Going Digital #2

A second drawing made with the new digital pen, again a tracing based upon an artist’s drawing acting as a guide in the interests of exploring the instrument’s mark-making potential. After beginning with Cezanne, we now draw upon Giacometti as the template, given his distinctive mode of mark-making, & his drawing transcribed from Cezanne’s portrait of Victor Choquet, an appropriate coincidence with a mind to continuity & dialogue: Giacometti, indeed, made a number of studies from Cezanne’s drawings & paintings, over the course of many years (dating from the 1920s onwards), exploring a range of styles in the process of doing so.


tracing after Giacometti, biro on tracing paper, 30x20cm

As with the previous example, the tracing necessarily loses something in translation, as the semi-transparency of the paper & the subsequent marks upon it serve to obscure some of the subtleties & details of the source image: this, of course, can be regarded as a good thing as it allows the new drawing to become a thing in & of itself, at a distance from the reproduction of the original (in the volume ‘Cezanne & Giacometti: Paths of Doubt’).
The physical fact of the use of different media – organic, responsive graphite pencil for the original, the machine of the less subtle & versatile biro for the tracing – also emphasizes such distance & difference, which the digital reading of the pen drawing, as processed digitally, then intensifies.

Again, it’s a fascinating process to trace an artist’s hand & moves, in this instance trying to replicate Giacometti’s explorations at arriving at some degree of resolution to the problem of achieving the form of the image he was studying & using as his model, charting a course through the labyrinth of gestures, the flow of constant revisions, the gradual honings & homings-in, as recorded by his pencil & evidenced below.


Alberto Giacometti 'After Cezanne: Portrait of Victor Choquet' c.1950
pencil on paper/30x31cm

As before, the digital version of the the biro pen drawing as read by the receiver & subsequently uploaded to the computer displays quite differently from the marks as made upon the sheet of tracing paper, appearing distinctively much in the manner of a drawing made with a fibre tipped pen, broader again in its communication of lack of variation of touch.


Finally, the digital image as converted into a text via a Word document, with perhaps not as many looped characters as might be expected to appear, apart from a smattering of lowercase t's, instead again favouring uppercase Es & Yen symbols: no meaning, of whats, hows or whys, seems to be discernible!

ftItTeFeEEeEEEEIiEtFEFf¥tEytIfIh¥Ei¥¥tItTEt*t¥tItIE¥FttttiTIPh¥ypMgP
testate'ttttt¥tttt*i¥EIIgoIt¥t*oei¥ttd*t
tha¥#¥e##*

Sculptural Influence

Today the opposite of tomato is the art of Alberto Giacometti

graphite & putty eraser/20x30cm
original source: 'The Times' 18/03/08

The process of this transcription - of a wonderful Cartier-Bresson photograph of Alberto Giacometti in the presence of one of his sculptures - was carried out whilst also having at hand some examples of the artist’s paintings & drawings as reference material, something else to look at & consider: I admire their unique style a great deal, they’re a constant source of fascination to study, the process of their making laid bare through the explicit statement of the network of cumulative lines & layers of which they are composed, the constant revision to which the becoming-images are subject, intensely thought, ‘worried’, into existence. Thus, both Giacometti’s graphic work & his sculptures seem to have had some small subconscious influence on the subsequent drawing & the process of its making, with it displaying a greater variety than has become usual in terms of mark making, & having been similarly worked back into in a more ‘sculptural’ manner, the fingers holding the putty eraser coming into much closer proximity to the surface of the paper. The subject’s wonderfully craggy features - putting one in mind of those of WH Auden & David Hockney’s drawn portrait of - might well have exercised some positive influence too.


Alberto Giacometti
'Portrait of Annette' 1954


Alberto Giacometti
'Apple on a Sideboard' 1937

Soundtrack:


Martha Wainwright
Belle & Sebastian 'Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant', 'The Boy With the Arab Strap', 'Push Barman to Open Old Wounds'