vorfreude

... happy anticipation.

it's been in my diary for months now, and after seeing singing to the sea by bethan huws, i'm very much looking forward to an afternoon among text, crosswords, installations and a bit of video.

bethan huws il est comme un saint dans sa niche: il ne bouge pas, kestner gesellschaft, hannover 

hehehe, and with such an announcement i am creating a bit of zugzwang* for myself to write about it afterwards.

*being forced to make a move, usually metaphorically

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.

Eldon Group Show 2010

amidst all else, here's final a draft flier for the Eldon Group show 2010. While the group composition is in a bit of flux and may change, the opening preview is set.
Saturday 1 May, 11am - 1pm,
St Andrew's Gallery, University of Glasgow.

All else on this flier

not quite random

...for the weekend. and after.

portfolio week

... is now. with a grin on my face i'm mounting this and that. pulling another folder out out of the depth of 'underneath my bed' or 'behind my wardrobe'. oh, yes... i should have another drawing of this. somewhere. (there have been plenty of 'portfolio days' over the past few months but now we're approaching physical handover day on friday).

portfolio making is curating. in an a1 bookformat. as such it is intriguing: to observe the juxtaposition of disparate pieces in approach but in similar palette; to place next to each other sketchbook pages and a relief print from some time later as the latest development of a sketch. and to see and acknowledge the sheer amount of labour that has gone into this - visible and invisible - over the years. as well as the threads, lines of inquiry and departures across a variety of media and approaches.

a pair of fresh eyes, hands and thoughts and the resultant placing of sheets next to each other makes all the difference. thank you, l! though i know that you don't really see the point of painting ;)

this one is one of the sheets. the collagraph at the bottom was the result of my printmaking before christmas. i still need to retry the transfer process, have indeed already sanded the plate down a bit further, and want to try on coloured paper. but placed beside the flattest of flat relief print it starts talking in unanticipated ways. keep it up, i think. i'll be listening. or should that be watching?

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

Planning discoveries

I am currently working on the final assignment for the printmaking course. The project involves a monoprint plus relief print.

Part of the instructions reads as follows:

Begin by preparing several sketches and ideas in your sketchbook where you combine colour schemes, line drawings and designs. These will help you establish and decide on a final idea. Good preparation is always essential when preparing a new project. Do not be afraid to try different colour schemes using watercolours, inks or coloured pens and pencils. [OCA, Printmaking 1, p. 172]

Most of my print designs have originated so far from sketches done here and elsewhere, ideas captured as I come across and later referred back to. So, yes, there is a definite use for the sketchbook. But as far as the printmaking process is concerned, I have a hunch that the use of drawing media becomes somewhat limited. I think what I'm trying to grapple with is the sentence that

Good preparation is always essential when preparing a new project.

I fully agree. Agree on the basis that this is true when preparation is understood to be wider than the use of drawings in sketchbooks. Thus, preparation for the printmaking involves: printmaking. The making of a variety of marks, colour schemes, overprinting, wiping out on paper, different formats and different pressures when pulling the print.

To me it seems that the use of colour schemes is also limited when explored in sketchbooks. The property of the printing inks cannot be replicated through w/c, coloured pencils or acrylic ink; so, any sketchbook work is very preliminary.

For this project, I decided to prepare practically - by printmaking - rather than other media sketching/drawing. And in doing so, working my way through the various stages and its design/material/composition decisions that it required and how these related to the idea of an image I had in mind.

Starting point: The image in mind is one of a a series of very ripe cornfields in a late summer sun, somewhere along the Ruta 5, south of Santiago, Chile. A series of rather minimalist lines of the field patterns and some photos I took have been calling me persistently to do something with and the monotype seems a perfect opportunity.



Stage one: Preparing a ground for a monotype. I'm after a high chroma orange background to set the tone of the overall print. I'd like it to be densely build-up itself, before I begin with the monoprint itself. My first idea is to use a board of polystyrene and ink it up: first in hansa yellow, then in hansa yellow with a tiny bit of naphtol red. These two layers are done quickly. They dry with a heavy bumpy texture and form the base for more overprinting.

Stage two: Orange lines. I am experimenting with a darker orange/ red to overprint; trying out if I can cover the previous printing fully, partially, lightly. At some point I begin to scratch marks into in to: lifting ink with the palette knife.

 

Monotype, two layers polystyrene, one perspex plate, 20x20cm

And, I am ending up with beautifully thin lines. The plate, despite vigirous rubbing doesn't transfer strongly at all (probably because of the strong texture off the polystyrene layer), thus, the distinction between covered/uncovered orange areas is hardly discernible. What is however visible are these long, rather elegant lines where the ink assembled on the plate.

I think I have my lines for the monotype. I am unsure about the polystyrene effect though. It seems rather strong. It's very intriguing in itself, but possibly not for the design.

Planning: a process of experimentation and discovery. This can be done in a planned, systematic way. But I know that for my own working process, it needs to be step-by-step. Now, I may go back to the sketchbook to continue with the next stage.

There are some more prints that followed on from this discovery over at my other blog.

bliss in three bags yellow to crunchy

 

raisins, dates and crunchy caramelised nuts on my kitchen counter via jerusalem's old town

thank you!

bliss in three bottles purple

pickled beetroot with horseradish

1.4 kg beetroot
4 tbs fresh diced horseradish
1 tbs black pepper
1 tbs caraway seeds
3-6 whole cloves
1 bay leave
0.7 l white wine vinegar
125ml water
80-100g brown sugar
1 tsp salt

wash beetroot, cover in cold water and bring to boil for 25-45min, depending on size. peel and slice or dice. fill while still warm into sterilised jars (this lot made 3x 500ml jars), alongside horseradish and spices. boil vinegar, water, sugar and salt. fill jars with the liquid and seal immediately. it keeps for a minimum of six months; i had some of them for well over a year or two; great with olive oil and parmesan. the recipe asks for fresh horseradish but any strong horseradish sauce works as well (cream in sauce doesn't seem to spoil the pickle).

people do things

i am still thinking in blog, a lot of the times. so, there have been many beginnings or even full blog posts for the past couple of months. yet: many of them didn't appear here. i kind of used them as thinking tools for myself or discussed them in person with others offline.

so, it's been rather quiet. let me see, if that can change again.

one of the more persistent thoughts over the last week or so is one of amazement and surprise. it's a little game i've been playing with myself and which now is fairly explicit: what are the things that i do not need?

i don't like the virtue of frugality that this seemingly establishes. and i don't think that's what it's about. instead, i like it to be about the boundaries of what is normal and taken for granted.

looking back, i know fine well that among the best things that happened were two significant moves, one when i was thirteen and then when i first arrived in glasgow in the mid-1990s.  both of them were difficult, often lonely and in many ways fraught as they threw myself back onto myself and myself only.

and alongside, they became about the social ways in which normality is constructed:

'this is how things are to be done'
became a
'this is how some people like to do things in this place and in this time'.

office for sale

so, my thinking of the things i do not need is whispering to me: you leaving academia is going to be alongside those two moves one of the best things you've ever done. it's a quiet whisper currently, but it's been getting louder as i'm busy cancelling taken for granted unpaid administrative chores, begin to ignore esteem indicators and the 'must-do' calls... all taken for granted, for normal, as the things one cannot do without.

... in this particular place and time.

leaving that particular place, time and institutional context is making that explicit. and even if it is going to be only for a short time, i'm excited by my tax return, the mindmap of future work for the year and the fact that i now worked out a day rate for my work.

boundaries? made by people, mostly. need a good go at stretching, extending and if sensible, ignoring.

Paul McCarthy The Painter

is currently on display in a wooden box in Edinburgh's Dean Gallery. the wooden box is situated within their permanent room of the Paolozzi Studio, a sedate, if busy, still life assemblage of Eduardo Paolozzi's studio.

the box in which the film is screened on a loop is temporary, two temporary seats propped in two corners, the sound is poor. people came in, watched a bit, quickly left, an older couple left, came back for another look, came back again for another look. inside the wooden box, the busy noises of the gallery were constant.

education of contemporary art, in particular its means of productions, its economy and how it produces individual genius out of shit, who in turn inhabit the squalor. the box inside the studio as deliberate education too: look at what we can do by setting up a provocation, of creating a tension between two representations of art production.

4 3 minute wonders

they come by way of another film by luke fowler (bogman palmjaguar, 2007, currently on display the national gallery of modern art in edinburgh).

i spent a fair bit of time organising what it was that i've been doing with art in past, presence and future - how the formality of application procedures enframes the telling of a coherent story. in doing so, i stumbled again across the white room and my circling around it as an unfinished project. unfinished or in progress? these four glasgow tenement interiors are curiously related to the white, uninhabitated - or only at points inhabiated flat in berlin. they are fragmented, they are titled by people, these never appear, only in possession and the spaces they inhabit. hm... thinking... circling...