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.