them in different colours, building up a sketch or blueprint.”

Next he began to trudge around Tyneside examining the buildings which he might use to make his sketch come alive as a pattern of coloured lights across twin conurbations.

“I wanted to use mainly existing light sources for what is a very conceptual piece. The drawing is the sketch of the idea but the work itself is NewcastleGateshead being used as a huge canvas.”

Lothar explained that some buildings already create colour associations in our minds, sometimes – as in the case of shops – the result of branding.

In his Glow 07 piece, called Himmelblau/Crimson, subtle lighting effects in a range of buildings – including Baltic, Gateshead’s famous multi-storey car park and Old Town Hall, Cale Cross House in Newcastle, along with Newcastle College, Northern Stage and the Theatre Royal – accord with Lothar’s sketch.

For a pilot or a seagull, it might be possible to view the whole thing. For the rest of us, the picture’s components can be seen individually and imagined as a whole.

Glow 07, which will illuminate the longest winter nights, also features the work of Susan Collins, Tanya Meditzky, Tod Hanson, Zöe Walker, Neil Bromwich, Nayan Kulkarni, Lulu Quinn, Miles Thurlow, Cath Campbell, Edwin Li and Jordan McKenzie.