Drawing meditation

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

---

Just trying to get my head back into making, after the research paper I kind went off-line. I needed a break and to reset. I visit the movie the revenant again. Trying to summon what is it about kenoticism. Drawing is.good point of meditation,, in addition I also want to animate some more drawings and need to get my eye back in as well as my head.

I like the last drawing best - it even works upside down. I think I enjoy the departure from the formal and real, a fluidity of movement where translation is free to move in a less linear fashion.

(Am also still misusing the Stuart Semple ink)

I’m keen to hold onto a few thoughts that have manifested over the past year: Bundles, Granular, Bleeding through, Kenotic, it’s hard to keep up with all the thoughts and I need to find a more organised way to formally collate the most significant. The curated blogs help but I still fear I am forgetting stuff.

Been also looking at Benjamin on translation as a point of research.

---

Imaginary Bundle 3

View fullsize

Imaginary Bundle 3: Ink on paper, 520mm x 380mm

---

I like it and then I don’t. I tried really hard to keep the elements uniform, but then they’d escape me and my regime. I am a failed dictator in a very small world. I wanted order and perfection but got rebellion.

Showing whatever I am doing is important. But how else can I continue to show my work and escape the limitations of the formal gallery and the clouded water of social media?

---

In solution

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

---

Particle dispersion in solution.

Everything is divisible.

Every idea

Every thought

Every belief.
/////////////////////////////////////////////

Questioning how I question my questions

////////////////////////////////////////////

More drawing from film stills. Although it doesn’t feel as successful and I’m not convinced of where this can go. I’d much prefer to work from my own film work and original source.
However it still has me thinking and examining.
I didn’t care for the drawing, but I did like the dispersion of the particles across the paper as I bled the paint. To draw with this technique is excruciating as control is minimal and the temptation to draw properly to overcome the random element is strong. But to do that would pull too far from the quality of the textures created randomly. Somewhere in-between is a drawing I like.

---

Imaginary Bundle 2

View fullsize

View fullsize

---

Feels good to complete but feels incomplete///

I’m dubious of making the same work over and over again. Is it really valid? I know many artists will make a series of similar drawings exploring a theme, but somehow I feel uncomfortable to be making the same or similar drawing. I guess I am keen to see development and progression and if I am honest… then I don’t see any.

However there is a meditation in drawing that permits me to explore and think. Ideas are generate whilst drawing and it doesn’t seem to matter what the drawing is necessarily . I heard a curator say that ‘abstract art can get to heart of things’, and perhaps thats enough.

I’m also reading ‘Why we believe what we believe” by Andrew Newberg, I’m looking for an understanding of the construction of belief. As a neurologist he states that; Spinoza’s idea of intuition correlates with the way our brain creates a holistic image of the world.

“That intuition allows us to comprehend what the senses cannot perceive” and “we can enter into intuitive states through the act of meditation or prayer” and “These processes can enhance our lives by allowing us to circumvent the conceptual errors embedded in logic, reason or personal opinion. Intuition, creativity, and spiritual practice may all provide better means for apprehending reality and truth more accurately”

However I do also realise the inherent dangers of such a statement. Giving intuition the same gravitas as facts is really ‘buttering the eel’. (Made up metaphor). But I do like the idea of making space for intuition.

---

Saturation

---

How can one drawing do so much to me ? I’m sat at home feeling pretty lousy, a virus has spent the best part of this week trying to interfere in my practice based research, and THAT is unforgivable. However I want to focus on this drawing by Gerhart Richter. Understand why it speaks a previously unchartered place in me.

Every now and then I encounter a work which is far grater than he sum of it’s parts. Deceptively simple in it’s execution of ink bled across paper. This one drawing is flooded with emotive waves like a symphony. It feels as though it is the the distilled essence of a passage across hope, love and loss.

I suspect that it is no chance that Richter created this drawing and it is born from years of study and making in colour and form. I don’t care necessarily for a lot of Richter’s paintings but I see his craft.

When I look at the drawing I see sadness and beauty occupying the same space, a lament -( as discussed in this weeks MA session). I’ve always connected with the notion of the lament, the sadness in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.

It’s also important to consider as I’m using this process of bleeding ink quiet a lot in my own practice right now. Something I am a little suspicious of due to it’s popular nature, the though needs to work in sync with he aesthetics. And where am I taking it?

---

Key wOrds///

---

Key words from drawing and researching today, in no specific order///

Burnt sugar

Bundle

Wad

Banding

Strap

Steps (descend ascend)

Return>>>

////

I feel like making large format drawings in oil. Large greasy drawings, I desire to see thick black and sepia marks commanding the paper.

Portraiture

I still really enjoy making drawings. I feel guilty as though I am old fashioned stuck in craft, but I find making marks, making certain drawings so satisfying. The feel it has, the presence it carries. I worry as it feels as though there is no concept, idea or thought in the work. Just self indulgence and showing off. That there isn’t really a place for it in contemporary art. Is representational art over.

What is the purpose of portraiture today? Where does the thinking and conceptual value lie? Observation? Deep observation of an individual.

---

Bundles

---

Note: The blog doesn’t have to be journalistically written. It’s too self conscious, lacks honesty as it’s more performative. It can be notes, lists, images. A subconscious free flow is perhaps better. I have also included a bad photo and resisted the temptation to edit too much.

Bundles today I like bundling objects - multiples. I want bundles of all sorts of things.

Plaster dipped burnt wood. Pelican feathers. Sculpt a pelican in hard plaster?

It was good to get my hands on materials - finally collecting some copper and wicks. The materials tease me. Just their presence goads next to create, something anything.

I’m conscious that I want this blog to be written in a much more analytical and academic fashion, with pithy insight and formal art history references. But I will leave it at… today I like bundles and materials.

Re Image/// The place of drawing. I love these organic and diagramming drawings. They feel like they have such a strong place in art/ artists process.

Image from: Theaster Gates P112

---

Proof & Approval

---

---

I noticed a connection between the words approval and prove - that had not occurred to me before.

The two set an interdependent in a negative frame. That to have approval I must prove myself, yet this is a futile task. My identity should not be scaffolded by others approval that I must first evidence.

My subconscious harangues me…

“If you really are…

…an artist

…intelligent

…likeable

…worthy to do an MA”

 >>>Or insert any other angst based self-defeating doubt>>>

…then prove it…(by fact based action…)

It seems the moment we step out, we come under unfair and unjust scrutiny. Rather than be encouraged to take risks, make new work or suggest a new way. Eeverything must be first justified and evidenced.

Prove///Approve - it’s a shitty equation.

How would you describe 'a healthy artistic environment’?

One free from the need to prove myself. 
Challenging yet collaborative.
A space where risks are taken.
A fringe space liberated from standard cultural capital.

Thinking about what my fellow students are doing to enhance my social and learning experiences; What do I most value in them?

Honest, challenging and rigorous discussion.
Experience beyond my own frame.
Kindness and understanding.

Thinking about what I am doing to enhance my fellow students social and learning experiences; What do they most value in me?

Experience outside of themselves.
Kindness and understanding.
Honest, challenging and rigorous discussion.

Sorry to be cheesy but I can’t ask something of someone I’m not prepared to give myself.

///Currently reading::: 
Theastre Gates:::Carol Becker, Lisa Yun Lee, Achim Borchardt-Hume