Whatever It Is

Whatever It Is

Another New Studio

I’ve had a mixed January after time off over Christmas. Lots of time spent trying to get an app from Unity onto the app store, I must have spent twenty hours and it still won’t go on so I’ve resorted to putting the Doncaster Platonics app on the Artivive  App.

It works, which is great, but it costs money to use for anything other than minimal output and there would be further charges if the works were viewed more than a 1000 times in a month. That might seem to be a lot of views but the five Platonics drawings are each individual artworks so that’s 200 views each.

Whatever It Is

Christmas Tree – Oil on Board

While I was at home I painted a Christmas tree, because it was Christmas.

Bird Skeleton

I missed several days studio work after discovering water dripping down onto my stairs from the skylight. This proved to be a hole in the roof so that needed sorting, mostly involving waiting for tradesmen to turn up to quote and then sitting around while the one I chose did the job.

While I was in the roof cavity, off my cellar studio I found the skeleton a small bird, I think it’s a sparrow, and I took it into the studio at c-view to draw. This is 140 cm x 80 cm pencil and pastel on paper. This was started on the 12th of January.

Small Fox

I also painted a small fox while I was waiting around at home and did a lot of digging in the garden.

Whatever it is

Bird Skeleton with Red

On the 15th January I was able to get into the studio again and added some red to the bird skeleton and worked over the shadows and some marks on the paper with white paint. I managed to get help to deliver the lemniscate  to the NHS at Barnsley Hospital and also got some photographs taken of the work I’ve made at c-view for prints and a new website.

Bird Skeleton with red wash

I got back into the studio on the 19th January and painted the background of the bird skeleton with red ink.

Studio 23/01/2024

I also started a new half sized maquette for the three trees variations in cardboard. I finished this on the 23rd January and made a lidar Polycam scan.

Three Trees Maquette drawing

When I returned to c-view on the 24th I started a drawing of the three trees sculpture, I’ve also explored this in the sketchbook.

Three Trees Maquette drawing

And when I next got in on the 29th I finished it.

Whatever it is

Red Pigeon

I was in again on the 31st, after a lot of work on the app and the background story to the big Gardens Project and I worked the Red Pigeon drawing up to almost finished.

I’m thinking that the Garden is the protagonist of the story for the project, asserting itself by becoming in the presence of ‘you’ as the witness. As simple as it sounds the longer you are present in the garden the more you see and the more you interact the more you find out. The plot may be the reconciliation ‘of’ or ‘with’ a fatal flaw in the main character. There has to be some kind of achievement at the end of it.

I wrote a kind of manifesto for my protagonist. Which garden I am depends upon you. I am the garden growing the fridge freezer and the bin bags full of ignorance; I am the garden organised with gravel and abandoned to dandelions and curly wurly wrappers bleached and wilted; I am the garden clinical in its efficiency, with no room for invasions or unwanted natives, made new every season with garish borders; I am the garden abandoned to ideology, at the mercy of the wind and the moss and the tap roots, and the ‘wilding’; I am the garden that tells you what it wants and where it wants it; You are the garden I am.

I really should find the time to work consistently on this, whatever it is.

A small aside about photographing work, I took the photographs below in my kitchen with the iPad, the picture is 12inches square. I haven’t adjusted the colour in any of them, it is just a question of finding the right light. The one at the right is the closest to reality.

Fox, colour photographs

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The January drawings can be seen here

and the December images here

There is a link to the previous month’s Gallery on each page.

The drawings are posted to Threads and Instagram each day.

Wading Through Mud

Wading Through Mud

(Another New Studio)

This has been a busy couple of weeks since my last post (link to post) with work on the NHS Barnsley project which is progressing but will be the subject of another post when it’s completed.

Distractions aside I continued to work on the large drawing I’d started but didn’t post last time out.

Wading Through Mud

Large Rose 11/08/23

Then (11th August) it looked like this, there evidence of some changes in the centre at the bottom but it doesn’t work, too structured and neither one thing nor the other.

WAding Through Mud

Large Rose 14/08/23

So I decided it needed some stronger blogs at the top right and some on the left and below to draw it together. This is the state of play on 14th August.

Wading Through Mud

Large Rose 18/08/23

I decided to move everything up a bit and strengthen the overall force of the circular composition. This is after the 18th August.

Wading Through Mud

Large Rose 25/08/23

I needed to think about it for a while and I worked on the UKSPF project while I did that but felt like it had no presence so I attacked it with white paint and this is what it looks like on the 25th August. It hasn’t changed since but illustrates how you can work your arse off and things will still go wrong.

So I’ve left that for a while, who knows how long, Howard Hodgkin  used to turn his paintings to the wall for two or more years so I’m not going to be in any hurry.

I have a desire to get much simpler with the physical work – I’m also trying to get back to the world building in VR – so I started to work on a new drawing of apples I have in the studio. I see this as part of a sketchbook with AR elements that will include the birdsnest, and drawings of my Doc Martens and the garden at Tickhill Road.

Wading Through Mud

Two Apples 29/08/23

The first drawing is just the apples on a sheet of white paper and I thought it interesting how the colour balance changed when I added the shadowed wall next to the window.

Wading Through Mud

Two Apples 29/08/23

I’ve completed the UKSPF project bar the publication, the images can be seen in this post “Not Building”  the video is a quick run through of how it works. I might reduce the size of the videos as much as I can.

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The August drawings can be seen here

and the July images here

There is a link to the previous month’s Gallery on each page.

The drawings are posted to Twitter and Instagram each day.

 

Not Building and Building

Not Building and Building

(Another New Studio)

Lemniscate wave cc sculpture

lemniscate with ribbon sphere

The inherent frustration when making anything has been rearing its head for the last week. I tried to work out a solution to the sphere at the centre of ‘lemniscate wave cc’ and it felt totally unsatisfactory. The problem here is that the sphere doesn’t fit with the forms around it and it appears as if the torus and the flash are simply supports for it. I’m not keen on articulating why things don’t work because I’m never sure I can, but I was left feeling uneasy. As a result I decided to strip the sphere back and paint it with the Tile Red doorstep paint I used for some of the drawings.

Building and Not Building

Lemniscate Wave cc with Front step paint

Torus sculpture made from Lemniscate ribbon sphere

Torus sculpture made from Lemniscate ribbon sphere

I was able to use the paper I stripped off the sphere, together with the scrap from the Doncaster Platonics drawings to build a small torus sculpture that I ought to recognise as an avoidance strategy.

Doncaster Platonics Water (New)

Doncaster Platonics Water (New)

Returning to the Doncaster Platonics [UKSPF Art Grant]. I completed the report for the council and submitted it so I’m waiting for their contact to arrange a visit. I did find that the original drawing for water (the icosahedron) did not work effectively as a target so I replaced it with this new drawing.

Studio 19 July 2023

Studio 19 July 2023

I’ve got the five drawings framed up now, the frames altogether ended up costing about half the grant awarded, and I started work on the unity/vuforia file for the app. There is a small version of the Doncaster Minster  photographs and a quick, jerky, test of the tageting of the dodecahedron for the heavens. The Minster film will have a soundscape recorded in the grounds with the strangely curtailed electronic bells chiming at 12:30 Wednesday.

On days when I don’t go in to the c-view studio I’ve been doing some drawing/sketching in the attic studio at home. As much as anything to keep my hands busy when I’m thinking about the things I’m not achieving.

Drawing of Platonic Solids

Drawing of Platonic Solids

This is a small drawing of the platonic solid models I made at the beginning of the process and below is a drawing of one of the torii sculptures from February.

sketch of torii Maquette

sketch of torii Maquette

To give myself a break from the video editing and Unity work I did another big drawing using Gesture VR with passthrough on the Quest 2.

To give myself a break from the video editing and Unity work I did another big drawing using Gesture VR with passthrough on the Quest 2.

To give myself a break from the video editing and Unity work I did another big drawing using Gesture VR with passthrough on the Quest 2.