The drawings which please me. For different reasons they each illustrate an aspect of my life-drawing which really interests me at the moment, and which I feel I can stand up and talk about with a fair degree of contextual knowledge, but more importantly I feel that they each come from within me and are a material expression of my most personal and complex process.
Alva Bernadine
The Bernadinian photo-philosophy can be summed up in five words. They are: astound, confound, provoke, intimidate and gorgonise.
He is after two things in his photographs: One, they should have tension and Two, they should have narrstive. "There is no place for conventional beauty, it is ugly beauty that I seek".
Also, and something which has plagued me for some time, he is 'Anti-portrait'. He says, "I began to use shadows, crop faces, and to partially or totally obscure them in my snaps. When you see a face you reflexively begin to read it. How old is it? What sort of experiences has it had? By denying the viewer the face, I force his eyes where I want them, and that is to the event" Exactly! The eye of the viewer will go straight to the face. If there is no face, then everything else is up for grabs. So, one draws what one sees, and this will then become the interest of the viewer. You will know that when I include a face I draw only one side, one eye, when it is essential to include the head to make a point, e.g. in recent examples when I have a chin resting on a hand, an elbow resting on a knee, a foot resting on the floor, then the issue being explored is the series of supports throughout the length of the pose. Including the full face in this sequence would most certainly distract from the narrative.
The ideas, philosophy and intentions behind (i) the mirror compositions of Hans Breder and (ii) the transparency within Hans Bellmer's drawings, have become installed within my psyche. Whilst I have known of the work of these artists for some years my understanding has only recently emerged as I have attempted to analyse my own drawings.
Alessandro Boezio claims that 'everything can be transformed', so through a remix of the human body there is created an ambiguity of forms. I have recently become aware of a quality of ambiguity in some of my drawings. One cannot immediately work out what is happning within the contorted conglomorate of body parts.
I feel I am at last entering into a world of my own invention: "Every creative work is somewhere between memory and oblivion, you remember things but you forget things, so because you forget, because you have oblivion, then you have a space in which you can invent something" (Louise Bourgeois).
Here are two pieces by Thomas Rolfe who claims he pursues beauty whereas the work of Asger Carlson engages with the grotesque.
I do life-drawing two days a week.
Not all the year through.
But when I do,
I experience periods of intense emotional and intellectual challenge and fulfillment.
I become one with my art.
Any boundary between artist and model dissipates with time.
But ultimately, I am generating my own world, in which my personal genre evolves.
Then, every so often, I feel a need to explore a context for my art
(I will be indicating what that current context might be in my forthcoming postings).
A 10 minute pose with Liv looking up. Accompanied by a quick drawing of the main pose for the remainder of the morning.
The second drawing seemed to present me with quite a challenge. Or perhaps I turned it into one. I don't do whole poses these days, and I don't do sight measuring, and with my anagram/bits approach I don't need to get the proportions right. Liv who is long and tall and slim demands careful attention in order to do justice to her elegance. So I sight measured, and structured the drawing. This was not my usual quick, spontaneous, intuitive, 'feeling' approach.
Then after lunch Liv took up a classic reclining pose on a chaise longue. I had with me some recent drawings which I intended to use the backs of. But as I reviewed these drawings it occurred to me that I could try something which had been at the back of my mind for some time: to superimpose a drawing upon a previous one. So this I did, and in the process all kinds of examples of multiple body compositions came to mind. I've since researched this approach further and will be posting a brief summary of my findings soon, together with whether I believe this has potential. The classic reclining pose is not immediately apparent in either of these drawings, but turning them through 90 degrees should reveal all. A key correlation which caught my attention and inspired me to pursue this path was the lower leg foreshortening, which occurs in both drawings but is very clearly articulated in the second of the two.
