drawing

Psychological Voltage

Alexis

 

Pen and ink study

 

Following from my previous post, ideas start to form as to how the two aspects of what I am working with, the raw and the refined can coexist. The transition from the radially symmetrical, ordered Chaos Contained  to the more poietic gut forms has been a journey from the external to the internal, searching for the internal world contained within the carapace. I have oscillated between one and the other and it seems that the symbolic reifications have been and still are gestators for what I am working on now. I see the possibility of the chaotic inner world nascent from, evolving and bursting out of the idealised concept of the type form. This may be too literal an interpretation of what I am thinking but in the working with the material is where the transformation can take place.

Plato thought that our world was a mere shadow of an ideal one, our backs turned to the light and all we see is a third hand puppet show – which makes me think of the shadow videos I have previously put together. Aristotle got his hands covered in the slime of dissections and the analysis of the literal world that we see and touch each day. He looked at it straight in the eye and tried to explain it.

These drawings are the first attempts at placing markers for the ideas that are forming in my head. From them I can develop and evolve these ideas, make them less… obvious; more about the struggle between knowledge and knowing, existence and experience, than biology.

 

Pen and ink study

 

In the first visualisation, the internal bursts forth from the carapace; in the second, the metamorphosis of form from raw compost to ideal form. (It reminds me in a way of the empathic climb in Philip K. Dick’s Mercianism.) Two ways of reconciling through transformation. This is where the strength of the myth lies, in the potential to transform mud and dust to a higher state. It is an idea that holds psychological voltage.

 

Studies for H

Alexis

 

A chronological series of six pen and ink sketches for the H project

 

These are studies done not for the way the sculpture might look but to exercise in what spirit I will approach its making. I see part of this making as painting. Pen and ink is ideal for this, its fluidity and indelibility require seeing ahead a fraction of a moment before committing to the paper surface. And older than paper, its manufacture, a step away from charcoal belies its sophistication. Artists in the past have used this as a tool for analysis, for its closeness to painting: ink is liquid, applied with a brush of sorts, the unforgiving rigid point the focus of decision. The act of drawing with pen and ink is akin to delineating the boundary between the passages in a painting thereby creating a virtual line only that this line is the embodiment of something that does not actually exist. To do this needs an analysis and understanding of the line’s function in relation to what is being drawn must be done without inhibition or hesitation if the form is to come alive. In the case of sculpture, which deals with weight, pen and ink can express the lightest of touches as well as the heaviest of masses. Its calligraphy is a language inflected and nuanced by where and how the ink is placed and the freedom acquired can equally be translated into other mediums. 

Only in the penultimate sketch did I use pencil as a preliminary. Doing so disrupted the rhythm but more importantly, resulted in a drawing lacking in invention probably on account of the forms coming more from the head and less from a more visceral centre. Below is the initial sketch in biro I made a few days earlier featured in my previous post.

 

 

Traces, Thoughts and Transformations

Alexis

 

 

The wet clay leaves a trace, a marker of its passing. All things leave a ripple in the fabric of the universe, gradually sublated into the chaos of complex interactions, inexorably moving towards randomness. But the random is not without pattern; a lack of pattern is a tell-tale sign of order. The patterns we perceive in random systems are unpredictable, truly formless. Those patterns are the conceit of the mind, progeny of the brain, evolved to recognise symmetry… or invent it. 

But these traces are not random, they are chaotic, and that is something very different. Photographing and manipulating the image gives rise to a pleasing pattern, something of aesthetic significance but without knowing its provenance, of what value is it? Does value lie in the way it is selected and treated, in perception, context and inferrences? How deliberate must a work be? Is intention the framework around which a work must be built or is there something else at play?

To look at the stain on the floor, the shape of clouds, a flower or bird in flight all delight the mind but is this enough? Maybe, but I feel that transformation of source material is key for something to become art: a metamorphosis into ordered form, the aesthetic; change engendered in the mind, the conceptual. Hand in hand they must walk together as sensation and idea.

Is digital transformation enough for the artist?

 

Learning New Things

Alexis

 

 

I have never done something like this before. I am finding it a challenge but not because I lack the skills of drawing, composing, digital or manual. It is more a case of sequencing and seeing how  detail fits with the overall. This might appear to me a matter of applying what I do in other domains to this, the graphic narrative or comic. However, the applicable principles are to be used in a completely different context; one in which the single image does not stand alone but is seen as part of a much larger narrative in images. In addition, the attention of the viewer has to be maintained throughout the process of sequential page turning: rhythm, sequencing (how one images corresponds to subsequent images), pacing of the script and consistency of vision are all part of the process. In short, it is about working with a carefully crafted script. Something I am going to have to do when working on the multiple screen video performance. So this is a way of introducing that process. 

Probably the way for me to break down what I have done is to look at the first page and see how the problems presented have necessitated shifts in how I view the overall work. The interesting part of the process is how the initial vision, feeling, has had to be changed in order to convey a more compelling narrative through visual means. 

I was fixated with a particular ‘look’, a simplicity that quite frankly was getting somewhat boring. I tried to reduce detail to focus on the narrative but found that this had the opposite effect. It is the detail surrounding the central character that conveys the story, after all, there is only so much that can be done with a single creature in a barren landscape. So what I have done is spend a while looking at the great many solutions that others have used for both comics and graphic novels. This has helped me in seeing how I could do something more affective.

So what have I done? The following is a list of the changes that I have sketched out in my mind and tried out, not shown above:

  • Change the geographical transitions to convey a sense of the psychological journey of the creature. I had maintained this constant with the result of convey nothing more than repetitive monotony. Although this was the initial intention, it did not seem to hold the attention or even convey the meaning I was hoping to impart. I worked with process but there came a point where an intervention to change direction was needed to increase the affectiveness of what I was doing.
  • Introduced minor characters which heighten the creature’s isolation much as a lost person would feel in a forest full of unfamiliar animals and plants. This also personalises the character with the viewer creating a conversation between parties. This is a more intuitive direction, after all, most people’s experience is not that of living alone on the Moon or Mars. 
  • Not repeating stances and views, keeping the pace of the storyline going while relating each vignette to the others. This can be done using colour, line, composition and tone as well as the particular characterisation of a given scene. The direction of sight needs to move in a sequential narrative and lines of tension, repetition, reflection and so on, are all devices that can be used to achieve this visual journey.
  • Most importantly, elaborate the script so it includes details that help create interest in and engagement with the character and its story. The script, to my surprise, is perhaps the most important thing. It does not have to be about speech, it is also description of the scene, emotions, details, incidental action, time, season, terrain. All these are important to compose in an abstract sense so that the drawing phase is not always starting from the beginning when an impasse is encountered.
  • Work with what I am familiar. This is important in creating a believable situation and characterisation. It is much easier to work with elements of which I have experience rather than trying to set events in locations that I cannot relate to. For this reason I have chosen the Venezuelan savanna, land of tebuys and Conan Doyle’s Lost World. An appropriate setting for the story that unfolds.   
    But what is this narrative about? I have been thinking if it was about loneliness, or perhaps the dark side of companionship; about a search or about the indomitable spirit of survival. In the light of what I have been exploring in the past few day there is something else, the emergence of predation, not in the sense of a literal figuration of the strategy filling an ecological niche. It is more of a metaphorical account. If examined carefully, again it is not so much about predation but competition, territoriality or even status. There are multiple inferences in the storyline, that is the point of it, ambiguity, and the ambivalence of what is loneliness and what is solitude.  There are also technical elements which are can be worked out in the process. One thing I have found though, although I have spent some time on the project, I am amazed at how little work I have actually done. I can see that I need to do much more ground work. But now I am clearer as to what is needed, I can move on at a more productive and energised pace. What relation does this have to the main project proposal? Everything is still up in the air but there is a strong correspondence with other elements I am working with, metamorphosis, culture and the deep past as a counterpart to the contemporary.

 

Start of a Graphic Narrative

Alexis

 

 

I have  been working on ideas arising from drawings I did earlier in the first term. I did not know where they were necessarily going but that is the nature of artistic experiments. However, it is not a case of not knowing what I am doing but rather allowing what I do to take me somewhere new in the spirit of experimentation.

Over the past days I have learnt a great deal about comics, their layouts and techniques which are helpful in creating narratives concerning my work and ideas. It is an interesting way to work; with hand drawing, computer graphics and photography. What I have in mind is a set of accessible works that sit alongside my mainstream pieces.

I decided to start with a principle character working it out through drawing. I used the seeds sown in a series of pages of sketches drawn earlier, particularly Drawing 4…. The  creature above is by no means definitive in morphology but it bears the fundamental elements of its making. Around this creature, I am writing a number of scripts in order to build an narrative structure for sequencing images. As I started this project I was also experimenting with the camera on my reflective walks. The context of these wanders over the same territory has become an important element in what I do, a setting for the imaginary world of the works and their interactions: perhaps the stage I mentioned in the symposium video at the beginning of term. 

Working this way has opened out many ways for the unification and expansion of my practice. I still have a long way to go as I work in parallel with other projects but it is rapidly becoming part of a scenario for originary things, a mythopoeitic process.

 

Drawing 5: Ennoia

Alexis
Studies: graphite on paper, 316 x 237 mm

I am drawing as a way of originating an idea. The word idea has its roots in the Greek Ennoia which literally means “act of thinking” as well as “form” and “the look of a thing”. Related to this is idein, Ancient Greek for “seeing in a creative manner”. How fitting it is that a drawing should be a creative way of seeing an idea: a visible manifestation of thinking. This is such a powerful tool for origination.

Images and words are starting to merge; not as equivalents but as different expressions of an emerging idea. My use of words follows drawing, as reflection on the act follows reflection in the action. This process is leading to ideas related to what I said at the start, that I see my practice as a stage on which a play of sorts is enacted. 

The narrative I alluded to in a previous post, started to emerge in drawing 4 and these sketches have crystallised this a little more, particularly in the context of drawing 3. I do not want to say too much at this stage; to keep the revealing in motion and not cut the process prematurely. The creature stands as I, on the threshold of something broad and unknown. Through this metaphor I have seen a glimpse of a transformative process leading to a collection of existential works. It is the origination of a personal mythology.

Impetus

Alexis

The worn graphite pencil glides to and fro searching form, trying to enter the flat surface bounded by the small parcel of paper. Changing faces, it deftly leaves a trace that grows careful not to mark the paper indelibly with a false word. Thought is suspended in the uncertainty of emergence, I keep quiet and let the form tell me what to do. I am in its embrace, as the pewter carbon slates off the point until, it asks me, what shall I do next? We are now partners in shaping this tiny world. For now it must be all the world, no distraction except for breath. Time does not count in this place, movement reckons change: too much and life is extinguished, too little and we are left wondering what if. Imperfections must be left behind; corrections will unravel all that has been done as lines coalesce into form, light and shade becoming sensible with words of recognition. And so the meaning passes onto me as I hear the other’s voice grow faint in this world. My hope is that it waits for me in the next.

Drawing 4: Some Sort of Story Starts to Emerge

Alexis
Studies: graphite on paper, 237 x 316 mm

Today has been the darkest day of the season; rain and cloud but it is not cold. Does the weather influence work? It may do but what it most certainly does is influence mood and interpretation. If interpretation is part of the work, particularly in-action reflection, then the weather must in some way influence the work.

These sketches unlike the previous ones are more of a sequence than a series. It appears to me that one sketch led to another and that by the time I had reached the final vignettes a narrative had started to emerge. I really was not trying to create a narrative but it seems to have come about spontaneously. Is this because subconsciously I look for a narrative or is it that having completed the previous series of drawings, I am becoming more fluent and synthetic? Is it that I am linking the images despite myself?

I was not aware of any particular theme at the outset but during the course of the sketches, a familiar notion has started to show its face.

Drawing Studies

Alexis
Studies: graphite on paper, 237 x 316 mm

These rough sketches are a change of stance from the previous drawings, approaching the idea called for now ‘Oracle’. Exploring the inside and out of an imaginary prototype, I inhabit the space. This is not an aesthetic exercise in drawing, neither is it a testing ground for the work. It is more of an immersion into the idea, to understand where its physical form comes from. It lives in a landscape but is trapped in the context in which it is found: should be in a desert but it must sit in a room, an exhibit collected and appropriated from the imagination and displayed… for now. It is small yet pyramid-like in conception, is it to be simple or ornate? Is it a temple or a receptacle for sound; the Holy of Holies or a profane Pandora’s box; a landscape contained in the sounds that enters it, sounds processed and altered as a message must be arranged and packaged for its destination

It is now evening and having thought about the work’s geographical limitation, the idea has come to me that, although contained and relatively small, the sculpture can contain the world. Instead of the microphones collecting the sound being located within the same space, they could transmit from anywhere that they might be placed. The sculpture is then no longer limited to its location but it can encompass the world… or at least a greater part of it than before.

Drawing Studies 2: The Simplicity

Alexis
Studies: graphite on paper, 237 x 316 mm

Today I drew another set of studies.  It really is an exploratory activity and a reacquaintance with drawing. The images do not conform to the ideas I have for project work but I am glad for that. Breaking away from the constraint of a predetermined outcome fills me with a sense of freedom and renewal; what I talked about in my first post, Elastic Thinking, Synthesis and Renewal. It is in the true spirit of the MA. From these studies something may come but come what may, the thing itself seems to be what matters. The action, the thought, what it might lead to, give me the same feeling I had when I first started years ago. This happens from time to time but for it to happen now is wonderful. 

As I draw I think. I think about what I am doing and how it can be done better. I am learning rapidly as it comes back to me compounded by what I have learnt and experienced along the way. These small sketches represent much more than what they are in themselves. 

As part of my brain focuses on the technical activity, another part nudges me into feeling my way, sensing the concept and translating it into a language expressed in pressure, sense of space, distance and closeness, weight, light, volume. These are all empirical technical aspects. There is also another part of my brain that is released and wanders and thinks of other things. Reflection on the doing and reflection on the reflection. 

I like the way that all this is achievable with the simplest of tools. A block of toothy paper and two graphite pencils. Is this not the simplicity with which artist worked before? From Lascaux to Phidias, Michelangelo to Ingres, Picasso to Moore. The most exquisite work was done with simple tools and materials. How does this compare with digital media? Is the digital another freedom or is it a self imposed exile into consumerism? I have drawn with digital media and found it a rewarding exercise but more for the outcome than process. The smooth layers, the faultless line, edges that leave no ambiguity. It is indeed very seductive and aesthetic. I have rationalised it and it appears valid. But I ask myself, have we become so accustomed to perfection that we are in danger of losing sight of what human creativity is and where it comes from? Is the machine to be the paradigm by which we measure and are measured and origins lost in time and made irrelevant? So many questions come to mind offering contradictory views it is overwhelming. For now I shall continue building this small, simple, limitless world and see what happens.