The World Turned Upside Down

Today the opposite of tomato is ‘dance, dance, dance, dance, dancing to the radio’ (& singing along to ‘Transmission’ & other of the songs of Joy Division)


graphite/30x20cm
original source: ‘The Guardian’ 13/05/09

Featuring another drawing transcribed from a newspaper photograph compositionally featuring a distinct grid format (see numerous previous posts referring to the personal addiction to this icon of artistic Modernism), done so on a deliberate, resolved square-by-square basis as much as possible.

The drawing was actually made in the manner illustrated below, i.e. from the original source inverted.


The inspiration for this technique was that of the painter Malcolm Morley, observed doing so in a recently-watched DVD featuring the artist discussing his work in a most interesting, engaging & entertaining manner whilst painting.

The film itself is one of a whole series of interviews with individual contemporary artists produced by Illuminations, going under the umbrella title of ‘theEYE’. The films are most informative, being of a format that allows the artists themselves to talk – at about 25 minutes length – about their work whilst in its company or otherwise illustrated by specific examples of taken from across the individual’s career: the access this allows to the creative process, influences, techniques, etc, expressed in someone’s own words, builds up a fascinating portrait of a particular artist – with instant ‘influential’ results, as can be seen!

Returning specifically to Morley, the technique he currently employs is to take a newspaper photograph, divide it into squares (measuring & then cutting, rather than leaving it in one piece), squaring-up a canvas accordingly, & then attaching the inverted sections of the photo next to the square on which he will transcribe it, enlarged, faithfully, meticulously, in paint, physically working from the top left of the canvas across & down but of course transcribing the photo from its bottom right, upside down. In this manner, the image is only resolved when the finished canvas is inverted to reproduce the photo in its original state, & the working process is thus an accretion of small finished sections at a time – all, in themselves, individual abstract paintings that only exist in relation to their immediate neighbours as the process unfolds.

In this manner, working from the inverted photographic original & from, as habitually, top left to lower right, was the drawing made, being an abstract process disconnected from any figurative considerations, an interesting variation on the usual process of transcription.

Further to ‘theEYE’ films, I intended during the previous post to make mention of Gary Hume’s in the series, which had reminded me of his ‘Water Paintings’ & provided the direct inspiration for the related ‘overlaid images’ composite drawing from the tabloid ‘girlie’ original sources.

Soundtrack:


Scritti Politti ‘White Bread Black Beer’
PJ Harvey ‘Uh Huh Her’
Bjork – homemade compilation from ‘Debut’, ‘Post’ & remixed tracks
Wire ‘A Bell is a Cup Until it is Struck’
Low ‘Trust’
Luna ‘Best of’

and, in memory of Ian Curtis & the anniversary of his death on 18th May (1980),


Joy Division ‘Unknown Pleasures’, ‘Closer’ & ‘Substance’ –
still magnificent after all these years.

Seeing Double

graphite/20x30cm
original source(s): ‘The Sun’ 01/05/08 & the ‘Daily Star’ 14/05/08

As an attempt at something a little different, this transcription features a composition combining the images from two separate photographic originals.
Tidying up at work one day, I retrieved a discarded or forgotten copy of the tabloid newspaper ‘The Sun’. This publication in particular is renowned for its tradition of the ‘Page 3 girl’, in the best pin-up tradition, a topless pose of a young woman, of a so-called ‘glamorous’ nature, & I wondered if it might be possible to incorporate such an image into The Project, given its archetypal standing within the newspaper photo canon, & if such unambiguously titillating subject matter might be reclaimed in some way for art, if rendering such as a drawing, through the process of, might alter its reception & meaning in any way. Given that such examples from the history of art as many of the typical ‘Salon’ paintings of the 19th century as referenced & indeed transcribed recently could reasonably be claimed as & criticized for being made for similar purposes – although perhaps appealing to a more bourgeois audience than the British tabloid press’s target audience – I was concerned that such a drawing might merely fall into the same trap &, whilst a solution was intermittently contemplated, remained on hold as a ‘possibility’, but, then, subsequently retrieving a copy of another such newspaper, the ‘Daily Star’, containing a similar image, I was presented with an opportunity to attempt a different approach than what might otherwise be a more or less straight transcription. Another more recent example from the history of art more obviously displaying such 'glamorous' subject matter might be the work, in general, of the Pop artist Mel Ramos, which often references, in seemingly celebratory fashion, the world of advertising's use of naked young women's bodies to sell products of almost any nature, especially those that might appeal to men's sense of their own masculinity.

Hence the inspiration for this drawing – although itself being done on a considerably reduced scale & thus lacking much complexity - was an example of Gary Hume’s 'Water Paintings', which I saw as part of his exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1999, large-scale works of multiple, overlapping line drawings of nudes, based on magazine photos, punctuated by flat areas of colour (the lines in fact being the bare aluminium surface of the support), where the multiplicity of facial features, breasts, nipples, etc, renders their being read as belonging to any specific figure ambiguous.


Gary Hume ‘Water Painting’
household gloss on aluminium/1999