graphite, putty eraser & watercolour/30x20cm
original source: 'The Guardian' 16/06/08
Continuing 'the project within The Project', the 3rd drawing 'sectioned' from the football crowd original newspaper photo, reading to the immediate right of the previous entry, the cellular nature of the grid format helping the part serve for the whole, featuring as it & each does the same essential components of a person-framed-in-a-box although each face & expression is of course individual: the variety within the basic limitations serving to provide continued inspiration & freedom of expression.
This particular work (part & whole) enables me on this occasion to mention & cite as influential the work, & particularly the drawings, of Zak Smith, an artist discovered through his inclusion in the compendious survey of contemporary practice 'Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing' as previously mentioned.
Subsequently, suitably impressed, especially by the archive of work available to view on Zak Smith's own website, I invested in his book 'Pictures of Girls', which features a fine representative selection of the artist's work in various projects & allows access to a suitable study of his technique - labour-intensive, highly-detailed ink drawings with acrylic washes on plastic-coated paper which gives them a very distinctive, wonderfully fluid appearance - & equally individual style, what one might term essentially punkish & contemporary - peopled by characters very much of 'the now' - yet suffused with & quoting all manner of art & other visual references such as Klimt, Art Nouveau, Japanese graphics (contemporary & historical) & the western comic tradition, resulting in a densely-patterned, exuberantly Baroque aesthetic. Similarly, the form that many of the drawings take as individual, discrete parts of series references again graphic novels & both cinematic & literary narrative, works teeming, overflowing, with life.
The particular project of Zak Smith's to which I'd like to draw attention with which to contextualize the football crowd drawing(s) is his illustrative interpretation of Thomas Pynchon's vast, ornate novel 'Gravity's Rainbow'.
As may be observed below, this work, with a drawing produced to refer to some aspect of the text of each single page of the novel's total of 760, has, in addition to being presented in book form, like the novel it illustrates, been exhibited in its entirety, as a whole entity, where one might choose to view it for itself in such a form, & narratively, page by page, drawing by drawing, cell by cell of its grid format, or otherwise free-associate between various separate drawings, up, down, backwards, forwards, diagonally, jumping across at will, reading them in a very postmodern, non-linear, rhizomic fashion.
Also included is an example of a couple of the separate pages of the project, again illustrating the artist's general technique & the method - which has directly informed the football crowd drawings - of applying local colour to certain areas of the otherwise starkly monochrome drawings.
With the football crowd drawing, it seemed an obvious choice to primary-colour the various headgear & replica shirts of the supporters.
Soundtrack:
White Stripes 'Elephant' & 'De Stijl'
Elliott Smith 'From a Basement on the Hill'
Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man 'Out of Season'
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