The mark from the heart: a pre-Christmas treat.

This and my next two postings cover the workshops I attended over in Stroud run by Paul Fowler just before Christmas (see 'A paradox for meditation' and 'The Nude and the Lady in the Hoop')

Here, I just wanted to add a thought about the relationship between my use of fine-liner pens and the graphite pencils (these are the two mark-making tools I used throughout the four days).

• Fine-liner pen is 'exacting' and 'slower' which encourages a thoughtful process. It brings my 'conscious' into the process.
• Graphite pencil engages with 'the heart' as opposed to 'the mind'.
• It's as simple and straightforward as: the 'considered response' as opposed to the 'intuitive response'.
• Graphite pencil is 'the mark from the heart'.

OK, not as simple as I describe. But, food for thought.

A paradox for meditation

I've talked of my belief that I have been engaging with the 4th-Dimension and the 6th-Sense as part of my perceptual processes in my life-drawing. I have also suggested that I am finding the idea of 'The Impossible Drawing' to have some relevance.
Below I include an item from my note-book. It is an amazing image which at first glance may appear fairly straightforward. But one soon becomes aware, as the eye moves from one part to another, that something very strange is taking place. Ultimately, one concludes that the 3-dimensional structure is, in fact, an impossibility. Continued concentrated examination fails to come to a conclusion as to the form being presented.

Throughout the past years my drawings have moved in this direction. Re-juxtaposing anatomical parts and utilising superimposition and transparency, have resulted in somewhat complex compositions which demand examination over time to discover what is actually happening. Often images emerge to the beholder which were not apparent when the drawing is first looked at (this phenomena happens to me also, and this with my own drawings, and I love it when this happens).

Now, this may be a pretentious starting point (the work of Daniel Raymond Chadwick) to introduce my next set of life-drawings, but it is an inspirational one! So my key words to help place what I have been doing in some sort of context are:  ……..AMBIGUITY....ILLUSION....PARADOX...…..SURREAL...…..

The 20 or more drawings represent my output from the two 2-day workshops ( December 11/12 and 18/19) run by Paul Fowler at Pegasus Art in Stroud, England. His title is 'Circus to Stage' (a two day work shop exploring movement and costume with two models) with a nude model and a circus performer in a leotard twirling in her hoop. The model assumed various poses in the usual suspended ropes and on plinths but each in a 'spatial' relationship with the lady in the hoop.
[www.paulfowlerartcourses.co.uk]. In general each pose was held for about 30 minutes with some variation in timing due to the degree of difficulty.

The Nude & The Lady in the Hoop

My drawing is my feeling on paper.........

You can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success, at least as success as conventionally defined.

I have always considered my life-drawing to be a meditative activity, and have worked towards making it more so. Just as the role of concentrating on breathing helps one enter a meditative state so concentrating on my life-drawing process helps my life-drawing activity become a meditative tool.

To this end I frequently embark upon self-analysis (as this blog gives evidence to)  and more recently have attempted to understand my perceptual engagements between my mind, my seeing, my mark-making, my space within and beyond the surface of the paper, my model, and the complex dialogue taking place within the processes of the life-drawing event.

My life-drawing meditation has brought me closer to the truth, closer to beauty, harmony and goodness. It is good to think about process...…… It is even better to realise one is thinking about process.

The wandering (worrying/concerning) mind: What you are generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment. If there is one aspect of life-drawing that the caucus of my life-drawing colleagues agree on is that when the model assumes the pose 'silence-breaks-out' as each person enters into their own world of engagement and dialogue.

So, success for me is not the 'quality' of the end product, however that may be defined. For me success is the inherent 'depth' of the perceptual processes I engage with and enter in to.

I started this posting by claiming that 'my drawing is my feeling on paper', and I probably made this connection through a Buddhist philosophy 'Feelings just are!' One accepts their arising and subsiding, rather than reacting to them. Well, within the 30 minutes of each pose at Extreme Poses in Stroud, there is not time to react. And so there is no time to question, to analyse, to consciously think about, what is appearing on the paper. One is in a meditatively creative state of mind. And objective analysis (a rationality) should be kept separate from the creative act.

So I do not draw in order to produce an end product. But I do take the end product to help inform myself as to what occurred during the making of the end product. One conclusion, which I have alluded to on many occasions in my postings is that I tend (but not always) to focus on parts of the pose rather than the whole. I deconstruct the pose into anatomical parts and reconstruct in a way that says something about how I am seeing. A result of this process, in the drawing, is that things that seem to be true at first glance are in fact not true. In other words I am creating, for the beholder of my drawing, an illusion. This has developed to such a degree that when I myself return to one of my drawings I often get an idea of the main image or content but then uncertainty enters and I have to spend time searching to identify what I have actually drawn. Sometimes I give up attempting to recall the process of making the drawing and on what I have actually included. My superimpositional juxtapositioning and my overlapping and transparency are fundamental to this phenomena.

I have talked in the past of my engagement with the 4th Dimension and the 6th Sense, and I have written of my understanding of how these have become part of my life-drawing process. Recently I have begun to contemplate whether 'The Impossible Figure' can relate to what I do. I am beginning to consider that it may be fundamental. In the drawings of Escher and of Daniel Raymond Chadwick I have found parallels. That which appears feasible (or true) to start with, upon closer inspection starts to look unlikely and finally is just not possible.

I want to append to this analytical insight into my art a reminder that I believe my two-handed-drawing, which is now seven and a half years old, suggests a more holistic activity is taking place. By holding a pencil in both hands and making marks simultaneously with each hand am I enhancing the use and interaction between the two sides of my brain? As I move back and forth from my paper are my motor movements participating in a spatial continuum which passes through the surface of my paper and encompasses the space beyond to embrace the pose and this providing a channel for the energies and personality of the model to reach me?

I am adding two images:
The drawing is a big one, far bigger than my usual A1. It appeared right at the start of my two-handed time, and also was one of my introductory experiments with fine-liner pens. I call it my 'squiggle' technique'. The two pens made marks working closely together, as they explored the form. I recall there are two models, a male and a female. It was one of Paul Fowler's double-model days. Here I am a 'tonalist' - there are no continuos lines. Now, I am a 'linierist', and to me a line may represent a tonal contrast or on occasions even a colour. But essentially a line promotes 'spatiality'.

Looking back I  believe that this drawing together with a few others at the time heralded a real breakthrough in my life-drawing journey following a growing frustration with my realistic interpretations of the classic standing, sitting or reclining pose.

I have referred in the past to what I believe and understand to be:
my cubism
my simultaneity
my interpenetration
my superimposition
my transparency
my space-time 4th Dimension
my layering of planes
my layering of spaces
my passage thro' into the paper

Whilst the above are seen as fundamental characteristics of my thinking and of my drawing I am beginning to add a new language in my attempt to understand my thinking and my drawing:
Paradox...…………………
Meditation...……………...
Illusion...………………….
Surrealism...………………
Collage...………………….
Ambiguity...………………
The Impossible Figure...….
Spiritual...………………...

I am in between two double days at Paul Fowler's 'Extreme Poses' at Pegasus Art in Stroud with two models on each occasion. I have completed the first of these and am excited by the prospect of taking a look at my drawings and seeing what happened. My feeling is that the above language, which has been emerging over recent weeks, will be clarified by the content of my drawings. But I have yet to see if this is the case. When completed I will photograph and post them.

I believe there is more to come. As Ava Gardner is quoted as saying: "Deep down, I'm pretty superficial". I feel I have touched what is for me a fairly deep level of understanding of what I do but I want to go deeper into the processes of my life-drawing. However, it was Charlotte Rampling who said, "You cannot watch yourself, dispassionately" and hence my out pourings on my blog. Finally, James Turrell added, "My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It then becomes your experience" ……. but I believe that I am setting up situations which allows me to see and then I take forward (perhaps most often subconsciously) the experience gained.

Can I handle what is happening?

I think the answer has to be NO!
My life-drawing journey is becoming too complex.
I feel I do not want to engage with the intellectual and perceptual complexities that are emerging.
I, simply, want to draw the human body.
I want to sit down before a white sheet of A1 220gsm cartridge paper, portrait format, a fine-liner pen in each hand, and draw.
I want the process of drawing to help me see that which I am looking at.
I want the activity of mark-making to support my way of seeing and engaging.
I want to experience the activity of life-drawing to be a spatial engagement.

Model and artist: there is the space in between, yet there is the flowing back-and-forth dialogue, there is connection. When artist and model connect something special can emerge.

Can I handle what is happening? A huge question.
My blog entries suggest I question, research, analyse, stand-back-from, reflect, and attempt to place into an art/historical context my thoughts and drawings. But, lets not forget, I only do life-drawing perhaps once a week, I do not have a studio and never do anything outside my regular life-drawing classes.

I will continue this journey: 'paths are made by walking'. I will evolve.

Sequence and chronology

I frequently encounter difficulties when posting my drawings on my blog.
Most of the time my drawings are posted as a week-to-week diary, in chronological order.
But, every so often, I manage to delete a carefully composed posting just before I 'click' to publish it.
Consequently, a posting comes up out of sequence.
Although I find this frustrating, it does not concern me.
My aim is to record my life-drawing journey, more or less as it happens.
What the end product of this process is, is of little or no concern to me.
My blog is my diary.
It is my way of recording my drawings as I create them.
And incorporate into my journey my researches into 'context': Who has gone before? Where has this concept been engaged with? Which great artist can help explain to me what it is I am engaging with?
Having said that, I warm to responses.
I don't get many.
When I do, they warm me, they support me, they energise me.

What do you think?

Talgarth - Day 2

On this second day Niel introduced the idea of 'collage'. Some years ago I experimented with collage and you may recall how I played with gesso and torn paper and then overpainted with charcoal and various paints. So I had done something like this before. And my response was to literally draw the shapes of paper which might be applied to promote tonal differences. So I began to introduce an 'outline' to help draw attention to and differentiate between tonal areas. This is very much an 'architectural' technique. So I am familiar with it, and unfortunately it did not take me out from my comfort zone. I was responding to the workshop intention of 'collage', but in my own way, and this did not challenge me. The above three drawings do not take me further, although I find pleasure in sitting in front of them and studying them, and knowing that they have come from within me.

Talgarth: And I expected my 'cubisme' to flourish

AND It did for a while. But then other forces took over.

I travelled over to Talgarth in Powys to attend Niel Bally's Life-Drawing course for three days. I have been to Niel's on 3 or 4 occasions before and always came away having moved in unexpected directions. This is partly because Niel is a 'tonalist' and I, if anything, have recently become a 'linierist. Niel more or less agreed with me when I suggested this to him. Though I am sure the difference is so much more complex than this simple distinction suggests. In suggesting this to him I was kind of seeking a way of doing my own thing as opposed to responding to his proposals that we should be exploring inks and washes with brushes and other tools, and the scope of charcoal, and then moving on to collage and then painting. 

Was I going to be able to cut myself off from what was taking place around me and focus myself into my own world and avoid the forces and energies that were starting to abound, sticking with a fine-liner pen in each hand, and all the rest of my cubisme, transparency, superimposition, ambiguity, morphism, varying scales, etc.?  Of course not! And it would have been foolish not to have opened up myself to new inputs and then, afterwards, to see how I had been changed.

So I have posted my drawings from the three days at Talgarth in the following three postings, but if I was asked to choose just one which to me continued my recent preoccupations but was significantly added to by the intentions, the suggestions, the approaches, and Niel's 'tonalism' then here it is. And I rather like it!

Talgarth - Day 1

I've responded similarly on many occasions as the model changes poses every five minutes and recalls Duchamp's figure moving down the staircase. But this time with some tonal additions using a big brush and three ink wash densities.

In the two above drawings the model lay horizontally before me. I condensed the pose by bringing the two halves together and overlapping them, and with ink washes landscapes appeared on the paper.

In a recent posting I described how I had introduced a series of circles on to the paper in order to help suggest a 3-dimensional spatial geometry to assist my engagement with the space within, around and beyond the surface of the paper. The circles would also provide focus points within the space of the paper to locate selected parts of a pose. These might be drawn at different scales, and even from different viewing points, and possibly with different perspective vanishing points. I might then extend one or more of the selected parts to outside of the circle thereby embracing my morphing idea and ultimately creating a new form. This new form could then introduce ambiguity, and be open to alternative interpretations.

I had a few moments to fill at the end of this first day and just felt like picking up a graphite pencil in each hand and bring together some of the lovely parts of the pose.

Niel talked of the value that a frame gives to a drawing. And by placing masking tape around a paper washes can be given a edge and other marks halted. I experimented with this in the above drawings. And I feel that a drawing can be enhanced by this addition.

Talgarth - Day 3

So, here we are on Day 3 of Niel Bally's life-drawing class over in mid-Wales. I travel from the iron-age field patterned landscapes of Gwent, below the foot of the Blorenge, up alongside the River Usk, into the valleys sunk between huge, glacial sculpted, rounded mountains. Then descend down into Talgarth. It is a journey which takes one into a different world. Beyond the mountains, into a refreshingly optimistic future.

What does Day-3 have to offer?

Niel introduces paint! Colour! 

How do I respond? 

I like to draw, with whatever other medium I use. I love 'line'. 

And, I have with me my Derwent tinted-charcoal blocks.

This is a 'dry' medium. 

It has a transparency that allows earlier marks to show through. It allows graphite pencil lines to state their presence upon the surface already occupied by sweeps of tinted charcoal. 

We started with six fairly quick poses. Louise was amazing as she posed to provoke from within us responses, quite unanticipated.

Then I engaged with a series of more considered and more thoughtful responses.

The circles, designed to help focus on specific anatomical parts, within the spatial dimensions of the paper, did assist me to structure my responses.

It could be, that this final drawing of the three days, embodies and encapsulates, my current life-drawing philosophy, which no other has. Yet, it is not as simple as this.  I move on. In an evolutionary path. I feel I have reached 'It', frequently and it would seem, regularly. But, life goes on.

So there are two drawings which I take from this three-day experience. I am reflecting upon them.