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'.

Fashionable

Today the opposite of tomato Is a Woman & A Sad and Beautiful World


graphite & plastic eraser/20x30cm
original source: 'The Guardian' 03/03/08

This striking image presented itself as suitable source material for transcription due to a number of factors.
Again, it displays that classic photographic dynamic between a sharply-focussed foreground object & a less distinct distance, giving a palpable sense of space to the picture plain. Furthermore, the lovely halo effect around the background silhouetted figure presented a technical challenge in its representation &, as a solution, offered the opportunity to use the eraser to make marks in a positive way rather than its more usual application as a subtractive, negative-positive tool.
Secondly, the composition itself & the tonal contrast between the black forms & all that lovely white space, cool & minimalist, perfectly suiting the subject matter.
Apparently, the inspiration for this particular Vuitton collection, by Marc Jacobs, was in part the film ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’, one I recall enjoying in the not too distant past along with another Wes Anderson work, ‘The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou’, perhaps an acquired taste but most enjoyable if one goes with the flow & flights of fancy, & visually stylish & seductive.

Soundtrack:


Tori Amos 'Boys For Pele'
Low 'Things We Lost in the Fire'
Sol Seppy 'The Bells of 1 2'
Rachel Unthank & the Winterset 'The Bairns'

One of the pleasures of listening to music whilst working, & thus searching for something different for a change for such purposes, can making a reacquaintence with an artist or album that might have strayed from one’s aural radar. Such a case in point occurred on Sunday afternoon in the form of Tori Amos’s mighty ‘Boys For Pele’, which supplied well over a sprawling hour’s worth of wonderful songs & shifting moods: a real treat.

I’m not sure just how essential music is or seems to have become to the working process – it’s certainly a most enjoyable & inspiring aspect of such – but it was interesting to recently encounter an alternative view in the shape of the opinion expressed, during a recent BBC TV ‘Culture Show’ feature, by the artist & retired musician John Squire, who, despite his past & the assumptions one might make based upon that, claimed to prefer not to listen to music whilst working as “it marked time” & this was something he was keen to avoid, rather engaging in & with painting as a ‘timeless’ activity, free of such a particular restriction. Developing from his earlier Pollockesque covers for the Stone Roses records, his recent work seems interesting from a visual – formal & technical – perspective, incorporating the use of a range of fabrics & collaged material embedded in layers of wax encaustic & paint, & also the ideas informing it, essentially dealing with the complex mix of notions of Englishness, as the artist’s statement claims.


John Squire 'No Recommendation for Clemency' 2007
Encaustic, oil , wool & paper on hessian
40x30"