eindruck_ausdruck [aka reflections 2]
impression_expression
imprint_exprint
inprint_outprint
ein_aus
on_off
the limitations of translations mark out the cheesiness of the simple polarity of impression and expression. i remember back to how i could never remember, or rather: differentiate, which method defined which school: what was the inside/outside, stimuli/response of the impressionists and the expressionists. it took a long time until i remembered that the former were the keen outdoorsy ones, soaking up the world in all its fleetingness to then express these impressions.
eindruck_ausdruck signify research and art. the keen observation of empirical facts, relations and circumstances. the correct identification of these impressions stimulates research. it is impressed, never to be impressionistic. how different from the cheap and hazy thrills that paint offered on canvas. and colour even. my heart races, my gullet sings with adrenaline and it all turns into colour and mark on canvas.
simple. isn't it.
departures to define a break with observation, impression, towards one of gesture and mark, expression.
i remember being scalded for not being expressive enough about my national, if not international expertise.
i remember the impressions left from fraught research relations and the bewilderment of others if these were dared to be expressed.
i remember the realisation that the kind of politics that mattered did not have a place. could not have a place in the institution (see expressive expertise).
observations that fed the lack of expression as the expressions i would seek were not sought.
i remember the excitement of the problems that a canvas could posit.
i remember the recognition that only close observation could resolve whatever expression.
i remember the boredom with proclamations that artistic expression was all that was needed.
present memories that simply are the internal relations of eindruck_ausdruck. they only exist in each other, are one everchanging dynamic. one
Showing posts with label OCA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OCA. Show all posts
Saturday, 25 December 2010
eindruck_ausdruck
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Wednesday, 17 November 2010
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.
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.
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Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Saturday, 11 September 2010
more on time travel
the ghost of time has been with me throughout the last year. it has become a structuring device. an organizing framework for sense-making. it allows me to time travel. so I did last Sunday night – my neighbour’s loud and evident love at 4 am for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7o3uTemxpg&feature=related put me firmly at a table, at the entrance of the t-keller with some rioja and him, some time in 1999; and as the associations tumbled along, it was a year and one day that I sat in the kitchen of the white room and suddenly had words for that restlessness in my body and my heart. a restlessness intermingling with fear. not the ordinary fear of the world outside but the ordinary fear of the world inside. in fact, the fear of that restlessness. that there would only ever be restlessness. that at all crucial moments in time, these would be inscribed by restlessness. those sensations that travel from my gut up to the back of my throat, shedding adrenaline through my body, making it tingle everywhere.
high alertness and yet nowhere to move.
the ghost of time as expression of a past as it inflected on the future in the very present. it is my specific time travel: backwards and forwards and then let it all collapse into the now. has noone ever thought of this before?
once the words were written at the kitchen table while it was getting dark outside, they took concrete form. rather than another pdf on my hard drive, they called for moving further, onto paper, into print and illustration. that transformation of the bodily sensation into external document was deliberate. as I had written about taking pictures to the framer and thereby externalising them, giving them their own subject being – one so much less owned by me, so was this.
it was a gift, a memento (and so much mori), to him, but even more so to myself. psychoanalysis has probably clearly defined terms for such externalising of loss and grief. it becomes material and thus separate from the self.
looking back at the traces on the blog I am surprised how it also became intimately tied up with my departure – a physical and a mental one during October and November. looking at the posts I don’t remember several of them – if the presence is so full, I find that it leaves little space to be remembered in detail later. so while I was leaving and yet staying, the ghost of time did precisely that: it ghosted my time in absence. marked out a space of loss in the present that was past while I was practising the future. looking back at this I feel intensely grateful. for having taken it so serious for all those years. those years were important. and for this departure.
so, the ghost is alive. it has a name, a cover and a blue dust jacket. in all this he’s circulating – circulating without me, on his own. as much as there is continuity in the memory of loss, there can be other continuities. I am aware of how they are wilfully productive: productive of all kinds of conciliatory and soothing emotions. as if the world operated as a tit for tat.
I was going to write some more about the sense-making of one’s experiences by others. but, as often, i. has provided me with good questions which in the process reveal much more about my own sense-making than that of others. inspiration can work through all sorts of ways and produce all kinds of resonances. it is not as such an indicator for trying to trace authenticity. it only serves a reminder to myself who the ghost of time will always be for me. a moment in the past that restructures all possible futures in any present.
so, why not have some more of this. another glass of wine? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynhChNKRVB0&feature=related
high alertness and yet nowhere to move.
the ghost of time as expression of a past as it inflected on the future in the very present. it is my specific time travel: backwards and forwards and then let it all collapse into the now. has noone ever thought of this before?
once the words were written at the kitchen table while it was getting dark outside, they took concrete form. rather than another pdf on my hard drive, they called for moving further, onto paper, into print and illustration. that transformation of the bodily sensation into external document was deliberate. as I had written about taking pictures to the framer and thereby externalising them, giving them their own subject being – one so much less owned by me, so was this.
it was a gift, a memento (and so much mori), to him, but even more so to myself. psychoanalysis has probably clearly defined terms for such externalising of loss and grief. it becomes material and thus separate from the self.
looking back at the traces on the blog I am surprised how it also became intimately tied up with my departure – a physical and a mental one during October and November. looking at the posts I don’t remember several of them – if the presence is so full, I find that it leaves little space to be remembered in detail later. so while I was leaving and yet staying, the ghost of time did precisely that: it ghosted my time in absence. marked out a space of loss in the present that was past while I was practising the future. looking back at this I feel intensely grateful. for having taken it so serious for all those years. those years were important. and for this departure.
so, the ghost is alive. it has a name, a cover and a blue dust jacket. in all this he’s circulating – circulating without me, on his own. as much as there is continuity in the memory of loss, there can be other continuities. I am aware of how they are wilfully productive: productive of all kinds of conciliatory and soothing emotions. as if the world operated as a tit for tat.
I was going to write some more about the sense-making of one’s experiences by others. but, as often, i. has provided me with good questions which in the process reveal much more about my own sense-making than that of others. inspiration can work through all sorts of ways and produce all kinds of resonances. it is not as such an indicator for trying to trace authenticity. it only serves a reminder to myself who the ghost of time will always be for me. a moment in the past that restructures all possible futures in any present.
so, why not have some more of this. another glass of wine? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynhChNKRVB0&feature=related
Sunday, 15 August 2010
Too many legs for those cranes
... there are some images that keep stirring around my head. One, are those of Lucia Noguiera's film Smoke (1996) that I saw in parts at the Tate on Tuesday. I wish I hadn't been so annoyed by Francis Alys's posturing and would have gone back again to see this rather quiet film about a performance involving kites, umbrellas, two kiosks, a bench and little else.
But: the other image is captured and a bit more considered than this glimpse at Smoke.
It involves a colourist woodblock print, done in the Great Norther Wastes somewhere in China, and is part of the current exhibition at the British Museum on The printed image in China.
After having seen a couple of printmaking exhibitions in the gallery space of the BM I find the space too stuffy and archival for prints that were so clearly concerned with the world around those who made them, commissioned them and used them - like those in the Mexican revolution or now the 20c Chinese prints.
The texts that go alongside the prints are in part banal, in part patronising: either it's political as in propaganda, or it's not political as it concerns a landscape.
This print here is thus, arguably, about a backward, idyllic rural scene. Done by a generation of printmakers and other artists, the Beidahuang movement, who joined 100,000 demobbed soldiers in the late 1940s to 'cultivate' the plains.
The print caught me (unsurprisingly) for its colourist qualities: those fields of hue and contrast.
Yet, upon closer inspection:
Surely, the artist would have been able to match up his separate woodblocks in a way to match bird body with bird legs; and surely he would know that sedges don't grow on bird bodies?
So, why did he divert, subvert or at least distort such realistic representation of rural life in the Northern Wastes. I wonder if the author of the accompanying text is right with their comment that such "nostalgic scene is typical of his lyrical, colourful style".
So, is political only accepted as party political ideology? Is there not so much more going on, that is not easily read from without? Says she, thinking of the great commentary that Frontier Blues provided of northern Iran, also part of the culture programme in the big city last week.
As for the printmaking:
But: the other image is captured and a bit more considered than this glimpse at Smoke.
It involves a colourist woodblock print, done in the Great Norther Wastes somewhere in China, and is part of the current exhibition at the British Museum on The printed image in China.
Country Sentiments/ Xiangqing by Hao Boyi (b. 1938), 1983,
Woodblock print in oil-based inks and colour on paper, c40x55cm
Woodblock print in oil-based inks and colour on paper, c40x55cm
After having seen a couple of printmaking exhibitions in the gallery space of the BM I find the space too stuffy and archival for prints that were so clearly concerned with the world around those who made them, commissioned them and used them - like those in the Mexican revolution or now the 20c Chinese prints.
The texts that go alongside the prints are in part banal, in part patronising: either it's political as in propaganda, or it's not political as it concerns a landscape.
This print here is thus, arguably, about a backward, idyllic rural scene. Done by a generation of printmakers and other artists, the Beidahuang movement, who joined 100,000 demobbed soldiers in the late 1940s to 'cultivate' the plains.
The print caught me (unsurprisingly) for its colourist qualities: those fields of hue and contrast.
Yet, upon closer inspection:
- Why are there so many more legs than cranes?
- And, why does the sedge grow across the birds' bodies?
Surely, the artist would have been able to match up his separate woodblocks in a way to match bird body with bird legs; and surely he would know that sedges don't grow on bird bodies?
So, why did he divert, subvert or at least distort such realistic representation of rural life in the Northern Wastes. I wonder if the author of the accompanying text is right with their comment that such "nostalgic scene is typical of his lyrical, colourful style".
So, is political only accepted as party political ideology? Is there not so much more going on, that is not easily read from without? Says she, thinking of the great commentary that Frontier Blues provided of northern Iran, also part of the culture programme in the big city last week.
As for the printmaking:
- many of the prints make explicit use of water-based inks and how they disperse on damp paper. There are some very good examples of that, e.g., Dawn Melody/ Chen qu by Lu Fang (born 1932), 1983
- also: it seems common to handcolour part of the prints later
- as David Hockney mentioned, there is something curious going on with perspective. - It's obvious in some of the prints, such as Sunrise at Nanhu/Nanhu richy by Shi Handing (born 1930), 1981. - The horizon line is variable and objects don't necessarily recede. I need to have a closer look at this and what possibilities it affords.
- as to Hao Boyi, the artist of Country Sentiments, there seems plenty more of him around the inet. Look at his work and the context. Maybe I'll even find something about the missing cranes' bodies?
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Monday, 9 August 2010
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)
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Saturday, 7 August 2010
klee's uhrpflanzen
... i found them last night when collecting the bits and pieces to complete my printmaking logbook.
klee's concerns with time - when time falls apart as in Die Zeit, see the post here - occupied me before. so, while searching for examples of how artists use simple printmaking techniques - notably monotype - i finally understood how klee's oelpausen - as an oil-transfer technique work: essentially as monotype backdrawing done on a paper covered with oil paint. - that much for technique.
it produces characteristic shadows. but again, the concept grabs me: uhrpflanzen - watch plants. the ambiguity of language in german as it refers to ancient plants also; and in english: watch plants. watch for them and watch them change. my brain is turning around this.
the synergy between concept and technique is one of observation, taking note: the visual imagery is rather similar, albeit differently produced, to my one of my wild carrots drawing.
but here's first the watch plants.
klee's concerns with time - when time falls apart as in Die Zeit, see the post here - occupied me before. so, while searching for examples of how artists use simple printmaking techniques - notably monotype - i finally understood how klee's oelpausen - as an oil-transfer technique work: essentially as monotype backdrawing done on a paper covered with oil paint. - that much for technique.
it produces characteristic shadows. but again, the concept grabs me: uhrpflanzen - watch plants. the ambiguity of language in german as it refers to ancient plants also; and in english: watch plants. watch for them and watch them change. my brain is turning around this.
the synergy between concept and technique is one of observation, taking note: the visual imagery is rather similar, albeit differently produced, to my one of my wild carrots drawing.
but here's first the watch plants.
paul klee, uhrpflanzen, 1924,
oil-transfer and water colour on paper and board,
46x30.5cm, musees royaux des beaux-arts de belgique, brussels
Friday, 6 August 2010
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.
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.
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Thursday, 22 July 2010
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.
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.
Friday, 16 July 2010
zig.zag
... back to the fields in the land from jarman's personal political colour field of digital blue.
this one i haven't watched, just saw that youtube has it as 10-min parts. however, it figures prominently in my mind of the labour and work that has gone into cultivating a field. it served as a reference point for numerous geography fieldtrips to the west coast of ireland. it also figures prominently as to relations of property and the consideration of belonging - and of those who do not belong, by property or presence.
seeing the dominance of the church, pain and the pastoral also can refer to the pain of the pastoral. the pastor as pain. now, there's a few more openings along the way.
but. here's the opening of the field (1990, ireland, jim sheridan)
this one i haven't watched, just saw that youtube has it as 10-min parts. however, it figures prominently in my mind of the labour and work that has gone into cultivating a field. it served as a reference point for numerous geography fieldtrips to the west coast of ireland. it also figures prominently as to relations of property and the consideration of belonging - and of those who do not belong, by property or presence.
seeing the dominance of the church, pain and the pastoral also can refer to the pain of the pastoral. the pastor as pain. now, there's a few more openings along the way.
but. here's the opening of the field (1990, ireland, jim sheridan)
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Monday, 12 July 2010
... and then it's blue
(D. Jarman, 1993). only in excerpts so far.
it's a conclusion in more ways than one. the highly saturated hues of journey to avebury are replaced by the colour of jarman's increasing blindness.
so, a film that consists of a single 'image' - the blue of one man's blindness. the blue inspired by yves klein's monochromatic paintings. it's all and nothing it seems to me. it's a refusal - to turn one's struggle with hiv-related illnesses and approaching death into a film-able narrative. so it's a social and political positioning. without images other than blue, the image recedes - in it's all-encompassingness - to make way, to heighten one's senses of voice, sound and music.
strangely, i find the hues of avebury far more disconcerting. somewhere i read a review of 'this garden of eden'. it could well be that 38c in berlin is frying my brain a bit too much, but the sickly hues of avebury shout at me: pain and the pastoral. the pastoral as pain.
it's a conclusion in more ways than one. the highly saturated hues of journey to avebury are replaced by the colour of jarman's increasing blindness.
so, a film that consists of a single 'image' - the blue of one man's blindness. the blue inspired by yves klein's monochromatic paintings. it's all and nothing it seems to me. it's a refusal - to turn one's struggle with hiv-related illnesses and approaching death into a film-able narrative. so it's a social and political positioning. without images other than blue, the image recedes - in it's all-encompassingness - to make way, to heighten one's senses of voice, sound and music.
strangely, i find the hues of avebury far more disconcerting. somewhere i read a review of 'this garden of eden'. it could well be that 38c in berlin is frying my brain a bit too much, but the sickly hues of avebury shout at me: pain and the pastoral. the pastoral as pain.
Thursday, 8 July 2010
take a journey
to avebury, with derek jarman (super 8, colour, 1971, 10mins). images rather than a film.
look! it' so full of colours! how beautiful is the countryside!
i saw it yesteday at ngbk's excellent exhibition on goodbye london - radical arts and politics in the seventies.
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
noting change
... is nothing extraordinary since the world is constantly changing. - a phrase that still sticks in my mind. heard over ten years ago when trying to piece together a long piece of writing.
how true. and still how difficult, not to shout at: oh, there is change! how unusual!
needing frameworks that are suitable for the unforeseen makes my application of frameworks often a bit undecisive. [while all the while building complex, flexible systems in my mind].
so, here's a bit of change. a new template, some rearranging of the sidelines and most importantly: some play with the content of this blog. a recent unsubscription note reminded me of the fact that this blog has for some time not been about 'paint and pastel'.
waymark number 1: pain and the pastoral. with an ensuing observation of the meaning of bucolic. still in digestion, and all the blogger wizadry (and snail pace) tonight is enough to make the promise of a bit of thinking around the current blog title.
i have also revised my decision of a separate learning blog paint and pastel: study. it is far less tedious as i feared (notably because the main writing still takes place offline) but that also means that there are rather few postings and the division between here and there does not make much sense any longer. so, i imported all the post from there to here - they may show up in your blog reader.
still imageless for today. you can look at the background though (if it doesn't hurt too much).
how true. and still how difficult, not to shout at: oh, there is change! how unusual!
needing frameworks that are suitable for the unforeseen makes my application of frameworks often a bit undecisive. [while all the while building complex, flexible systems in my mind].
so, here's a bit of change. a new template, some rearranging of the sidelines and most importantly: some play with the content of this blog. a recent unsubscription note reminded me of the fact that this blog has for some time not been about 'paint and pastel'.
waymark number 1: pain and the pastoral. with an ensuing observation of the meaning of bucolic. still in digestion, and all the blogger wizadry (and snail pace) tonight is enough to make the promise of a bit of thinking around the current blog title.
i have also revised my decision of a separate learning blog paint and pastel: study. it is far less tedious as i feared (notably because the main writing still takes place offline) but that also means that there are rather few postings and the division between here and there does not make much sense any longer. so, i imported all the post from there to here - they may show up in your blog reader.
still imageless for today. you can look at the background though (if it doesn't hurt too much).
Saturday, 12 June 2010
recordings
... used to happen here much more frequently.
they have moved since. but, frankly, it's a bit of a mess. i am trying constantly to figure out how and what and also for whom i am recording.
i am thinking back to the many discussions i. and i used to have about diary writing, about keeping records. for ourselves or for others. i am also thinking about diaries burnt on a frequent basis so as not to leave a record.
part of my current recording mess is to do with teaching instructions: to keep a logbook of your learning. hah - something i turn to also when i am teaching. reflective journals abound to provide a space to externalise, reflect and thus absorb more easily what is to be learned.
do i record textually, visually, aurally? organised by subject; by approach; by who it is for?
all these questions stop me from recording. i need to figure out the entirety before i can get started. and the entirety needs to provide plenty of openings for unforeseen developments. oh dear... thinking and living in wholeism can be a bit daunting.
so, i'm devising ever more journals in my electronic journalling software notetaker (very good, exc. that it is not half as integrative as it claims to be, and exporting to pdf is a bit of a pain); have written notebooks (divided in three; currently: General/Research - Art - Skills work); and plenty of sketchbooks, divided into portability, assignment work, and general.
my plan is to work on 2-3 art projects at any one time; my plan is also to organise these a bit like course modules. there are three in development: (1) soundworks/ (2) landscapism art, naturally/(3) body identity makings. the middle one is the most clearly formed (somewhat easily so: it's a more decisive interrogation of my fieldwork paintings/drawings/prints to take in also an urban element (beginning with matta clark) and some details of nature). the media for these will largely be drawing and printmaking (etching) for the next year.
today, (2) landscapism in art, naturally, acquired its first page in the new a3 sketchbook that will be the overall holding file for it. phew. that only took me six weeks, largely due to my recording hang ups, see above.
happy recording - wherever and however.
they have moved since. but, frankly, it's a bit of a mess. i am trying constantly to figure out how and what and also for whom i am recording.
i am thinking back to the many discussions i. and i used to have about diary writing, about keeping records. for ourselves or for others. i am also thinking about diaries burnt on a frequent basis so as not to leave a record.
part of my current recording mess is to do with teaching instructions: to keep a logbook of your learning. hah - something i turn to also when i am teaching. reflective journals abound to provide a space to externalise, reflect and thus absorb more easily what is to be learned.
do i record textually, visually, aurally? organised by subject; by approach; by who it is for?
all these questions stop me from recording. i need to figure out the entirety before i can get started. and the entirety needs to provide plenty of openings for unforeseen developments. oh dear... thinking and living in wholeism can be a bit daunting.
so, i'm devising ever more journals in my electronic journalling software notetaker (very good, exc. that it is not half as integrative as it claims to be, and exporting to pdf is a bit of a pain); have written notebooks (divided in three; currently: General/Research - Art - Skills work); and plenty of sketchbooks, divided into portability, assignment work, and general.
my plan is to work on 2-3 art projects at any one time; my plan is also to organise these a bit like course modules. there are three in development: (1) soundworks/ (2) landscapism art, naturally/(3) body identity makings. the middle one is the most clearly formed (somewhat easily so: it's a more decisive interrogation of my fieldwork paintings/drawings/prints to take in also an urban element (beginning with matta clark) and some details of nature). the media for these will largely be drawing and printmaking (etching) for the next year.
[the 2-3 limitation is a bit of a cop out, easily unmasked: there are as much as 20-30 strands on the go at any one time, and i maintain that i can maintain these with ease... ever optimistic]
today, (2) landscapism in art, naturally, acquired its first page in the new a3 sketchbook that will be the overall holding file for it. phew. that only took me six weeks, largely due to my recording hang ups, see above.
page 1, monotype, 20x25cm
happy recording - wherever and however.
Friday, 11 June 2010
The Quillet
Bren Unwin, The Quillet
[all else to follow in a couple of days... again in the need of a hosting site]
Monday, 31 May 2010
peter lanyon
has made it on my list for the land art investigation.
i hadn't seen his work before. but richard's course on modern and contemporary art at the tate britain last week introduced me to this one here:
i think it was my favourite painting of the lot. - in far as my emotional response goes. i love it for its colour balance and rythm, emphasised by the strong gestural marks. the rythm of calm and dynamic. it depicts the tragedy of the flooding of the tin mines in levant, cornwall. the tin mines were under the seabed and too close digging under the seabed led to their flooding with the loss of 39 miners' lives in 1919*.
see this bbc archive for some information on the cornish tin mining industry.
so, a couple of books on lanyon and lanyon's landscape paintings are ordered. it's been a while that i was that intrigued by a painter. there is a potential, from what i've read so far, that his landscape work actually provides a radical departure over previous landscape genre obsessions with harmony, a hiding of ownership and power relations in the landscape. i'll wait on the post delivery to read on.
*this is the information given on the tate website. i did some reading about the levant mining disaster and can't find any reference about flooding; instead, the miners were trapped and suffocated when the mechanical ladder on which they ascended after a shift broke and brought some of the shaft down with it. an incident from the mid-19c is the mining disaster at east wheal rose, where 59 miners died when shafts flooded. see the wiki entry here. i will wait to read more about the painting to get a sense which tragedy lanyon referred to.
i hadn't seen his work before. but richard's course on modern and contemporary art at the tate britain last week introduced me to this one here:
Peter Lanyon, Lost Mine, 1959, 183x153 cm, oil on canvas
Tate Britain
i think it was my favourite painting of the lot. - in far as my emotional response goes. i love it for its colour balance and rythm, emphasised by the strong gestural marks. the rythm of calm and dynamic. it depicts the tragedy of the flooding of the tin mines in levant, cornwall. the tin mines were under the seabed and too close digging under the seabed led to their flooding with the loss of 39 miners' lives in 1919*.
see this bbc archive for some information on the cornish tin mining industry.
so, a couple of books on lanyon and lanyon's landscape paintings are ordered. it's been a while that i was that intrigued by a painter. there is a potential, from what i've read so far, that his landscape work actually provides a radical departure over previous landscape genre obsessions with harmony, a hiding of ownership and power relations in the landscape. i'll wait on the post delivery to read on.
*this is the information given on the tate website. i did some reading about the levant mining disaster and can't find any reference about flooding; instead, the miners were trapped and suffocated when the mechanical ladder on which they ascended after a shift broke and brought some of the shaft down with it. an incident from the mid-19c is the mining disaster at east wheal rose, where 59 miners died when shafts flooded. see the wiki entry here. i will wait to read more about the painting to get a sense which tragedy lanyon referred to.
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contextual studies,
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Sunday, 23 May 2010
houses
the book on gordon matta-clark found my way as an intervention for my current interest in land art; the dangers of a rural and remote idyll.
so matta-clark's work is a forceful pulling back into the city; into politics of development, speculation and the destruction it produces as a necessary moment within.
the land art rests for the moment as i'm working on the final set of printmaking pieces. a series of four. which i decided to be about lived in and visited spaces. rooms i lived in or visited. some old, some new, some fleeting some persistent. the prints are to be a combination of all things i learned in the course so far. so: probably culmination is a better word rather than combination.
two of the images will be new ones; two will be translations into print medium of existing images.
the home/house/interior relates to some of the sound art i recently come across, heard, saw, pondered. it concerns the spaces that are demarcated by subjective responses to the places we inhabit. the boundaries these spaces establish: of access, of use.
there is a lot more to be said and done about this. most of this is taking place off-screen and i have been coming to use the blog here more as an uncommented but carefully assembled holding space. i seem to be working in messy clusters these days.
the last point opens up to the how? can i work on these issues in art/research? can i play with these in art/research? can i learn about these? can i learn about these with others?
i think these will serve well as starting questions for the next few years. there will be some visuals too. but first, take this one little intervention
so matta-clark's work is a forceful pulling back into the city; into politics of development, speculation and the destruction it produces as a necessary moment within.
the land art rests for the moment as i'm working on the final set of printmaking pieces. a series of four. which i decided to be about lived in and visited spaces. rooms i lived in or visited. some old, some new, some fleeting some persistent. the prints are to be a combination of all things i learned in the course so far. so: probably culmination is a better word rather than combination.
two of the images will be new ones; two will be translations into print medium of existing images.
the home/house/interior relates to some of the sound art i recently come across, heard, saw, pondered. it concerns the spaces that are demarcated by subjective responses to the places we inhabit. the boundaries these spaces establish: of access, of use.
there is a lot more to be said and done about this. most of this is taking place off-screen and i have been coming to use the blog here more as an uncommented but carefully assembled holding space. i seem to be working in messy clusters these days.
- there is the one about about interior spaces, subjectivity as well as disappearence;
- there is another one that is developing out of my previous work on fields, landscapism, a thorough look at landscapenature;
- and there's a third that is starting to ask questions: questions about knowledge production in art. the methodologies of artistic production and how these can be explored.
the last point opens up to the how? can i work on these issues in art/research? can i play with these in art/research? can i learn about these? can i learn about these with others?
i think these will serve well as starting questions for the next few years. there will be some visuals too. but first, take this one little intervention
Saturday, 22 May 2010
one art
One Art
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Interior spaces
In the middle of my series of 4 for the final print assignment, i'm returning to last summer's engagement with henri matisse. notably his cut outs and his constructions of interior spaces.
there are two images that caught me as to the spaces they establish and subvert.
one is the
While Matisse is first and foremost a painter, and thus possibly a bit misplaced in the Contextual studies pages of my Drawing logbook, I would like to discuss and have a closer look at Matisse's painting, and in particular his interiors and still lifes.
The questions to consider are
How does he compose his paintings? In particular
The background with fireplace and two sofas seemed to be straight at eye level; as for the construction of the sofas, the left one sees the female figure floating on it, suggesting that the one plane we see is indeed the seat itself rather than the front panel; the sofa to the right in contrast does not seem to have a seat but only consists of back and front panel. But both sofas sit on the same floor line.
We seem to be looking for high up down onto the carpet and the top of the fireplace. Although the front of the fire place suggests that we are also looking at it side on.
There's a major change in perspective happening around the chess table and the two chairs. I traced the space of the chair legs and the left one stretched far into the back ground of the picture while the right chair's legs look fairly undistorted.
There are significant developments as to his perspective in this painting, and an earlier one (Harmonie Rouge 1908) - marking a difference to earlier ones:
- the flattening of space,
- the reduction of concrete objects into a space that isn't concrete and the simplicity with how objects are represented
- the space he establishes also contains metaphorical reference: the world as perceived and conceived. (Flam 1982, p. 30)
There is also some material on the convergence of Matisse with Russian Iconic art and a particular reference to his construction of space. [The author uses 'convergence' rather than influence, which strikes me as curious. He mentions the painting here also, which precedes Matisse's visit to Russia.]
These points were discussed on the OCA forum. The particular insight that emerged for me from that discussion is the way in in which the paintings seems to pivot around a central axis through the chess board. In summary, there are the following points to make:
Without this discussion, I probably would have not considered the painting in more depth - the pattern and overloaden interior set up would have stopped me. I find it too frilly, fluffy and busy for me to dwell on it. It seems too decorative and too symbolic. However, the analysis of the picture plane opened up an interesting discussion on perspective conventions and the details of how an apparent flatness is indeed carefully constructed and achieved. It has also been insightful as to the dynamics contained in the convention of family portraits and interior settings.
Now, this has also been part of my printmaking research - what is there with the spatial constructions that I can take from it for the final series of prints?
Go. Figure.
there are two images that caught me as to the spaces they establish and subvert.
one is the
Henri Matisse, The Family of the Artist, 1911 (oil on canvas)
Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia (© The Bridgeman Art Library – London, New York, Paris)
Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia (© The Bridgeman Art Library – London, New York, Paris)
Henri Matisse, The Blue Window, 1911
130 x 90 cm.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
While Matisse is first and foremost a painter, and thus possibly a bit misplaced in the Contextual studies pages of my Drawing logbook, I would like to discuss and have a closer look at Matisse's painting, and in particular his interiors and still lifes.
The questions to consider are
How does he compose his paintings? In particular
- How does he achieve balance and harmony (two elements he is particularly noted for)?
- How does he construct spatial dimensions in his paintings?
- He is well noted for depth in his paintings which works against conventions of perspective drawings
- (a) the compositional arrangements of drawings - notably still lifes; and
- (b) ongoing consideration over how to construct space and depth within the picture plane
The background with fireplace and two sofas seemed to be straight at eye level; as for the construction of the sofas, the left one sees the female figure floating on it, suggesting that the one plane we see is indeed the seat itself rather than the front panel; the sofa to the right in contrast does not seem to have a seat but only consists of back and front panel. But both sofas sit on the same floor line.
We seem to be looking for high up down onto the carpet and the top of the fireplace. Although the front of the fire place suggests that we are also looking at it side on.
There's a major change in perspective happening around the chess table and the two chairs. I traced the space of the chair legs and the left one stretched far into the back ground of the picture while the right chair's legs look fairly undistorted.
There are significant developments as to his perspective in this painting, and an earlier one (Harmonie Rouge 1908) - marking a difference to earlier ones:
- the flattening of space,
- the reduction of concrete objects into a space that isn't concrete and the simplicity with how objects are represented
- the space he establishes also contains metaphorical reference: the world as perceived and conceived. (Flam 1982, p. 30)
There is also some material on the convergence of Matisse with Russian Iconic art and a particular reference to his construction of space. [The author uses 'convergence' rather than influence, which strikes me as curious. He mentions the painting here also, which precedes Matisse's visit to Russia.]
"Sometimes Matisse's pictures and the icons are said to be "flat" because they lack Albertian perspective -- as if space were dependent upon such perspective. This, too, is an error, as will be made clear by our investigation of the nature of pictorial space. This investigation will begin in the following paragraphs, and will be taken up again and deepened later in this essay.I found this very useful for understanding some of the limitation of perspective and how Matisse's complex treatment of colour and form establishes a depth of space which works at time with, at times against perspective.
Our experience of space in the world is largely kinesthetic, dependent upon the sensation of our bodies' movement, our feeling of the forces of gravity and equilibrium, and the ever-varying correlation between optical stimuli and eye movements -- including binocular convergence, accommodation to focal distance and parallax. This elementary fact is forgotten by those who think that space is achieved in painting by optical verisimilitude [had to look this up: something having the appearance of being true], with its shading of volumes and its atmospheric and linear perspective approaching the effect of photography. An arbitrary "snapshot," the epitome of a purely optical impression, gives us a jumble of variously shaped tones removed from their spatial context. From being accustomed to viewing such flat images, whether in photographs or in academic "realist" paintings, we develop a "space blindness." The eye seizes upon recognizable details and, by a conventional sort of "leap of credulity" accepts the flat image as referring to things one has experienced in the world. The difference between flatness and space collapses.
The opposite happens in great paintings. There our experience of space is heightened. In a masterpiece of Matisse -- or of Rembrandt or Raphael, Giotto or Picasso or Mondrian, for example -- a feeling of depth is created by the pushing and pulling of shapes and colors. All the lines and tones are organized, at once musically and architectonically, in such a way as to give the viewer movement into and out of depth; and this depth is made palpable by the tension between it and the flatness of the pictorial surface. The real experience of space in a painting is not quantitative, dependent upon the suggestion of deep vistas; rather, it is qualitative, dependent upon the resonance of the tension between the flat plane and all the pushing and pulling planes of color. The difference between flatness and space is not collapsed in painting; it is amplified." (MATISSE AND RUSSIAN ICONS:
The Metaphysics of Pictorial Space by Lazarus James Reid, http://jacwell.org/Supplements/Matisse%20and%20Russian%20Icons.htm#Note16).
These points were discussed on the OCA forum. The particular insight that emerged for me from that discussion is the way in in which the paintings seems to pivot around a central axis through the chess board. In summary, there are the following points to make:
- There is an overall impression of harmony in this painting; it is achieved by repeating patterns (diamonds) and more importantly by red, black and white as unifying colours.
- The sense of harmony betrays the complex social relationships that are displayed in the painting;
- Examining the perspective, anti-perspective and construction of the picture plane gives some indications to these tensions - Anne's observation of a central axis along the chess table was a very important observation for this: so, people are distorted, float or huddle in the pictorial composition.
Without this discussion, I probably would have not considered the painting in more depth - the pattern and overloaden interior set up would have stopped me. I find it too frilly, fluffy and busy for me to dwell on it. It seems too decorative and too symbolic. However, the analysis of the picture plane opened up an interesting discussion on perspective conventions and the details of how an apparent flatness is indeed carefully constructed and achieved. It has also been insightful as to the dynamics contained in the convention of family portraits and interior settings.
Now, this has also been part of my printmaking research - what is there with the spatial constructions that I can take from it for the final series of prints?
Go. Figure.
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at
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contextual studies,
interior,
My prints,
OCA,
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space
Saturday, 15 May 2010
conical intersect
by gordon matta clark may just be the thing to continue with in my little line of disappearances.
slightly different scale though
slightly different scale though
Posted by
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at
20:20
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Labels:
(in)visibilities,
installation,
OCA,
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urban
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