'Whistling' in the Dark...

graphite & putty eraser/20x30cm
original source: 'The Times' 23/06/08 (facsimile of edition dated 21/06/69)

This drawing was processed from an original image, published recently in facsimile form, depicting the first moon landing: the 'photograph' appears in fact to be, rather, a still from a TV camera, given its horizontally-lined nature which gives it an appealing texture for transcription purposes in terms of explicit attention to mark-making, which, as always, is the primary intention of the process, to make obvious the significant physical, temporal, hand/technologically-made differences between the drawings & their photographic sources.


J.A.M. Whistler 'Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso Bay'/1866
oil on canvas/29x19"


J.A.M. Whistler 'Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket'/1875
oil on canvas/23x18"

The nature of the original, where form, detail & spatial relationships are ambiguous at best, the whole verging on 'abstraction', put me in mind particularly of painted images of a century earlier, Whistler's series of 'Nocturnes', where, again, form & detail is submerged under the cover of darkness, thus enabling the artist to move beyond the strict confines of realism & endeavour, rather, to represent the atmosphere, the effect, of dusk & night, to move towards creating an art more complex than & independent of a mere reliance upon & fidelity to appearances, a more 'painterly', aesthetic place, where the attention of the viewer is drawn to the design of the image & also the technique of the painter & the materiality of the painting as a stained & brush-stroked, mark-made surface, the whole acting very much as a precursor to Modernist 'abstract' painting at the same time as the Impressionists were working to represent the physical & atmospheric effects & optical phenomena of sunlight, daylight, dissolving form into colour, describing the fugitive nature of appearances, drawing attention through their painterly technique to their paintings' facture, to similar ends.

Soundtrack:

'Test Match Special' Eng v SA, 2nd Test