Red & Dead Again

graphite & putty eraser,with watercolour/30x20cm

Being the latest drawing to be processed, slowly against the prevailing natural 'light' conditions of the lingering & enervating seasonal gloom, from the subject/object matter of found roadkill 'Readymade Cubism', pleasingly compressed, crumpled & folded into a flatter reformed state than its previous in-the-round three-dimensionality, & displaying sufficient of a synechdochal fragment of its familiar brand name & design to allow a positive ID, along with another nod towards the naming-of-colours practice of Mr Jasper Johns, also more generally present in referential terms.

Soundtrack:


Low 'Things We Lost in the Fire'
The Woodentops 'Giant'
Elliott Smith 'Either/Or'
The Triffids 'Born Sandy Devotional'
Cat Power 'The Covers Record'

A soundtrack tending mostly towards the sombre (enlivened by a shot of Rolo McGinty's manic energy), much of that rather subdued too, befitting the seasonal atmosphere of cold, damp mists, everything deadened.

Venturing out into the chill embrace of such unwelcoming atmospheric conditions necessitates the appropriate insulation against, not least woollen headgear, woven – in the interests of aesthetic integrity (note the combination of style & substance!) – into a grid pattern, TOoT’s good old modernist friend & favourite...


Pleasing textural detail too, in the interests of both visual & physical tactility...


Not unlike, it may be observed, the grounds of a number of still life oil paintings-as-objects from the archives, of which this is but one example (circa 2001)...

Return of the Grid(s)

Delighted today to notice, upon passing the frozen pond as pictured previously on New Year's Day, the presence in the grid-format fence of a section patched by means of not just one but a veritable visual, formal feast of a further two grids, one of silvery wire in diagonally-halved form behind a bolder, stronger rusted iron one, creating a compelling, complex arrangement: modernism is alive & well into the post-noughties...





Further to the subject of diamond-format grid patterns, this wonderful image of Braniff Airlines hostesses modelling rather fabulous 1960s Emilio Pucci-designed uniforms is to be found within Stephen Bayley's sumptuous volume & intriguing thesis 'Woman as Design',


which pattern structure in turn brings to mind a visual analogy in the form of an example of Chuck Close's latter style of painting, in this case a self-portrait.


Chuck Close (from 'Close Reading' by Martin Friedman, Abrams, 2005)

More Grids

Today the opposite of tomato is ( )

Sometimes it's amazing just how serendipitous the occurrence of certain images can be.
Following on from the newspaper photo used as source material for the recent drawing featuring the check-patterned dress, came this picture, sequentially most appropriate & also perfectly relating in formal terms to the working methods of many artists, particularly those involved in the transcription of photographs.
Again, the lure of the old faithful modernist grid proved irresistible, particularly when presented in such an explicit form. Such a source image also provided the opportunity, the invitation, to transcribe it into a drawing in a classically systematic manner by a cell-by-cell process beginning in the top left hand corner, working horizontally to the right & then in this manner line-by-line vertically, to finish in the bottom right, the first time I’d ever attempted such an approach, this process being tempered slightly by occasional returns to make tonal revisions of certain individual cells as necessary once a more all-over tonal pattern began to emerge as the systematic process progressed.


graphite/20x30cm
original source: 'The Times' 22/02/08

As an example of the squaring-up & transcribing process, I shall cite the work & working methods of Chuck Close, to whom I’ve already made reference during the course of this year’s drawing-from-photographs project, illustrated by one of his measured-up ‘photo maquettes’ & then the finished painting, the scale of which is quite breath-taking when seen in relation to the artist himself.



Although this is an early work of Close’s & his technique & style have developed considerably since the 60s, still his adherence to the grid endures: indeed, it became & has remained an explicit element of the paintings’ form, with each cell its own perfectly-formed abstract picture within the complete brightly-coloured picture, the all-over patterned design from which can be discerned the figurative elements, coalescing & dissolving, of the human head upon which, in photographic form, it is based.

It’s fascinating, indeed, to trace the progress of the grid in Modernist painting, from its genesis in Cezanne's increasing statement of series of horizontals & verticals parallel to the picture’s edges, through the scaffolding of Braque’s & Picasso’s Cubism, to Mondrian’s gradual development culminating in his explicit, rigid, black-lined grid structures, & then the grid’s frequent subsequent recurrence in various forms in the work of such diverse artists as Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman & Close amongst others. Once referred to an ‘unreconstructed modernist’, the grid remains something to which I’m drawn…quite literally in this latest example of drawing practice & process!

Soundtrack:


Sigur Ros ‘Aegytis Byrjun’, ( ) & 'Takk'
Rachel Unthank & the Winterset ‘The Bairns’

More Visual Grids: Marion Manning’s ‘Tracking Dawn’ Project

It may have become apparent that the series of images serving to illustrate the previous 2 posts have been arranged in a grid format: this has largely been nothing more than addressing the practicalities of composing a number of related images in a visually manageable manner. However, the subject of grids seems to be a recurring one at present, & here is the pretext for bringing attention & linking to a series of images similarly arranged thus.

I’d been doing a little research recently into the use of grids in painting & other visual art as a sideline related to a current topic of debate & theoretical exploration (the relation between is very likely to prove fruitless, alas), &, in the course of this, chanced whilst Googling upon something I found rather interesting & very aesthetically inspiring. The something in question is a website featuring the Canadian artist Marion Manning’s ‘Tracking Dawn’ pictorial project, which, all in all, was a fascinating undertaking & produced some wonderful visual results - some, indeed, quite spectacular, sumptuous, gorgeous & ravishing: a veritable aesthetic feast.

Essentially, Manning took a photograph of the dawn each morning over the course of the year straddling the turn of the millennia, June 1999 to June 2000, & her website presents a record of this process. It’s particularly interesting how this project relates to another inspiring one I’d mentioned in an earlier post, that featured in the film ‘Smoke’, fictional in this instance, of course, of a series of photographs, taken on a daily basis, same time, same place, of the same prospect yet, by virtue of their incidental details, all in fact unique. Although, in order to accommodate the change in position of the actual point-in-time of the sun’s rising over the course of the seasons & year, the artist has in fact had to shift the object of focus to a certain degree, fundamentally the photographs are taken from the same vantage point even if the view is slightly different & changing over time before returning to its original focus. However, each dawn reveals this (essentially the) same typically North American subject in a different light & produces a unique result – in terms of light & colour, prevailing weather conditions, vehicular (/human) activity, etc - arranged in weekly, seasonal & ‘best of’ formats on the website, which is well worth a visit: it’s a lovely idea, creatively worthwhile & a beautifully realised documentary enterprise.