Sequential Drawing Research 2013: On-going studio-based work. My studio drawing practice for M.A. collected in one place.

The work is automatic, subconscious and does not set not to illustrate theory but obviously my reading around subject (especially film) is influencing output. This is an ongoing project.

Studio Diary11: May 23rd Cartoon Droodles?

My biggest inspiration A book called Droodles which I got from a jumble sale when a kid .most famous droodle is the cover of Zappas Ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch (below)..so now you know is not pop art, minimalism or a profound theory is DROODLES These drawings are profound meditations on the hinterland and liminal spaces between inbetween-ness in a multi disciplinary meditation on landscape, time and sequentiality specifically the first and second sequential moments (my theoretical tagging of the invention of cinema or was it animation? (1888 LePrince) and the second moment youtube 1995.)..so now you know..then again it could be a droodle

This entry was posted in cartoon, Comics, drawing, research, practice, practice-based research, Research on

May 23, 2013.

graphic design, graphic

Studio Diary 10: 13th May: Sequential Drawings?

A rapid set of drawings playing with idea of cartoon abstraction, comic strip and filmsequential narratives on a fixed canvas?

This entry was posted in abstract, cartoon, Comics, drawing, graphic research, Research on May 17, 2013.

Studio Diary 9: 7th May Burolandschaft?

A very hot day and studio a little cooler than expected which good. Still managed to create three drawings despite also reading photo related items specifically about early photography ( Lady Elizabeth Eastlakes Review from London Quarterly Review). Had a fascinating message from an architect doing a PhD at the University of Tasmania who picked up on the recent drawings. He said they reminded him of the German Burolandschaft workplace drawings of the Quickborner Team of 1960s.

I did some hasty research (Googled it) and came up with drawings he referring to which were fascinating (see below). The connection is not entirely strange as I have been regarding these drawings a s cumulative memory maps of my hometown/landscape. I am coming at it from a fine art viewpoint which more influenced by artists like Simon Lewty (http://www.artfirst.co.uk/simon_lewty/) and Aboriginal Bark Painting (signifiers of place) as much as maps and graphic diagrams. The idea of linking this further to architectural diagrams/theory fascinating. I shall be delving deeper. Especially as the drawings above show Caruso St John plans for the new Arts Council officesironically http://www.carusostjohn.com/media/artscouncil/new_national_office/introductio n/index.html

For one of the drawings I sectioned the page into staves or cartoon strips to try out some sequential abstract narrative notions I have. This could lead to some large painted/drawn canvases for final show.

This entry was posted in burolandschaft, cartoon, Comics, drawing, graphic research, practice,practice-based research, Research, Studio Diary, Studio Practice, thinking on May 7, 2013.

visual

Studio Diary8 : 30 April. Home.

Strange couple of days paintinganything but canvas though. Front of house, bathroom , shed you name it if it didnt move I painted it with white gloss. After that i finally sat down in home studio to do some graphic work. The resulting three drawings above. First one i consciously trying to stay small in markmaking. Middle one I did blind to see if it loosened things up and finally a very fast drawing to try and preclude conscious acts. Finally I drew the country alphabet above which comes from a slightly different angle and refers way back to a alphabet of symbols I built up in late eighties. I will scan some examples from sketchbook next time I in proper studio to compare with image above which actually more aligned with Mariscal than abstract expressionism or Paul Klee.

This entry was posted in cartoon, drawing, graphic research, research,Research, visual thinking on April 30, 2013.

practice, practice-based

Studio Diary 7: 17 April: Presentation and beyondThe Bauhaus

Presentation for MA students. A slightly odd experience. Especially when introduced as a graduate. Back to studio and more subconscious un-directed drawing. Hidden messages.crazy thoughtsmad equations..exploded peanuts charactersback to paul kleetaking the line for a walk..Bauhaus. Found this fantastic image by Paul Klee of structure of the Bauhaus not unlike my plan for M.A. drawings ha ha ha.it all connects.

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cartoon, drawing, practice, Research, RPT

on

April 17,

Studio Diary 6 : April 9th

text drawing

cartoon fragments

Right and left hand drawing

cartoon text 1

cartoon text 2

Finally back in studio after Easter break and torn between the reading required for the Film History paper for Amsterdam and keeping drawing experiments going. In the end managed both. Above are drawings I did as usual trying not to think almost automatic and the larger ones at bottom slightly different. Inspired by some recent text paintings of my friend Zenon I played around with notion of text as drawing. I then produced the strange calligraphy like hill drawing. Not sure exactly where this going but does seem to be laying on borderline between cartoon, text and drawing. I was reminded a lot of the Abstract Expressionist drawings I looked at a lot in the 1980s. Also been flicking through a Marukami Catalogue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takashi_Murakami

This entry was posted in cartoon, Comics, drawing, practice-based research, Research, RPT, visual thinking, writing on April 9, 2013.

Studio Diary 5: Couple of drawings

Continuing the automatic drawings which I have started doing in studio when waiting for software to fall over or repair itself..or machinery to workor when I not reading up about impressionist painting and photography I do these small doodles.. I not thinking about them just letting them fall as they might and will analyse later.

Starting to look like graphic designers maps:-)

This entry was posted in abstract, cartoon, drawing, research, Research, visual thinking on March 25, 2013.

practice, practice-based

Studio Diary 4: Digital Drawing?

I finally managed to get some things working in studio after the old XP laptop that I had managed to set up the larger tablet on failed. I have upgraded slightly an old toshiba laptop thrown out by work and after ripping the now dead screen off it have a serviceable digital drawing workstation at last. the new cheap Medion tablet (3.99 from Oxfam!) actually works ok with Windows 7. I then drew a couple of digital versions of the daily doodle that I have been doing in studio when there. Not with any great research output in mind but just to keep hand in and to start thinking about the glorious art object. Below are these digital drawings and the comparable real works. Interesting to work with similar materials in digital and physical space. Two are digital rest are drawn and scanned.

The strange thing is that the two digital drawings are much free-er and less digital than the hand drawn ones. I felt less prescribed as was trying out tablet and also trying out various brush sizes and effects whereas with pens I had a narrower range of mark-making available ironically ( a large, medium and small sharpie for those interested in such things and a biro). When using biro as thinner, scratchier implement I tried to match that in digital arena with photoshop brushes. The other interesting thing is the process of trying out some new textures was same in both processes. Maybe I have used digital pad enough now to feel more comfortable with it whereas before I always felt inhibited by the technology . But does any of this constitute new knowledge? I started reading Scriveners Hertfordshire essay on knowledge and the art object as preparation for the art object as cartoon character series. http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/vol2/scrivener.html

This entry was posted in cartoon, research, Research onMarch 5, 2013.

drawing, graphic research, practice-based

Studio Diary 3: Art Magazines & research culture

I spent most of today in studio again for first time in six weeks as illness prevented me from being there. I went in today with the supervision meeting yesterday for M.A. in the back of my mind. Clarifying the subject of the M.A. as Graphic Research has helped greatly. However my next decision is how far I pursue the Frayling argument between now and next September. In what form I investigate the research question when defined (has to be submitted as a new proposal by 7th January) so something to work on over Xmas and finally how much of this can I move forward as interrogation of own practice leading to a possible PhD? To that end I started looking through old art magazines in studio going back to 2001. I was looking for mentions of academic research culture in an attempt to find out when this started affecting what artists produced and the way they worked. Without going into detail it did seem that by 2003 it was observable within magazines to a degree which it wasnt earlier. There is a whole PhD in analysing this subject in relation to magazines and wider art practice fashions but for now i simply cuttiing out references then analysing them as best iIcan with cartoons drawn over the top. This could develop into a range of artefacts or be a dead end but seems a useful way of directly looking at shifts in artist selfdefinitions and institutional advertising.
This entry was posted in graphic research, practice-based research, Studio Diary on December 11, 2012.

Studio Diary 2: Drawing or painting?

Spent the afternoon in a not too cold studio (it has basic radiators thankfully) as starting to come out of over two weeks of severe chest infection. After looking at the neo-primitives below I thought Id try black acrylic paint straight to canvas and compare it with other methods. Pencil and chalk, paint this was because I forgot to take some Sharpie pens to the studio. So I could theoretically call this an experimental artefact led methodology although I can only gain qualitative data. I have posted on facebook so be interesting to see what reaction I get. I was vaguely thnking of the kind of memory painting Arshile Gorky did (most of his major works refer however subliminally back to his Armenian childhood) but after Id finished the last piece I realised that todays news about Hurricane Sandy and the associated imagery had leaked into my sub-conscious. I therefore named the drawing Sandy.

The smaller image in the gallery of two badges is from 1987 and were a couple of examples of laminated drawings that I sold in aid of Greenpeace at my show that year in Hornsey Library. Proving that nothing changes and I was doing Burgerman before he was knee high

Looking closer other influences which I can see in the drawings include Leger, Mariscal, and Miro all major influences on my late eighties work so it feels like I have somehow carried on from a point then of semi-abstraction before I went more figurative and lost some of my spontaneity. I picked up a book from my library at studio called Arshille Gorky: The Breakthrough Years. Which I will examine along with my present reading. I was heavily influenced by a book I subsequently lost by Harry Rand called Arshile Gorky: the implications of symbols (I have now found it as paperback on amazon although out of print). The Gorky fascination is not so much in his application of paint but far more the way he created memory symbols analogous to Miro. These repetitive symbols came from his childhood. I repeat similar motifs from my past almost like an alphabet and maybe analysing where this came from would be productive. In fact at one point I did try to make a pictorial alphabet of simple symbols. I will try and find the examples I drew. We then stray into both semiotic and literary territory. I will leave the deeper examination of this to the research pages

This entry was posted in Diary on October 30, 2012

new paintings, Outsider Art, painting, Studio

Studio Diary 1: Practice based research?

Ok so here I am back in the studio at the beginning of the second year of my M.A. by registered project and after a summer of drawing related research I am standing in front of a very old work on paper (c.1988) and two new canvases done over the summer in the time not spent researching Fraylings Categories (which wasnt much). So what do the canvases have to do with research if anything? I am struggling already to codify or analyse the works from any kind of methodological perspective. The ideas embedded in the paintings are intuitive, visceral (acrylic paint applied to canvas) and come from a half-formed naive idea of comic forms from looking at various comic and graphic novels and studing Philip Gustons work in some depth especially his drawings. I did read the book Night Studio by Musa Meyer which I remember was quite a harrowing account of how his depressions and rages affected his family ( Musa is his daughter). It did however convince in describing the sheer effort that went into his work. I suppose if I mined back into other works on him I would find material relating to his genesis of the comic forms that replaced his earlier abstract expressionist period. I also own the book Sweeper up after artists by Irving Sandler which I was half way through and which is very telling in its depiction of the fraught nature of post Abstract Expressionist careerism in New York in the early 1960s. But is this researchit is art hostorical research for sure but unless it impacts on my physical creation of an object could it be said to describe anything but contextual knowledge. To impact on the creation of an art object surely it has to be more profound than that? I am just asking questions here as at the start of a difficult journey. Turning intuitions, feelings and observations into theoretical research is a hard task. I

am not convinced as I start this Studio Diary that it at all possible but I may learn something else in the process. I am standing looking at the works. Day One. I photograph them so as to show the similarity in pieces created nearly twenty years apart and in very different locations and circumstances. Maybe that affects how I create images. Maybe the context is more important than I thought. I am also awed by the quotation from Dickens that I discover Guston had on his wall, which he held to, about complete devotion to the cause. I have never liked sunday painting but never had the means to devote my life to painting and this the reason I have stopped painting for long periods. I found an interesting article online by chance detailing Guston in the studio by Dore Ashton. http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4x0nb2f0;chunk.id=d0e 2683;doc.view=print

This appears to be completely available online at: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4x0nb2f0&brand=ucpre ss Now heres some art history to get my teeth into. Quite a start..but is it research?

This entry was posted in new paintings, painting, Philip Guston, research, Studio Diary,Studio Practice on October 10, 2012.

practice-based