2010

A couple of drawings, graphite and charcoal, to get the year underway. I’m tempted to add colour, but last year I learned about applying discipline to my practice, so I’m letting light and dark out for a play for a while, to see what happens…

New work in the third book

Looking at where my interest focuses just now I think I have found a new archetype image to play with…

This last image shows another artists work – I do not have the name unfortunately, the facing page is my response to that work.

For ‘Praxis’

 

These are the pieces I am contributing to the  Stage Three students end of year Exhibition ‘Praxis” to be held at the TLC campus in Taita, Wellington, NZ over months end, hanging on my studio wall before I wrap and pack them up this week.

This piece is one of the results of the exploration of the red dot as a ’sign’ or symbol, brought together with another commonly encountered form of the sign – words, specifically four letter words linked by the fact they are all ’s words’ (or ’swords’ as my love of puns breaks out yet again). I also rather enjoy the fact that the letter s and the letter f derive from similar old forms and to a novice eye reading old written language are often confused. They, like the dots, share similar forms but are all different, all unique, even those that look alike are in fact different words because they reference different things. So here, for those who like philosophy I am playing with sense and reference as well as form and repetition, figure and ground, colour and tone, symbolism and reality. I also like the way the entire piece resembles a commercial paint manufacturers sample card complete with idiotic varietal nomenclature. The dots by the way, are paint on paper, fixed to the canvas with a single dab of glue, so they are not part of the painted ground, but lightly resting on it, fighting gravity and remembering their horizontality in process.

This piece is Bookworm, made in autumn 2009,  the painting that started the entire red dot journey off for me when I realised the ‘bites’ could also be read as holes allowing a view through the ground into another dimension, in which case, somewhere there was a pile of red dots. And sure enough, there were. And what a merry chase they have led me on…

This piece is the end of the red dot journey, and is a direct response to several things I have encountered this year. It is a drip painting a la Pollock, the materials have been severely tested under a heat gun developing blisters and burns, hot paint rivers and pools driven into drought. It has appeared in multiple incarnations on my TLC blog throughout the year, from bone matrices to hidden surfaces to the cross icon marked grid, never quite dying of boredom but never quite reaching any acceptable level of satiety, until it at last provided a roosting place for the involuntarily and abruptly orphaned dots. And even then it had something to teach me before finally clawing it’s way to a state nearing completion, a small lesson that still has the power to make me grin. Another little visual pun.

And on the other wall there is my first deliberate hidden surface piece, which pays respectful homage and gratitude to my tutor for this year,  Australiasian painter of incomprehensible theoretical dimensions,  Peter Adsett. The deliberate theft of his floating line is both referential and symbolic, the best luck I had this year was when the other tutors tossed my name into that Too Hard basket. Thank you Peter for both the laughter and for keeping me sane and standing still under the onslaught of fools and idiots.  Alongside it two small sign pieces, labouring the point for those who still don’t get it, and on the other, a larger more complex and personal expressive collaged piece which just now wears the title ‘Cacophony’, with a smaller balancing collage that speaks of seeing and language and staying true to the vision. And finally, closest to the camera, the four rounds, black and white, minimally developed pieces that I still hold strong doubts about including, but they are I think the seeds of a future pathway with their roots firmly in 2009, and for that reason I will send them.

And there are the two Doubt books as well, because I promised I would send those too.

I apologise for the poor quality of the pics, I am no photographer, and the blurring and loss of detail is my fault not the the cameras. As always, the work is better in the real.

I hope.

A new start

With the arts study year coming to a close over the next fortnight I have finally edited out the ‘no’ pile and hung the ‘yes’ pile on my studio wall and invited comments from knowledgeable visitors, strange passers by and live in critics alike and the decisions are all made. That left a lot of empty space so I rearranged a few things to give me something to occupy the blank spaces. In doing so I discovered that one end of the studio – the exhibition end is very in your face, loud definite colours, clear shapes and (I hope) pretty direct responses to the years work, and the other end is calmer, quieter and probably much more appealing. Interesting discovery.

On the studio table are a gathering of the small square canvas blocks in process before I rebuild them for sale, and as they sat drying I picked up an earlier canvas from the years work and started a few modifications to that one too. Funny the way things turn out, I think this now just might morph into something I actually quite like…

There is a kind of scraped back old dinghy feel to this in real life that doesn’t show up so well on screen. It’ll be fun to see how it turns out…

A freshly painted wall

is completely irresistable for me, I have to fill that gaping space. Perhaps that’s why my waistline is so generous, this acute sensitivity to emptiness! Still, there is a reason for all this blutack activity and pressing of new pin holes – I have to sort out some ideas to display some of the years work at the end of course students ’show of work’…

Pages

The joy of the little Doubt books is that they provide an ongoing experimental space, a stash book, and a place to think out loud. No page is ever really finished, it just absorbs more information as time goes on. Some of the pages are getting really interesting now. And some of the things that end up making part of the page surfaces are pretty interesting too. Interesting peculiar maybe…

Taking the red dots to the wall

I am working on a large multiple piece for the end of year exhibition. It is a continuation of the red dot exploration, and is built on recycled table mats – easily obtained, stable and ecofriendly. I’m using acrylics, medium transfers of stolen imagery, collaged found papers and any other material that leaps out of my daily life and grabs me by the throat. Although some of this material is representational and pictorial, the processes I use change and alter these, with luck shifting them into a new state of being. Some of these multiples are coming close to completion now, so they are meeting the wall, to see if they translate from their horizontal beginnings to a vertical existence as finished art work. They are, as all my work is, subject to change.

And on the table beneath, more are beginning to be built.

Digital art…

I’m getting old. I find myself looking at the glossy fantasmagorical results achieved by those adept with photoshop and feeling the irritation mounting. It’s probably just technoenvy, but I cannot help thinking it is just a little too easy to shift a cursor or hit a button to drag an image into an imaginary memory space instead of on a table, with paper, paint, inks and glues. There’s no dirt, no torn edges, no waste piling up on the floor around the feet, no swearing and cursing when you can just ‘undo’ a mistake and return to a previously saved image. And then there’s the thought that I could make art by candlelight – it might even improve it – but without power the digital artist is completely stuffed.

The two Doubt series books are building nicely now, the colours are getting more intense, I’m coming across new text blocks to steal almost daily and they are a joy to play with.

And onward…

I work on several projects at the same time. It’s pure impatience. If I have to wait for a surface to dry, or a glue to take I can get sidetracked into unimportant timewasting activities like housework or surfing the internet. It also helps me break up my physical stance – important when you live with arthritis. Movement is a precious ability, if we don’t use it, we lose it, and I’m fast running out of joints to move. So I have become one of those annoyingly wide focused people with lots of things underway, and few ever finished assignments. On the table at the moment I have more dots in process. These ones are not lightweight paper punch outs, these are Dots with a Capital D for Sit Up and Pay Attention. Accordingly I have set up a little production line and I’m taking my time to build up a really lovely deep surface on these before I even really start work on them. And by deep I mean multiple gesso layers, sanded and sealed, and now I’m adding titanium white acrylic and lots of shine to preserve the brushmarks as the surface builds. The aim is complexity under the eventual final surface. Once again this is all about the paint, the brush, the depth and the edges – food for the senses, while the mind puzzles out the intellectual challenge of each piece. The production line work is pleasingly mindless, it has a beginning, a middle and an end – very restful after a morning spent reading about the whys and wherefores of academic research. The studio looks like this -

So, while each of these disks sits drying and hardening I have started another book, to be made up of the heavy paper drawings I’ve made this year – some of which I’ve shown on this blog over the previous months. Most of those are now randomly cut, scored and folded to make pages. They were double sided drawings, always intended as pages, but the cutting makes that identity real, and as I pull away the remainder of each I feel a tiny pinprick of regret because there is always a price when you alter a finished piece to fit a new purpose. I cannot throw out those left behind pieces. They’ll probably reappear in my submissions to Dale Copeland’s International Collage Exchange next year, something that is already starting to hover in my creative planning mind, it’s always a joy to take part. I had already cut, glued and covered the planned hardcovers for this book, but as I gathered the pages and looked down at them in my hand I’ve decided to make another book format for these, one that has an open binding. The folded inner edges are just too beautiful to hide away in an outer spine. The outer edges are not nearly as beautiful. Yet.

So now I’ll need to delve into my past work folders and find page potential for the set of covers currently drying and pressing under a stack of files. It would appear I have still another book to think about. Funny isn’t it? The way books multiply all by themselves…

The books…

I have two artist books under construction, using papers ‘made’ during this year. These two small journals will now accompany me on my travels over the term break and into next term, acquiring new layers and additions, and with luck will directly reflect in some part the new knowledge and experiences I have gained this Stage Three year at The Learning Connexion. Making them to just this very early stage has re ignited my delight in bookmaking, and I have this itch to make more, but maybe two at a time would be ‘good eating’ as my father would tell me. These might suffer, if there were more to fill, so I will engage ‘discipline’ lever and restrain myself for now.