Tag Archives: studio

More Birds

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More Birds

Another New Studio

Having thought a lot about how and why I make work I came up with a rudimentary explanation. The process can be contrasted with an everyday activity like walking to work. If you do it a lot it can fall into a category of activity that fades from your consciousness. You complete it automatically because you start with an aim, know how to get there and you’ve done it before. The more you do it the less remarkable it becomes. If you apply this to making work you end up with repetition and formula. It is not that it is not possible to use this approach to creative work, it’s just that if you use repetition you need to maximise your awareness throughout the process so that you don’t get bored. If anyone reads this they’ll think “10,000 hours!” and other such bullshit, if you do the same thing repetitively for ten thousand hours without thinking you’ll be exactly where you were skills wise just a couple of years older.

The way I work is to start without an end in sight so that the journey itself is always new. Not knowing where I’m going is fundamental to my practice and I’ve always found that when I explain it every word I utter narrows the concept. It strikes me that explanation becomes a form of prompt writing for an AI. That actually might be worth trying?

I also had a thought when I was in a crit session with Michael Petry through my CAA professional mentoring course which was that teaching is a delicate act akin to challenging tightrope walkers while they’re performing. Some require very small nudges, some require the rope being vigorously shaken and some just need continual encouragement from the sidelines. The point is obviously that the difficulty of any form of teaching is that it’s about the learner and not the teacher. I don’t know where the relevance of this is but I’ve written it down now!

From another CAA masterclass, this one with Rebekah Tolley  I’m trying to think about not finishing things and why I prefer things to be unfinished. What I feel about the work changes minute to minute never mind over longer times so it’s difficult to be sure that the direction I’m going in is a direction at all. I refuse to articulate intention is as close as I can get to answer to one of her questions, “[what do] you refuse to explain in the work”. The agency of the work should be inherent in the encounter with it.

More Birds

Scaffold Birds

I’m making more birds.

The first thing to say about the sculpture is that it doesn’t work entirely the way I want it to. I like the flowering of the birds at the top of the structure but the tower itself is a bit too decorative – maybe paint it black?

I signed on to the ‘Willow’ AR platform and tried out a couple of options.

I also tried out a forest of ‘Scaffold Trees’ in VR with a maze.

while that was my focus I used time in the studio to look a little more closely at the things I didn’t like on some of the drawings, adding the leaves to the scaffold trees drawing and tidying up the wings on the drawings of crows.

More Birds

Scaffold Drawing 230126

Three Crows 300126

Single Crow 300126

Into February I made more birds.

More Birds

Bird Wash armature 040226

Bird Wash covered 040226

I looked at the canopy of ‘Scaffold Trees’ and drew the form as if it were the wash created by the birds as they move through the air. This also references the scan of the Scaffold Tree that tends to solidify the bird forms as it can’t differentiate that well when scanned from the floor. The more abstract the forms become the more they give the impression of flight rather than bird.

I built a tower for the new wash and mounted it but decided to change the position at the top.

Bird Wash 090226

Bird Wash drawing 1102026

Then last week I had my second Shingles vaccine! For some reason I’ve not reacted well to these so I was a bit off the pace for a couple of days. I started to make some drawings loosely based around the works in the studio, so even more birds.

Paint Drying 130226

This particular piece interprets the birds above the Scaffold Tree as forms in space and has led to a series of drawings as they seem to be more accurately what I’ve been chasing.

The shapes birds make in the air 2 160226

The shapes birds make in the air 160226

I worked on the first drawing using Photoshop and then took those developments into physical drawing.

more birds

The shape of a bird in the air 160226

The shape of a bird in the air 2 160226

I also painted the Bird Wash ready for mounting on the tower. No doubt next month there will be even more birds.

Bird Wash painted 180226

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The January drawings can be seen here

  • Draw Every Day – January 26
    Draw Every Day – January 26
    Draw Every Day - January 26 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 27 on 18th January. ...
    See photo »

…and the December images here

Draw Every Day - December 25 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 26 on 1st December. I've continued to use the japanese brush pens and a box of watercolours, and added two novelty pencils with multi-coloured leads. The drawings are made any time from 9:00 am at the breakfast table and occasionally later in the day if I'm away from home. The drawings have been posted since the beginning, 6th May 2020, on instagram https://www.instagram.com/latham_1959 You can see previous months through the galleries page https://www.ian-latham.com/blog/galleries or you can go straight to November's drawings here -
  • Draw Every Day – November 25
    Draw Every Day – November 25
    Draw Every Day - November 25 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 26 on 1st December. ...
    See photo »

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

Or you can go the Galleries page on the top menu

The drawings are posted to  Instagram each day.

Birds

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Birds

Another New Studio

Birds

Two Crows November 25

One of the joys of the garden are the birds that I feed each day. I regularly see fifteen to twenty Pigeons, they gather on the neighbouring chimneys waiting for me to bring the food to the bird table at eight thirty each morning. While they are there, and before and after their arrival and departure, the smaller birds mill around the table, Hedge Sparrows and House Sparrows, Blue Tits and Great Tits. Occasionally a Black Cap or a Green Finch will appear and very rarely a Woodpecker or a pair of Parakeets. The garden will be full of Blackbirds from early morning until lunchtime and again from around three thirty as the sun begins to set. Magpies and Crows visit throughout the day, the Magpies chasing the Pigeons from the table and bullying anything they can see. There are at least three Robins that live at the top of garden near the house. If I venture up the garden I see all these and Long Tailed Tits alongside the charm of Goldfinches that fly up and down the gardens on this side of the street.

I have a feeling that I’m supposed to look for meaning in the things that move me and through that understanding develop a direction but I find myself continually thinking about the work having no meaning. Simply being.

Birds

Jackdaw November 25

Is it even possible to make something without meaning or purpose? Immediately I know that people will scoff at this, the world is full of stuff with neither meaning nor purpose! I suspect the truth is that some things lack either meaning or purpose but rarely, if ever, both. I don’t even know if this is what I mean. What I do is continually seek to limit the amount of editing I allow myself when I draw or build, I’m always looking for the minimal amount of me in any work. I am aware that editing is the activity I’m engaged in as an artist.

So I started drawing birds in November when preparing for the open day. I started with the Crows, the Gulls and the Jackdaw and went for the 1mtr square format to fit frames I already had. I made the support using three sheets of A1 cartridge paper stuck together with wallpaper paste and for these first drawings left unstretched. The surface afforded the quality of the air and be random enough to remain an active part of the drawing.

Gulls November 25

‘Scattering’ November 25

Pigeons Nov 25

I moved onto the big drawings at the same time, these were made at the same time as the sculpture ‘The difference between Birds and Trees’ and I used the leaf print to make the backgrounds before I drew on them. The pigeons references Milton Avery’s pigeons in Paris . The geese seemed appropriate for the time of year and the idea of the wind blowing the leaves.

Crows in Flight 1 November 25

Crows in Flight 2 November 25

These were accompanied by a few sketches of individual birds, loosely Crows in flight.

‘The difference between trees and birds’ Nov 25

Crows in Flight (maquette) November 25

The sculptural works were made to explore the idea of representing flight without being tied to making literal birds.

‘A Murder’ November 25

I also made a big drawing of a rookery, we pass one by the dual carriageway on the way to the pub.

‘More Pigeons’ December 25

The drawings are develop during any hiatus encountered when I hit a bump in the road. I might be thinking about where its all going or distracted by other considerations. In December I was greatly perturbed by the CAA Crit Programme  I did with David Risley that threw me completely askew.

‘Three Crows, or is it Rooks’ December 25

The Three Crows were drawn while I was working on the ‘woolgathering’ VR piece that I have worked to a point where it needs to rest. There is a walkthrough video of the entire piece here and the executable file can be downloaded for PCVR here

I made a twine story to try to explain the VR.

Birds

‘Two Pigeons’ December 25

The pigeons were drawn because I felt I needed to look more closely at them when I stopped working on the 1m sq drawing and Christmas was almost upon us.

‘Pigeon’ December 25

Birds

‘Geese in Flight’ December 25

The second Geese drawing was made during the open days at the end of November as I had a big paper stretched and drawing is an activity that it’s easier to step in and out of.

‘Crows in Flight’ (maquette)

While I was away from the studio I made some small models of ideas for birds in my attic and then took them to the studio to develop.

‘Crows in Flight’ (maquette) December 25

They are very difficult to scan as they’re shiny black so I got some interesting versions for modelling.

These two were relatively accurate. I tried Polycam’s [LINK] new AI 3d scanning which takes a single image and generates a 3d form.

The forms you get are interesting and give opportunities for more interesting takes on flight than the first models so I’ve made them into STL files for 3d printing.

‘Crow’ January 26

The big single crow has been on the board throughout December and I consider it abandoned rather than finished.

‘Scaffold’ WIP

I want to build a kind of woodland, reflective of the ‘murder’ drawing earlier in this piece, and this is the first step towards that. There will be flight forms atop the ‘twigs’ at the top of the piece.

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The December drawings can be seen here

  • Draw Every Day – December 25
    Draw Every Day – December 25
    Draw Every Day - December 25 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 26 on 1st December. ...
    See photo »

…and the November images here

  • Draw Every Day – November 25
    Draw Every Day – November 25
    Draw Every Day - November 25 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 26 on 1st December. ...
    See photo »

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

Or you can go the Galleries page on the top menu

The drawings are posted to  Instagram each day.

Explaining

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Explaining

There is a fundamental problem with explaining your work to people in most contexts. The meaning you give in the particular moment would be a different meaning in any another. I think I mean I’m still struggling with the idea of praxis because it seems that the recognition of it is contingent.

In any case I am just about to complete another CAA course, this one a four week ‘crit’ course with David Risley  that has been particularly challenging because of the need to explain. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want to explain. The ‘crit’ itself moves the work into the realm of spoken or written language rather than the visual and that makes the work lesser in some manner.

explaining

Notes on Woolgathering December 25

After a 1 to 1 talk with David Risley I made some notes about the way I might make ‘woolgathering’  more closely fit with the things I suggested about what I wanted it to say. Then I spent time putting that into practice and made a new video.

 

But I’m reluctant to talk about the work before or during the video, I think it needs to be seen first?

The most upsetting thing about this was that I really wanted to use this crit process to sort out the direction I wanted to take the birds in and I haven’t really talked about them at all.

Studio 01 12 2025

I started the month like this. This is the studio on the day of the 1 to 1, which lasted about fifteen minutes.

explaining

Pigeons 5/12/25

I made this drawing between the 3rd and the 5th December.

Rooks 08/12/25

Then made this one on the 8th December. I managed to stretch the large sheets I made form cartridge and wallpaper paste so while the other two sheets were drying I made some other drawings.

Two Pigeons 10/12/25

This one of two pigeons and the next one of the left hand pigeon.

Single Pigeon 12/12/25

I also went along to ‘The Little Anarchist Bookshop‘ at ArtBomb where Terry Hudson is presenting an installation of his ethical woodland festival based workshops. Not entirely sure what I think about it but admire the motivation.