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'.

Card Sharp...

Today the opposite of tomato is 'an English lady of a certain age'


graphite & putty eraser/20x30cm
original source: 'The Guardian' 14/11/08

Another newspaper reproduction chosen for the specific ‘photographic’ quality of its tension between focussed & blurred elements, the capturing of a split-second of the movement of a body across the picture plane. Note too the grid-like arrangement of the background (that again), a display of postcard-sized artworks that, through the drawing process (& the subsequent scanning & blogging-of), become representations of representations, reproductions of reproductions, taken to another level (& beyond).
At a superficial level, the blurring references, again, the photographically-derived ‘un-paintings’ of Gerhard Richter, currently haunting this resource on a regular basis.

Returning to the recently-posited notion of ‘de-photography’, ‘dis-photography’, & the various processes of ‘de-photographication’ or ‘de-photographization’, Richter suggests himself as an exemplar of such not only through his painting from photographic sources, & the painterly results of such, but also with his series of overpainted photographs, itself a significant, discrete body of work, where oil paint is applied to the physical photographs themselves, transforming them into another more formally & aesthetically complex, multi-media, ‘painterly’, material object altogether, coloured & textured - & altered in terms of ostensible subject matter & image content - by the application of the paint upon their surface, thus ‘de-photographized’.

Another example that might illustrate the nascent concept is that work of Matt Bryans, as previously mentioned, whereby the artist alters the appearance of selected newspaper reproductions of photographic images by the physical process of erasure of particular areas, creating another, different image in so doing.


Matt Bryans
installation view of erased newspaper photographs

As might be observed, the resulting image retains pale traces of that content which has been erased - the process of which can only be of a partial nature & never physically complete given the fragile nature of the newsprint itself, its surface & substance rendered more so by the action of erasure, making the ephemeral source object more ephemeral still, as the image itself appears – giving a ghostly, haunting quality to the new artwork, the ‘de-photographized’ image-object, that, given an eraser’s role as a drawing tool, could be said, perhaps, to exist as a form of drawing, ‘re-worked’ from printed source (on paper, traditionally the base material of drawing).

Soundtrack:


Lambchop 'OH(Ohio)'
Cabaret Voltaire 'Living Legends'
Divine Comedy 'Victory for the Comic Muse'
Galaxie 500 'Today', 'On Fire' & 'This is Our Music'