Self (It really is all about me!)

Self (It really is all about me!)

Another New Studio

Self (It really is all about me!)

08 02 2024

Having reached something of an impasse in the last month what with finishing things and so on I decide to start a self portrait. So on the 8th February I spent two hours working from life and arrived at the above. The proportions are ‘ish’ and it looks nothing like me.

09 02 2024

On the 9th February I spent another two hours…

12 02 2024

Then after the weekend I spent a further two hours on the 12th February. Again it’s beginning to look vaguely as if it might be a relative of mine.

Self (It really is all about me!)

14 02 2024

On the 14th I spent 3 hours mostly measuring the features against each other and refining the shape of the head. It might be worth mentioning that I decided to do this after seeing the press reports for the Courtauld exhibition of Frank Auerbach drawings particularly Adrian Searle’s review in the Guardian

But It really is all about me!

 

16 02 2024

I worked some more on it on the 16th bringing it almost to a conclusion after just over 11 hours.

19 02 2024

On the 19th I spent the last hour I’d allowed myself, for now, to reach this state.

judge for yourself

It’s ok, but you can judge for yourself. It really is all about me!

Tree Flower 12 02 2024

Obviously that wasn’t all I did during the first half of February, I also continued to work on sculpture. I repurposed the abandoned original support for the three trees half size maquette I made in January and also did some more work on the story for the Gardens project.

I looked up the idea of Eudaemonia that I encountered in Will Storr’s ‘The Science of Storytelling’ which is the only readably intelligent examination of the process I’ve found yet. Storr posits a 5 act structure for storytelling, Act 1 – This is me and It’s not working; Act 2 – Is there another way?; Act 3 – There is. I have transformed; Act 4 – But can I handle the pain of change?; Act 5 – Who Am I going to be? Essentially though I don’t think there is a set of rules.

I found myself distracted by an idea for the garden that goes back to the original impetus of recording the resting places of cats that have owned me over the years. To bring in an avatar of a cat that guides the player through the garden and instructs them on the quest, the quest being to find where cats go.

That’s where eudaemonia comes in, it is the state or condition of having good spirit, according to Aristotle. The eudaimonic life is one of “virtuous activity in accordance with reason” Or being happy by living with purpose.

Also on the 16th February I attended the first online seminar in AN’s Framework series Module 1. It was all about funding, different sources etc. Very useful if I can ever shift myself to apply it. I would post a link but the notes are not online yet.

Standing Nude 19 02 2024

After the weekend I spent some time buggering about with Gravity Sketch on the Quest 2, It’s been updated but it’s still very glitchy for me. Keeps dropping out and repositioning itself.

So I went back to ‘Gesture VR’ and did a drawing using passthrough.

Standing Nude 21 02 2024

On the following Wednesday I got sidetracked by the roof repairs at home and went to the studio on the 22nd, tidied the drawing up and stretched two new sheets of paper.

Studio 22 02 2024

At which point the studio looked like this.

Three (separate) Red Trees

To shake myself up a bit I took apart the three red trees, I should really take them somewhere and coat them with GRP, to give myself more room in the studio.

Structure 25 02 2024

Then I used the wood I got from c-view where my studio is, to make a structure for a new sculpture.

Dancing Tree 27 02 2024

On the 27th I attached surfaces to the structure – this is fairly heavy cartridge paper – and painted it with watered down Indian ink. It’s called ‘Dancing Tree’ for as long as I can remember it.

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The February drawings can be seen here

and the January 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.

It really is all about me!

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.

Directionless Direction

Directionless Direction

Another New Studio

 

A trip around the studio on Friday 17th November 2023. This shows the “redfilm” [link] video in its new projection, then moves out of the booth navigating the “three red trees” sculpture and briefly views the three red garden drawings that had been framed at this date before showing the different lighting settings for the NHS lemniscate. The video looks at the comfrey torus and ends on the trees.

Directionless Direction

I took delivery of the frames for the new work on the 17th November and started to frame the existing work. Red Garden One is above, Red Garden Two and Red Garden Three below.

Directionless Direction

On the 18th I decided that the new iteration of the Redfilm should have statistics about the climate crisis, centred around global warming. I spent the day making the slides and inserting them into the film. The facts were gleaned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report March 2023

Via World Resources Institute . The new film was entirely unconvincing and makes the whole concept somewhat patronising, so I dropped it.

On the 19th I found a review of Jewel Spears Brooker, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 240 pages. ISBN 1421426528. [LINK]

In which the reviewer, Michelle A Taylor of Harvard University, comments that

“the “deception of the thrush” is that the “world of speculation” can be made real, that the objects of the mind could overcome physical objects, the reality of the body: so Eliot returns to idealism—…—and sees it for what it is. Like interpretation, speculation posits its own world, immaterial, with only some relationship to fact.”

I’ve ordered the book to more fully study this but the meat of it is what I’m exploring the edges of in this current set of work. The idea that the fact of making things as an artist removes from them the possibility of representation because they lack the contingency of design. I suspect that as I reach out for the chance to articulate this the art world itself has fully embraced the contingency of design as a necessary precursor to the creative act. When I was much younger and became a teacher I spent the first ten years of my career teaching design precisely because there are methods and, whilst you can make up the rules you follow, there have to be rules. In art, which I consider absolute, you can’t teach it you just have to do it. This is what I mean by Directionless Direction.

Directionless Direction

On the 20th I made some collages exploring the forms in the big red sculpture and the source for it, two of which are reproduced here. The one above was used as the basis of the bigger drawing discussed further on.

The next two photographs show the drawing “bigred” begun on the 22nd of November and made with inks and pastel.

Also on the 22nd I started Red Garden Four.

At the end of the 22nd it looked like this with the addition of the chainlink and the panel.

Directionless Direction

On the 24th November I added the fence posts and the bushes but decided the piece needed more definition. I added a wash of Indian ink and then painted the sky out with Titanium White oil paint.

I also continued to work on the “bigred” drawing.

Taking it through the stages illustrated above, becoming more like the collage as it progresses.

By the end of the 27th November the drawing looked like this, and the studio was beginning to be ready for the Open Weekend at the beginning of December.

Additionally on the 27th I published the first release of the “doncplatonic” app.

On the 29th I worked more on the “bigred” drawing and started another drawing based on a photograph by a local photographer  Jamie Bubb, with permission, that was posted to threads a day or two before.

I’ll post more of the open day in a separate post and also a more detailed accounting of the reason for it all.

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The November drawings can be seen here

and the October 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.