sketch experiments

i mentioned that i took some laminated drypoint paper with me to iceland, didn't i?
having started to put into practice my 'spending time at the print studio plan', i've begun to finalise and edition some of the plates that have accumulated but needed a printing press.

so, here are, invariably titled greetings from grimsey; otto helms, grimsey; or: opa uelzen war auch auf grimsey. titling through memorised tool: i took the swiss army knife my dad had rescued and cleaned from one of my, by then rather confused, granddads 'de-cluttering' sessions (aka: throw everything you have in the nearest nettle bushes). while the knife doesn't go everywhere, it made it to iceland and was a rather able tool of choice for some drypoint experiments. and while it's unlikely that he ever would have come along to iceland (travelling was  definitely more  his wife's thing), i very much enjoyed the thoughts the improvised tool provided for the journey and after.

four 'postcards' from the island, inked up as intaglio and printed on one sheet. each card is about 7x10cm.

chickens don't just scratch

now with improved animation and sound that isn't straight out of the recorder (or indeed a location).
there is hope yet for a boiling mud pot remix.
happy oyster catching!

more movement

... in poses and on paper. human form this time and no chickens in sight.

cluck cluck

... the orange of the previous template was hurting my eyes just a little bit.

so. here's a new theme. and a rudimentary animation of some chicken (yes... they are chicken) as they picked after oat cakes in kew gardens a few weeks ago.

cluck cluck the chicken moves. here and there.
what's it after?
paint. pastel. pain. the pastoral.

cluck cluck in vain

DCs in graphite

klee's watch plants resonated with these drawings of the wild carrots: the first one done on day 2; the last one done on day 7. so, any changes to be observed are clearly due to the plant growing, flowering and moving from bud to seed pot; and not with any inability on my part to observe or draw accurately, of course!

daucus carota, day 2 and day 7, graphite on paper (a2)

the weekly growth

of my wild carrot bunch lies already two weeks back. i'd be curious to see what they may look like now. should i ask my dad to venture out to the patch (i'm sure he'd find it) and take a pic?

the intervening weeks have been eventful: plenty of reading and a collagraphy workshop at the print studio. i also watch the imagine programme about david hockney. there's two significant things to take from it:

(a) the problem that is western perspective. how it's catapults the viewer out of the picture plane. and hockney's many attempts to re-enter that plane, by focus on movement and by tracking the many perspectives that our eyes actually see as we watch.

(b) presence and mortality in the countryside. it's somehow a bit clicheed: go back to nature to get a sense of beginnings and ends and the neverending cycles thereof. but it nonetheless led to a series of (quiet) notes to myself.

more practically, i took a step towards my idea of temporality of the daucus carota plant by ordering two accordion sketchbooks - hockney's example of drawing the mess of a yorkshire hedge as individual plants in a moving book is being transposed not the wild carrots but the wildly growing border in our backyard.

i'll fill the book with the border. i'm confident that there will be more wild growing plants in the border than the pages in the book. i know that if i was recording flying insects i would loose - there seem to be virtually none around whatsoever. what change to the fields and the field from a month ago.

the moving imagery i find for this is a bit limited...

here's a slideshow of an early part of hockney's 3 years in Yorkshire: a series of watercolour paitings:


And some more of plein air scenes of the same wood throughout the year:


but lushest are probably the stills of his paintings at google.

daucus carota

... is all i'm saying and seeing these days.

thoroughly back in the fields, there's no metropolitan video art to keep me distracted. instead, i'm with the weeds - one of the 'usefuls' [someone will giggle afar], as the pragmatic german language defines.

the wild carrot. daucus carota. or queen anne's lace.

someone has a better camera than i do. and while i'm patiently doing 50x70cm studies each day of my favourite bundle of wild carrots, i fear i'll be missing some of the details on this page. but, i may just as well have 1/3 sec [7 frames] of a daucus carota animation movie.

fields in detail. and in movement. phew. that seems to be going to somewhere new, doesn't it? maybe a little bit.

here's someone else's fascination with the wild carrots.

it's done.

no, not the long overdue drawing assignment 1 but the final one of the three portfolios that so definitely have gotten in the way of markmaking exercises. it arrived safely with my for only a £9 surcharge on the plane and it's unwrapped and photographed (albeit the latter poorly). the forms are filled in and the particular form of german cv writing adhered to (i hope!).

it's been a strange kind of process: sifting through, ordering and framing on a1 board 2+ years of artwork and thus objectifying it, framing it by a narrative of development while letting some (or many?) of the openings shine through.

it made it a lot clearer for me what kind of development process a degree course in fine art is. and what it is not. i have been pondering the statement of 'having a too developed portfolio' and the context of a mature, though self-trained' style. it's stuff i've come across over the three years of reading and following other blogs while feeling my way along with my own and my own art practice.

i'm glad that mine is framed at the moment by an a1 portfolio. feels fitting to where i am. i hope they'll see that in the same way.

here's the slides:

and now to more light and shade and the many gradations inbetween.

Procedural drawing

in resonance with some of my drawing and markmaking sketches, i was intrigued by vivien's post on a javascript-based online drawing too, mr doob's harmony.
most of my uses of photoshop are to do with precisely that: shopping photos and not all that much more. with perseverance i can produce a map, a layer mask or similar but that's all a far cry from using it as a drawing and painting tool.
i have brushes on my iphone but find that if i fancy a sketch i rather take out the sketchbook than the phone.
but with the harmony surface, and it's limited yet rather complex brush tools, drawing at the computer becomes something different: it's rendering, the shades and lines build up in interesting, and in some of the tools complex manner.



have a look for yourself, here