Contemplating end of Nov 17

So I'm thinking about this work:

This has grown from some artwork on improbable / unfeasible buildings and investigation into mark-making - drawing a line. Thick acrylic paint, incised when wet and infilled with more paint when dry on bits of mount board that were left over from some mounts I made for my open studio back in the summer. I dislike throwing away stuff so they were lying about waiting for a job. 

What I'm wondering is: should I do more and end up with a kind of patchwork montage? Would that be along the right lines of my investigation? They take quite a bit of time to make and since I'm not made of time I need to consider if it's time-wasting to make more. 

Also, do themes of proliferation, fragmentation and multiplication work with my interests in unfeasibility, uncertainty, improbability. It strikes me that these are all reductive things and the aspect of repeated shapes is multiplying and I wonder what the outcome would be of combining the two.

Is there a sense of repetition towards infinity? This could be a question of whether infinity exists. There are differing ideas about this.

If there were to be a sense of breakdown within the repetition - in a sense like RNA, which carries information from DNA to the ribosome, where messages that don't arrive atrophy and degenerate.

Currently, I think the outcome of this is that they work better alone. Or in small groups so that they can be contained. I think I may try to think more about the relationship between the works I've done - not to prove or display a link - but to see how they speak to each other. 

Maybe or maybe not connected that: I recently read an Aeon article about the philosopher Phillipa Foot http://bit.ly/2BoBCiH - about moral choices being value driven with those values more likely to come from the reality (or perceived reality) that surrounds us rather than from logic or language, which prioritises relationships & culture as decision-making tools. 

So maybe a question I can ask myself about the future of this work is: What is the reality that surrounds it/me? rather than 'What is the logical result / next step'.

Recent work Nov 2017

Continuing my current work... an exploration into drawing while holding in mind my interests in notions of utopia and science fiction.., I've been working on this piece for about 2 weeks, a length of time that reflects both how long each layer of ink takes to dry and the flattening process for each A1 sheet. Making the marks takes comparatively little time. Now I have to decide if I want to speed up that time and how to do that. The length of the process gives me lots of thinking time and I can work on other projects that all feed into each other in the meantime so I rather enjoy the inherent delays. However, I'm interested in how joining the sheets together first will change the eventual form as lots of marks are made by ink drips pooling on the paper as it dips and stretches, also, flattening it will be an interesting exercise.

I made it too long to hang on the wall vertically which has turned out to be a boon, as it effortlessly seems to have achieved one of my recent aims which is to achieve some kind of shape additional to the 2d flatness and illusionary depth. It isn't visible from the photograph but the piece lying on the floor is deliberately upside down and it does give a pleasant slightly topsy turvy feeling when looking down on it. It's interesting how easily and simply that the situ of a drawing on a wall can be challenged.  This is definitely something to be explored.

In regards to the other projects, I am slowly bringing this drawing to a resolution in my home studio. I am of a mind, since I know where I am going with it, to concentrate more on other experiments within the studio space at college, although I've just started focusing again on the central shape.

I've realised that I've been mainly occupied with different ways to make a line - and to do that in a meaningful way. These are all gesturally different and either involve adding or subtracting material to or from a surface. So along with the ambiguity over surface / object that is something to explore - without going into drawing in space and installation. Not that I'm against formal installation its just that I'm all about the portability, and maybe transference of place in relation to my artwork. I'm going to have to investigate that too. :-)

deceptive perception?

Perhaps our problem is faulty perception? I glanced up from the computer screen to idly consider what a moment of arrival would be like for a civilisation such as ours, which is occupied with progress, only for my eyes to focus involuntarily on an object in the middle-distance across on the other side of the street. So now there is a displacement in inverted colours: a light-shadow superimposed up and to the right-hand side onto what I now see: the formerly unseen object. Here is an impression of a green glowing chimney beneath a cloudy sky. I am simultaneously seeing the object and my memory of it. And the memory is rapidly fading. As a memory and representation of a thought, this could be a fading presence of a civilisation.

Group Crit

Feedback on via tutorials and crits coming thick and fast at the moment - probably the best way to get it all in. I'm not expecting anyone in the big wide world to be at all interested in my arty shit, this is just my way of recording what my art course is doing for me and in some way attempting to distill what I'm learning.

Group crits can be really useful, but it's good to know what format they are going to take then you can prepare accordingly. My tutor emailed us all an excerpt from '7 days in the art world' that described a marathon group crit so I did approach the day with a feeling that I should have brought extra sandwiches - however, it wasn't nearly so intensive.

Firstly, I asked to have my crit in the format of a discussion rather than in 'fly-on-the-wall' mode. I wanted to have some other opinions on unresolved areas of my current work so I showed them sketchbooks and work in progress.

The main idea I have come away with is to work with the materiality of paper in it's form, to reshape it somehow, to explore it's properties as an object while retaining it's sense of surface: folding, wetting, the shapes and spaces left, and the touchable surfaces. They really liked being able to get their hands on my sketchbooks given that we don't get the opportunity to do that very often. I also enjoyed being able to share them. There is something around touch that I am interested in that somehow ties up with my hobby of partner dancing and the senses of physical connection that I use and enjoy there. That is a blog to come - perhaps after I finish the dissertation. My, how these blog ideas are growing.

I keep going back to the shape of my concertina sketchbook and its diarising potential. Also there was the idea of working on a roll - creating a drawing on a roll of paper and just rolling on forward when an area is finished. I'm also thinking of Bea Last's sculptural charcoal drawings. Trying to get to the edge of the paper's tolerance. I'm also very taken with Marian Piper's work which came up in my last tutorial with Cathy. They both tread a fine line between surface and object and their work both features repetition and layering

My working from original doodles made while waiting backstage at work was discussed. I kind of had a hard time trying to think of similar limbo that I have now - on pay, waiting for my turn and nothing else to fill the time but let events distill themselves on paper - it was very much a special time and place. I don't have any time now that isn't devoted to something else - there is always something to do - there's never time quite like that when I'm on someone else's pay and expected to do nothing. The only time that happened was while invigilating and we were told we could read or use phones - and I didn't feel I could zone out in the same way. It was hard to explain to everyone, and even myself that I don't have or allow myself those times. I have that sense of time passing increasingly quickly so I try to use every available second - so those enforced limbos are really valuable; of course I didn't let myself sit there then, I used the time to make something.  So now I am faced with wanting to make that time, or what I learnt into something else, or to learn how to access what I did then in a different way. Is it really a case of getting myself locked up so I am free to make?

What else was there?

As I read back over what I've written I realise that I haven't, and we didn't, discuss what I'm drawing - that I am not bound up in what I'm drawing. I've been too concerned about that probably. Perhaps I'm moving into the realm of abstraction but that may move me away from those original limbo doodles and the insight they gave me. I'm going to have to think more clearly about what I gain in moving away from that, or if I dawdle on the edge of doing so. Certainly, the large ink and charcoal drawing currently on the wall is a dawdling. Nice word for it. Maybe a dancing dawdling. Maybe d(r)awdling on the edge is as far as I want to go?

So ideas I had over the weekend were to emboss objects into the paper - coins, chains. I feel that I very much want to stay producing surfaces, and not objectify. There is something around the continuance beyond the surface, and the illusion of space that really interests me, the window-like aperture of a frame or the edges of the drawing. The edges really interest me, but not at the cost of the content or the centre. The tension between the edge and the centre is continuing and can be altered by adding another piece of paper. One of the next things I'm going to do in the studio is play with the nebulous ink and chalk dust background and cut it up and repaste it and see what I get. 

Tutorial notes

First news: I have a tutor. Second news: after a few delays I had a tutorial. So, notes:

Artists to check out:

Marian Piper. Repeat patterns, dense, intense shapes. Really like. Displayed / framed off the wall so that there is space behind - like that. Also off the floor.

There is this:
REEL 1, 2016, gouache and oil on canvas, 60 x 46cm

And another called 'Repeat Copier' that have these dense black shapes superimposed on a drifting wet-formed gouache background that look like they are floating. Again you get a sense of what is underneath. Floating still upon a fast current like leaves suspended on a flooded stream. There is a feeling that time is moving at different speeds, and a definite illusion of space being created.

In the 2015 works like 'This Year's Model' there's a strange sense of decay. Perhaps in the sense of copies that decay a little with each iteration as they move further away from the original, which isn't but looks like an over-inked screen-printing accident, the shapes seen behind a slippery curtain of industrial bottle-green.

Image from http://www.marionpiper.com


Metahaven - Manifesto.
http://mthvn.tumblr.com
This is a bit William Gibson in all his cynical dystopian net-based romances and adventure romps made out. A sprawling spew of images ageing from the 80s with tongue in cheek use of Times New Roman. Making an exhibition out of what their Wikileaks client didn't like, flouting graphic design rules... amusing to me in my role of a graphic designer.

However, interesting ways of exhibiting: Printing on silk, hardboard leant against wooden frames on which other images are pegged, mugs, t-shirts, clashing missing font text - all kinds of highly visible merchandise.

Doreen Massey - 'For Space' - more reading. Space should not to be confused with stasis but understood as fluctuating with time.

Eva Rothschild. For me hers is archetypal drawing in space. I can see why but I have tried this and abandoned it for illusionary two dimensional space wherein I don't have to deal with all that gravity stuff - stuff that is always in some manner pointing down. I'm not set on leaving it abandoned but it feels like a space that I don't need or want to inhabit. I think I shall probably have to come back to why that is, like why I feel I have to justify bypassing it. But that's going to be another post.

Mark Bradford. The layering and the cutting in and rough edges. Time spent and the sheer size and scale. The idea of mapping and cartography. (Cutting is reminding me of David's work).

We also talked about mapping the space that you are in, and I can't remember the name of the work: the story of the ruler who commissioned a 1:1 map of his lands and it reached a point where no one could be certain of where they stood - on the real land or the facsimile. That would be discombobulating for sure.

How I feel about progressing in terms of scale and volume: What I draw has to be shown in a way that not only works with what the image, it has to be intimately integral to the artwork otherwise it's not worth doing and will only detract. However, the mode of display, and I really like the idea of having space behind the work somehow, is really worth considering.

I wonder if I could play with this flattening / drying process to shape the paper somehow after I've drawn on it. The little hills and valleys that form as the paper wets during the ink stage are really interesting as it's because of the internal sizing and construction of the paper and I can't control it beyond amount of water and how I let the water pool, so perhaps there is something I can do there.

I also really want to look at joining of paper more - so now I have a destiny for the ink and chalk dust page that has been staring at me for 3 weeks from my home studio wall.

Course Notes 31st October

Happy Halloween!

My time has been split 60:40 between course writing & course making.

I'm up to around 3,000 words on my dissertation. I can't tell you yet if they are all in the right order, but according to Word that's where I'm at.

I have to say, that in comparison to the last dissertation I wrote this one is a whole lot easier. For my first one, all those years ago, when I had no personal computer, no car, no internet and almost no life skills (I survived on pasta, mayonaise and sweetcorn), I had to write the whole bloody thing; 12,000 words on a manual typewriter in a week. My fingers throbbed with pain. I was set on writing about art in Berlin during the period of the Berlin Wall: a fascinating subject I think most people would agree. Mum and I spent a week in freezing February 1993 traipsing round, trying to find our way around the former East Berlin. It was fascinating. It was cold. One big issue with the subject matter: I don't speak or read German. I scraped a pass, I don't know how, I can only think of the reason being that I took the time to visit.

This time I'm working on something much more manageable and armchair researchable: I'm looking at the dichotomy of being inside/outside, of passing through.

Inside / Outside? That sounds simple doesn't it? Except that the more I look into it the larger, more complex, and more interrelated it gets. Of course that's the fruit of knowledge - the closer you bring it to your mouth the larger it gets, and you can never digest it all. That's something I really like about contemporary art, it's endlessly interesting - the more questions you ask the more questions you discover and there are so many rabbit holes to disappear into. For me, the dichotomy of inside/outside is a case of one's length and depth of vision being altered by the environment as you move from within to outside. Furthermore a question is raised about being 'between' but I am most particularly interested in where a lack of difference in how places look can lead the viewer to feel discombobulated. It's something about where a difference should be, and isn't.

So writing-wise that's all interesting and good. Artwork - well, it felt a bit frustrating not to be making resolved work until I remembered that I'm supposed to be experimenting this semester. So I've been doing a bit more of that, as well as sneakily trying to bring a larger scale work to completion - just to see if I can. I've just handed in my proposal for this module's artwork and there will be an opportunity to present that to a group, so I will feedback on that probably in my next post.

I also spent a couple of days invigilating at CET (Coventry Telegraph's old home) 'The Future' at Coventry's first biennial. Some images of current work and from that below.

WIP: Iceberg and Power Station. Improbable structures and something about drawing what could not happen (?). There will be more steam rising.

 Detail from above. There's going to be more of this.

Collage experiment: Incised lines partially filled with charcoal. An attempt at something like Roni Horn's collages - the precision and the finger marks. I wanted to try and make lines another way and I really enjoy the precision of line vs the totally random and nebulous pastel powder (I sprayed the paper with fixative and pressed it onto some pastel dust on the cover of my sketchbook that had fallen off another work, then fixed that. You can see where I discovered it wasn't fixed.)

Some painty swiping pages from my sketchbook with paint left over from painting pumpkins and bats for my daughter.

The rest are from CET Coventry Biennial. Dashes of colour and perspective. The works employing audio filled the space most effectively, but some other artworks seemed a bit lost. It was a privilege to have been able to spend so much time there.

Course notes Oct 17

This post is going to comprise mostly of my thoughts following my first tutorial.

This is the first artwork 'Sunset at Chesterton Mill' I've completed since then. Not sure if I'm going to continue in this way exactly, but the process really seems to help me though to the end of a work, so I will be hanging on to that.

Main thoughts were that I should in somehow carry on in my current mode and experiment with scale and possibly texture. We talked about how I drew until I reached a point of recognition of a memory; not particularly somewhere I've seen more a melting together of moments, and now I consider it, that's what happened with this painting/drawing.

I had intended to fill in the whole shape with architectural forms in graphite, chalk & koh-i-noor leads and I'd been at that for 2 days, then there was a point when I looked at it and I slightly recognised the upright and left-leaning thick lines - which were being worrying me until then - as the legs of Chesterton Mill.

The Mill is a C16 building on top of a hill near home where I've done some sketching; you can see a long way from it but I'd become fascinated by the patina on the stone. I took my small family there on the last weekend of the summer holidays to watch the sun go down because you can't see it from my house and it was a warm night. It was something unusual to do together to mark the end of the summer break, and it was free. We obviously weren't the only ones with the idea because there were plenty of people there and the place had a nice atmosphere. Teenagers larking about, people and dogs, photographers with cameras on tripods. My 5 year old daughter had a fun time running around the soy-bean field and mill in the half-light.

As soon as I realised this the painting came together and finished really quickly. Now I've come to naming it - naming is important to me, the words create a complementary picture - so, I'm thinking it could be called 'Sunset at the old mill', or 'Sunset at Chesterton Mill' as above. And it really pleases me that I've ended up with a painting that looks entirely different to what a painting called the same name might have looked like 100 years ago.

There is a part of it that is about being inside and outside the house. A house is all corners and framed vision; you are always looking through doorways as you move around a house, which you constantly do. Outside, particularly from a viewpoint like this, you can literally see for miles, it really frees your mind, and you take some of that with you when you go back home. I was going to call it 'inside / outside / inside' or something like that to map our little trip out.


Other notes.
Advised to look at art of Paul Noble & Charles Avery who create worlds via drawing - leads me to reconsider a direction my artwork was taking about a year ago that I discarded then because it seemed too unusual.

And, although I intend to look at scaling up, I did this little experiment. Acrylic on a scrap of mount board. I like that I can't control the paint too much and it really is a shape incised out of the background - somehow that's important, don't know why.

Notes from sketchbook - September 17

I've been keeping an artwork diary... something of the tonne of different ideas that go through my head while I'm working and notes of stuff I've seen & read. I've been working on several different artworks but the Improbable Structures are the most problematic, deliberately so, and therefore more interesting to me.

10.9 "White paper performing as both foreground + background in some of them, which needs fixing. In 'Homes for Some - Summer in Glass Houses' & 'Summer Camp' the white (paper) is frame and it's quite effective when the darkness (which is pushed back) creeps onto the frame. Lost some of that with the frameless ones. Orange (might call it Helicopter??) needs more, and currently working on the clearing.

Auerbach and Uglow drawings. Destruction of surface / texture and erasure.

Terry Greene's Just Another Painter blog.

Occurs to me that I'm breaking down elements of a painting into different layers of action. First colour, then texture, then illusion of form with b&w charcoal / chalk / paint. First layer(s) are textural, abstract, the second layer architectural elevations. I ignore obvious paths to form new lines. The 3rd layer is form, imaginative, illusory.

Making art and sharing art are entirely different actions and involve different brain processes. This is SO obvious.

Playing with perspective and hidden. Got a comment from Kev, when I showed him the Peter Doig painting of Briey, that I've got a layers and hidden things in my work too. He put one palm in front of him and then another a hand's width behind it - beyond the surface. Happy with that.

26.9
Meeting at Telford, a foggy start but drove back down the M6 noticing the turning foliage almost matched the orange of the TMS signs. Mossy green and pale cerulean sky. Motorway lamps cascading into the distance. Very banal and very beautiful at the same time. Autumn sun on the side of the office building where my meeting was.

A couple of recent sketchbook pages:

The Clearing walks, farts and scampers off into the distance. 

Thoughts on new work

Note: from earlier in the year - possibly March. I should really do these things in order. ;-)

To recollect some possibly useful thoughts while I was painting last week.

I rearranged my tree forms work and I can see four main threads of work. One I'm concentrating on and at least three well-hidden tangents! So that was quite a useful exercise.

Thread one: my main one, is abstracting the tree forms which has made three pieces of larger work all around the theme of the first signs of spring. The trunks and branches are really dark blues, browns and purples, then there are little flashes of oddly shaped green. I think the shapes are key and colours second. So I think I need to set up a few canvases and have a go at making a set in watercolour / ink / acrylics.

Thread two: is sort of a zoomed out version of the above, and I'm going to abandon it because it's too much about the shape of the tree, too obvious and sort of too easy to get a satisfactory image from, which sounds silly, but means I'm not learning anything from it.

Thread three: has a looser, wider brushstroke and turns the tree forms pretty much unrecognisable, pretty much into landscapes and I feel I can work into them with pen / pencil without having to conform to the original sketch - which I'm doing with thread one. So I'll keep hold of that one.

Thread four: sort of a cheat because it's from a different trip, is more surreal, more of a doodle in ink. I like this but I haven't worked out a way, yet, of harnessing it into something I can sustain and make understandable/communicate. It's definitely 'mine' but it's also a bit weird, which is how many of my doodles turn out. However, I can see interesting abstract forms emerging and perhaps combined with the colours I've identified could form something else...

Oh, and another boats in the city at night painting emerged by itself the other day. I think it's a memory of London. I tend to forget that it's a city on water, but many times I've worked there in the last ten years have been in buildings next to water; quays or canals.

Final year Fine Art & Contemporary Cultures BAhons #2

Week 1

First day on the course included having to make a presentation (eek!) and have a feast (yay!). This is a photo of the feast to bear evidence of everyone's generosity in bringing food.

The presentation was about our influences and likes. Titled 5x5, we had to choose 5 songs, 5 books, 5 artists, 5 materials, 5 films. Not everyone presented back but those who did made it interesting and we all did it differently. Mine was a drawing & a list, but there were also sketchbooks, diagrams, a wonderful video and a filled up day pack.

I'm the only part-time course member at this level so my experience will be a bit different to the others. I suspect I will experience the whole, but in a drawn out way, and I hope to agree with my tutors in thinking part-time is a good deal because you get very similar access to studio and facilities, although tutor time is more spread out, as are the assessments. And that may be a good thing, as this week we were introduced to our learning goals regarding practical work, and also got to discuss initial proposals for the critical thinking dissertation (dun dun der) or case study (aura of slight bewilderment now thankfully dispersed) which is the option I've picked. I will come back to that one.

Final year Fine Art & Contemporary Cultures BAhons #1

Notes on picking up where I left off. Aka 'Why choose to do a degree here'.

I hope to achieve two things with this blog. Firstly I want to document my progression through the last year of my Fine Art & Contemporary Cultures BA Hons degree with the hope that diarising my experience will feed into other writing and understanding of what I'm trying to achieve with my work.

Secondly, I want to document my study at Warwickshire College, Leamington Spa campus to give people thinking about becoming a student here a clearer idea about what it's like.

My connection with the Fine Art & Contemporary Cultures course began in 2007 when I did the first 2 years (level 4 & 5) full time to achieve a diploma. I regretted not studying my passion straight out of school, instead I let myself to be talked into what my family considered to be a more employable option. When I was given the opportunity to fulfil my dream of studying art at this level I leapt at the chance. I fully participated in and enjoyed my two years at Leamington College.

Back then the dipHE course at Leamington was affiliated with Birmingham Institute of Art & Design at St Margaret's School of Art, where one more year's study would have given me my degree. I found the transition to the institute very difficult. I found the travel too much, the tutorial times too inflexible to mix with work, I failed to 'gel' with my tutor. I missed my old studio space and the tutors at Leamington, and moreover I couldn't find myself at home in the dark, untouchable spaces within Margaret St. I was making architectural intervention with electrical tape at the time and found myself at odds with the institution's need to preserve the fabric of the building. So I gave it 4 months, tried out a few things but didn't learn much, then dropped out with relief. So when I found out from another artist that Leamington was now able to offer a final degree year I jumped at the opportunity.

There is a question over choosing to study Higher Education at a college because they sit at the bottom of the educational hierarchy. However, as a former student here, and one who has experienced studying at a much larger university (3 yrs at Wolverhampton University straight after 6th form studying History of Art, English and Media & Communications) I can say that there are some clear advantages, and disadvantages.

I've already mentioned some of the reasons I failed to find study satisfactory at a larger, metropolitan college; time to travel, lack of dedicated studio space, inflexibility of tutorials because the sheer number of students a tutor has to get through makes it impossible to get through everyone. I think Leamington has a max. 30 students over all three year groups, including part-time students. At a larger art colleges only final year undergraduates generally get much of a tutor's time, but such small numbers give greater access to the tutor expertise, and they are all working artists. Visiting artists also have time to get round most students. Alongside division of available studio space into larger portions per undergraduate, greater apportioning of tuition is, I believe, a great advantage.

Definitely there are advantages to a larger course, and I believe that some miss the stimulus of other students around them, and although I don't particularly now, I am sure I would have if I was younger. Here I was glad to see that there was a good mix of students ages. In 2007 it was roughly half and half (I was in the older half at 35), and all the younger ones had left early for a variety of reasons which changed the dynamic of the course.

However, having a famous art college on your CV is undeniably helpful. The need to stand out of the throng is greater on large courses and probably drives ambition. You can get swept along with outstanding groups of developing artists, and there is more likelihood of influential persons and collectors turning up the the your end-of-term show simply because they get to see more in one place.

Despite the comparative obscurity of colleges such successes happen here too, particularly when a student takes marketing themselves into their own hands and reaches out further than the confines of their course. What has become clearer to me is that an art career is what you make it whatever background you happen to have.

My next blog will be more about my art over the first few weeks of the course. With photos, hopefully.

Links.
Warwickshire college, Royal Leamington Spa College website
https://www.wcg.ac.uk/page/93/royal-leamington-spa-college

Drowning Waking Dream

Some poems I'm daft enough to share.


Drawing

Eleven: Super-badged in nylon
a chevron glowing on my chest
soaring with eagles closer to the sun than anyone
two parts joy to three parts pride
five parts high on me

Until all that was left was to fall.
So I did.
Comming to at twenty four.
Years had passed floundering -
                                         soaked in invisible ink.

At Thirty-Five I finally felt alive

and in command again: forming a charcoal line
around the shapes I recognised.

Now at Forty-four, I’m less persuaded on what is certain

for if 'the book is read before it is written'*

reality cannot draw its own final curtain.

*line pilfered from Marc Auge.

Drowning Waking Dream.


In heroine's garb
I biked to victory,
but cycled from the path
into darker water.

Inkiness soaked me   
my costume loosened.
I knew I should get free,
but my wayward hands

gripped too tightly and we
met the riverbed as one;
the bike and Super Me.
Engrossed in my descent
I forgot not to breathe -

A seeking nostril drew
moist pillow air. Deftly
damp cotton twirled around
'til the fingers gave in.

I rose for miles and miles
effortlessly
via submerged skate parks,
reflected cedar trees,
verdigris shoals of bream.
I grasped at them
but failed to stay and dream.

~