Musical Interlude

Inevitably, given the supplementary presence of music here at Toot, accompanying the drawing process & acknowledged as doing so within the scope of the posts, a number of items caught my eye in the current edition of ‘Modern Painters’ magazine, which, broadly, is subtitley-devoted to the theme of ‘Art and Sound’, with a selection of related features within.

Firstly, as the subject of the recovery & rediscovery of items from the garage-bound cassette collection is currently in the air, this piece by former Stone Rose John Squire (about whose work I posted previously here), featuring examples of such very objects, aestheticized within a collage, themselves:


Then, again utilizing objects pertaining to the physical manifestations of recorded music, the work of Ajit Chauhan, including an oil painting of an LP record (was going to prefix that with 'old-style', but they do still manufacture such objects & release music in the format)


&, particularly - given that acts of erasure form a significant positive element of my own habitual mark-making drawing practice - the erased, altered album covers that exist in themselves & form the component ‘cells’ of the multi-part work ‘ReRecord’, as reproduced on the Saatchi gallery website.

These images, with much of their original content abraded, the surface scoured to whiteness, leaving behind only a selection of details (particularly hairstyles), thus take on an air of strangeness (even if the source might, in some instances, be recognizably familiar & possibly reconstructed in the viewer’s mind from the synechdochal clues on offer), especially as the individual facial details are absent, a quality of ‘otherness’ not dissimilar to Matt Bryan’s drawings created by erasing details from found newspaper photographs, although the latter are perhaps more ghostly in appearance.

Also, the Joy Division-inflected work of Slater Bradley, & the various artists contributing to the not inconsiderable body of work centring on the subject of another mythologized, iconic rock music figure, Kurt Cobain.
All interesting stuff, illustrative perhaps of a certain vitality to be discerned in the cross-pollination of forms of artistic practice.

On an unrelated point, other than its featuring in a current publication, this wonderfully nostalgic selection of archive images illustrating the 'Sanderson look' of interior design & decoration, from the latest edition of 'Design Week'.