Testing the edges

I’ve been nibbling round the edges of the similarities and differences between drawing/photography in my work for some time now, and in fact the last few months have been dedicated to a reinvestment of time and energy in thinking about photography and about photographic practice.  While this hasn’t evolved into any work yet (although there are a couple of projects in the pipeline) it also started a small debate raging which almost ended up in studio paralysis until I realised that – rather than having to choose between the two media - the photographs I was making and the sorts of things I was becoming interested in photographically (sequences, layering, time, movement, blur, non-imagistic photography) were actually, drawing in its truest sense!

Now I’ve clarified this for myself I’ve been able to make so much headway into new work.  There’s no one direction, more a set of ideas which are being moved forward simultaneously, the core of which is an oscillation between analogue and digital practice in its widest sense relating to drawing/photography.

Daily practice

First week back at work and already it’s easy to sense the reduction in visual thinking that’s happening while I’m busy looking at grids and text on screens and paper.  Because I started blipping during the vacation it’s been difficult  to remember to do it since I’ve been back – that assocation of activities with places and times.  I’ve realised that what keeps me blipping is the principle of daily practice, the need (and desire) to keep a small part of the day devoted to making something, to being creative, to being an artist.  Since I’ve been back studio time has diminished, but keeping studio practice going when it’s not your full time occupation is about finding ways and means, angles and gaps, to think, and to make.  Sometimes the time allowed seems so slight, but somehow the necessity to spend those few moments thinking visually is incredibly liberating and leads to some quite unexpected images that are made purely through the action of attentive observation of my surroundings at the present moment.

Drawings for Siena

Made some new work for a show called Drawing Connections, based on my recent net drawing ideas.  Funnily enough after a lot of mulling over what to do the format (10x15cm) and the tracings I’d made lent themselves to the most simple execution – sequential tracings.

Jive Bunny, Graphite on Hahnemuhle paper 10x15cm

Drawing thoughts

The net drawings continuing apace.  Some key things occur to me as I’m making these:

I’ve noticed a ‘compositional tendency’ to creep in when I’ve been working, not that this is inherently problematic but something that I feel I need to note, and perhaps challenge in future drawings.

Exhaust/fade – a pure process response.  Without ‘compositional guidance’ when are
they finished?

Shadow/repetition – at the moment the layering occurs through the desire to create new forms from the original tracing, so the points of overlap are more random.  Haven’t
tried working in a more sequential, fixed way – yet.

Net variation

From a contour line drawing of leaves.. Unfinished at time of writing.

Leaves (in progress)

Tony Cragg

“Simple processes. With materials no one else wants. Ideas that interest me. Images that interest me. Made where people let me make them. The rooms, the walls, the floors. The physical framework. Emotional responses. Intellectual responses. Elegant works. Humorous works. Beautiful works. Decorative works. Ugly works. Works in which I learned from the materials. Works like pictures. Meanings I intended. Meanings that surprised me. Personal references. Cultural references. No references.”

TC quoted in Guardian article.  Full text here.

Fantastic.  Culture Show article on his show at Edinburgh was just great – I was particularly inspired by his elaborate and fanciful sculptures which have grown out of observations of ordinary, household objects, letting the drawing of them extrapolate and create new forms from old…

Tracing and repeating

Tracing and repetition creating a new phase of drawings – I’m referring to these as ‘net’ drawings in notes to myself purely for the way the layering of different shapes creates new patterns and a web of lines across the page. These are a new development and refer back to and extend the drawings I was making some years ago which started with a gestural scribble which was then cut free from the surface – creating a three dimensional line drawing in space.  I loved these drawings because I love the painstaking laboriousness of cutting out (an example here ), but I haven’t really pushed the idea as far as it could go (I was always more interested in the three dimensionality than the specifics of where the drawing came from) and so coming back to a potentially similar execution in the net drawings rekindles this old notion of the lines become lines in space rather than lines on a surface, and of the transition from image to object.

Shropshire Journeys