lundi 1 août 2005

From Negative Space... to Razzle-Dazzle I started my art-blog writings last month with a negative image... not one, that is, with negative "this is the end of the road" thoughts... in fact the opposite. I used the description "negative" to imply a direct link with my previous work and involvement in photography... my real passion being black-and-white printing which, since the discovery by Fox Talbot in 1839, basically depends on a processed film - a negative. [see Note 1] My illustration for that weblog was a pencil drawing of a plant seen in the garden of the gîte / restaurant we stayed in for a few months after arriving in France. I can't think back to when I last made art in a public place, but seeing two children at one of the tables, fully absorbed with a packet of crayons and sketch pad, encouraged me to do likewise. Perhaps it's the climate, or wine, or joie de vivre which is so noticeable in France and other southern European countries when complete families are together during and after a meal... which, more often than not, will last from midday to 3-00 in the afternoon during the week and perhaps longer on Sundays. Whatever the reason, I went to the same table with my sketchpad, a very soft 4B pencil... and nervous excitement. How was I to start to draw in a positive manner when I was so out of practice? Children draw every day at and after school... they are practised artists are they not? But for me, trained at an art college some forty years before, I felt nervous in front of the children who were totally absorbed with their interpretation of the tiny village we were in... yes, it was depicted by a house, pointy roof, smoking chimney, garden path leading to a front door, a tree in a flower garden and a smiling sun overhead beaming radiantly. It must be most little girl's dream... the cottage in the country. Boys would have been drawing planes, spaceships, trains, robots, racing cars, ships, tanks... all from the hard, powerful, mechanical world. So what did I draw? Trying to be clever, a plant in reverse... a negative drawing... more interested in the shape and depth of the shadows between the leaves, not the leaves themselves. I'm told I must be an introvert... but that's by people who have seen me draw like this rather than by forming an opinion from talking to me. Strangely, watchers don't talk to artists... there's the double fear of disturbing, and of not understanding any answer to a posed question... so maybe art speaks louder than words. But we shall see... and that is my fear. The motif in this piece is one I'm certainly interested in... I started assembling the images on Saturday evening... and then spent a couple of day's browsing through old exhibition catalogues, modern art books, furniture magazines (especially the Italian Domus), internet searches... and now at 8:00 pm on Monday evening I have done my artwork and have the words to write. Simple really! But there's a problem... I thought the idea was great - but the artwork is crap! I guess I'm looking at it and thinking about the artistic efforts by the two little girls in the garden of the gîte... and mine doesn't feel to be of greater proficiency. I could hide behind the questionable phrase "artistic interpretation" (or artistic expression), but it comes down to lack of practice. I'll run through the "idea" as I worked on it... the six illustrations from top to bottom can't be mistakenly mixed up so I've spread them out to balance the page. The first illo was a pre-Dip art college piece from 1962... an exercise in painting the negative shapes - without any drawing of the outlines allowed - of a group of bent metal chairs. It's not as easy as you think (as I found out then - and again today) but you have to make the statement even when you can see that shapes and proportions are going awry. Remember, art is not always about showing what the subject is... you can add emotion and expression at will. I remember painting that original... and adding the darker shadows where the chair's runners touched the floor. I thought they added a third-dimension to the painting... to which the tutor threw up her arms in despair because the illustrative exercise was meant to be a TWO-dimensional representation. Lesson 1... Listen to the brief! Lesson 2... Stick to the brief! OK... after I photographed and scanned the 30x22 inch original I started to research ideas along the same "negative" theme... and found a lot to show from which I've selected a few relevant illustrations... image 2 being a scan from "Bauhaus Archiv 1919-1933" by Magdalena Droste published by Taschen... which shows a positive and negative comparison and how dark objects appear smaller than light objects of a similar size. Next to those comparisons is an illustration "Interior With Cactus" by Roy Lichtenstein in which, interestingly to me, the chair, which isn't shiny (no reflections present) has both positive and negative delineation. Illo 3 is an odd one... Tony Cragg was a winner of the Turner Prize in 1988 and in the late 90s was resident at the Henry Moore Institute in Yorkshire where he explored various ideas including that shown by the chair drawings marked up as a "Painting By Numbers" exercise. Looking at more examples of Tony Cragg's work led me to the Tate Learning web pages... and there is his large assemblage (illo 4) of rubbish entitled "Britain From The North." Going from his painting by numbers chair outline to his bits of colours assemblage... which in turn led me to the "," designed by Italian architect Alessandro Mendini. This is a gorgeous piece... but at more than $10,000 it should be! Of course one thing leads to another and as I flicked through the current Aôut 2005 issue of the French "Beaux Arts Magazine", there, amongst several pages of art games... (illo 5) was a "painting by numbers" illustration of Vincent Van Gogh's "Chair"... so I did it, but negatively and randomly, to imitate Mendini's Proust Chair. [I'll expand on this particular motif another time but it connects to the WWI War Artist's works]. From there it was only a short step to completing the exercise with my own chair illustration, done in the negative, and with random colour. Easy I thought... but after an hour of broken "Conté à Paris" Crayons and slow realisation that what you think you know and what you think you like doesn't automatically mean that you can therefore make, draw or paint just the same... well... so I retired gracefully to the kitchen and made dinner. Oh yes, illo 6 is the abandoned final piece for this article... from here on it can only get better... if not it's back to photography! Note : Although many credit William Henry Fox Talbot with the discovery of photography in 1839, this is only partly true... he invented the Calotype (or Talbotype) process which enabled any number of positive prints to be made from a negative. But photography as a recognised art, craft and science predates Fox Talbot... in 1826 the Frenchman Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce made the first permanent photograph - a "one-off" - because with his "Heliography"process it was not possible to make further of prints from the original because there was no negative. 9:40:38 PM    comment []