Storytelling

Today the opposite of tomato is ‘Sideways’

Perhaps it’s because of currently reading ‘Vermeer’s Camera’, as previously mentioned, and consequently considering a number of the artist’s paintings, but the narrative appeal of this sequence of original newspaper images, illustrating a fashion feature on the new season‘s ‘statement shoes’, suggested it/they might make a suitable subject for transcription. This composite drawing - and indeed its individual parts as processed - therefore remains faithful to the sequence of images as printed in the hardcopy of the newspaper, which served as my model, and also the online version.


graphite/52x30cm
original source: 'The Daily Telegraph' 12/03/08

The accompanying feature as written-edited, however, presents the narrative of the shoes as worn, tested, in another sequence, as, indeed, does a short film of the same.


Furthermore, to add to the fluidity, the ‘shufflability’ of the narrative, & thus the story they might tell, they are sequentially arranged in my sketchbook - inadvertently skipping a page between the first & second drawings, which blank space subsequently became filled with the third - in the following order, different again, as dated: 01/04/08, 03/04/08, 02/04/08. How we read a sequence of images, especially in the print or visual broadcast media, subject to editing and presentation, is perhaps often taken for granted, even when the story they tell might not be that as it happened, in real time. What stories may be told, using the same basic raw materials: the possibilities are open to numerous interpretations, agendas, etc…

I must admit that, if the sequence of photographs was originally composed & published thus - not strictly depicting the story as written-told, but illustrating it all the same - for aesthetic reasons, then this is the only ‘truth’ in which I’m really interested & with which I’m concerned. Didn’t someone once release an album of music entitled ‘This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours’..?

Soundtrack:


Spiritualized ‘Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space’
Tricky ‘Maxinquaye’
Charlotte Gainsbourg ‘5:55’
Belle & Sebastian ‘Push Barman to Open Old Wounds’
Lambchop ‘Aw, C’mon’ & ‘No, You C’mon’
Sigur Ros ‘Takk’
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds ‘Best of’

Been enjoying more of a musical catch-up, this time including the brooding, unsettling magnificence of Tricky’s masterpiece ‘Maxinquaye’ & the grand guinol of much of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ earlier work, the oft-murky depths of the breadth of which are a pleasure to submerge oneself in, surrender to: many an intriguing narrative too. The power of both of these albums (& some of the originals from which the Cave selection is culled) remains undiminished through or by time.


Watched ‘Sideways’ last night, for the third time, & enjoyed it more than ever: a quietly wonderful & beautiful film, with a perfectly-realised narrative, fuelled by wine & the pleasures of its drinking but encompassing much human nature within its journey. All that Californian space & sunshine appeared most attractive too…