mercredi 3 août 2005

From Razzle Dazzle... via Camouflage to Curved Lines... I feel an increasing involvement in the "artwork" side of this weblog... I can't say that it's artwork for gain, per se, as there's no realistic hope of a commercial outlet... but I'm beginning to think there's no simple way of separating my artwork from my photography. I think of both when I'm practising either one... which may lead only to confusion, or it may add positive elements to the way the image making process progresses on either the drawing board or darkroom enlarging easel. I generally found that with my photoblog individual subjects were started, worked through and completed in isolation and I could jump from writing on say nudity to Mamia 7 review to Stonehenge without having to get my head out of one mindset and into another focused frame of mind. It's probably a throwback to working as a freelance photographer for so many years where I could have been photographing all of Chelsea Football Club's players in the morning... an asbestosis sufferer in some deprived area of the city in the afternoon... and Miss World - whom I later dated - at a gala function in the evening. There was no time, nor need, to think too hard about what you were doing... you got in, got the shots, and got out... and the faster the better. Or as Julie Goodyear of Granada TV's "Coronation Street" used to say... "Get it!" followed by the briefest of pauses for a prevocative, hitched-up skirt and pouted lips pose, "Got it?" as she heard the click of the camera... followed by a, "Good," as she turned away from you to do something else. In her staged Northern accent it scythed out as a, "Geddit? Goddit? Gud!" I'm finding artwork is different. There's the time factor... much photography is literally 1/250 th of a second whereas, for example, Jackson Pollock's "dribble" paintings took days or weeks to complete despite their "action" classification. Of course most photography is purely representative whereas artwork is subject to interpretation. In mine you may find more than I have the imagination to see... or you may see nothing in it at all... which brings me back to "razzle dazzle" which was intentionally done to confuse the viewer... specifically German U-boats attacking unescorted allied merchant shipping in the waters surrounding Britain in WWI. The dazzle patterns are anything but... pattern being what they are not. I re-coloured the Van Gogh painting-by-numbers exercise from "Beaux Arts Magazine" and made a concerted attempt to confuse the viewer by using only four colours in an intentionally non-intended way. I found my random choice of where to paint was helped by turning the piece through 90 then 180 degrees... otherwise my eyes were conscious of the printed outline of the famous chair. When I repeated the exercise using only the colour black it became simpler because there was no limitation in unintentionally painting the same colour in concentrated groups of patches... I had the freedom to paint one patch black, it's adjacent patches blank, their neighbouring patches black and so on. The subliminal shape of the chair can still be seen in the mono-coloured piece but is not as easily seen as in the multi-coloured example. There are numerous examples of Dazzle paintings by the First World War Artists, and one by Edward Wadsworth I have reproduced from the superb catalogue of his major exhibition at Colnaghi's, London in 1974. "Ships beside Warehouses - 1918" was his only woodcut of camouflaged ships printed in two colours - black and blue. In the National Maritime Museum Greenwich is an interesting painting "A convoy - 1918" by Herbert Barnard John Everett, which shows how effective dazzle camouflage was in action. I couldn't help but swing the theme back towards the leading image of cars and abstraction by including an image of the Roy Lichtenstein 1977 Le Mans racer, one of fifteen unique BMW Art Cars created over the years. Lichtenstein's artwork creates reflections of a passing landscape giving an impression of speed. Also noticeable are his trademark "Benday dots" used frequently in his huge comic-strip pictures. I was going to stop there but I keep finding related references in art books, catalogues... and obituaries of all places. At the weekend the English "Daily Telegraph Obituaries page" carried an obit on Al Held, the American abstract expressionist painter who explored geometric shapes... typified by the above illo of his large "Black Nile III" (1971) canvas which, again as a loose theme in my artwork exercises, uses negative space to positive effect. For further insight on Al Held there's a transcript from an interview conducted by Paul Cummings on the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website. The purity of the shapes and circles in "Black Nile III" reminds me of the graphic works of Paul Nash, another WWI War Artist, and in particular his tiny 4.5x3.5 inch woodcut "Creation of the Firmament - 1924" which has a similarity of line to a glass sculpture I photographed for The Crafts Council, London in the late 1970s. The sculpture was elegantly simple and difficult to photograph... so I used the distorted optical illusion of the vertical window blinds behind the piece to help emphasize the shape and form... being there and seeing it in three-dimensions was how it was meant to be appreciated... a two-dimensional image needed, conversely, a dazzle pattern to show it better. 9:20:53 PM    comment []