The model spreads herself along the bench, then, next, gains support curling her hand over the edge of the bench, and later her foot springing off the surface. Yes, I do sometimes draw the whole pose, and I do regularly and frequently focus on hands and feet. But this is not my art! The bench in these cases is the context, and I very rarely include context. I emphasised this in a recent posting. So what is my art? My answer to this question I would like to suggest is that my art is my process. But I have claimed this before, and if I look back at my postings on this blog then the analysis and descriptions of my life-drawings and my life-drawing journey most often centres on process. Rarely the drawing as a finished work is mentioned and almost never have I attempted to produce a completed work. However my fascination with my process has increased, my research attempts to understand what happens when I draw a muse have been revealing, and above all I am beginning to gain a real insight into what is taking place in terms of perception, emotion, feelings, dialogue with the muse, conscious and un/sub-conscious thought, and perhaps some other aspects as well. I have become aware that (sometimes) after starting a drawing, i.e. selecting what to start to draw on the paper, the next really conscious event is standing back to view the drawing and being surprised or even taken-aback by that which I am looking at. Now, this doesn't happen every time, but it has been an increasingly occurring experience. And I am enjoying it. I have talked in the past about periods when I have felt I have taken an ownership of my art. That my art is coming from within myself. But this has been with reference to my mark-making (particularly with graphite pencils and fine-liner pens), my drawing with both hands simultaneously, and the way I select and juxtapose parts of the anatomy of the muse through morphing, overlap and transparency. Yet, experimentation is at the heart of my process. This is not a conscious will to dabble into the unknown, but more simply not having a plan or a goal or something to aim for. So, when I enter the life-drawing session I do not have a plan (I think probably I did in the very early days). But I believe now that a significant overall life-drawing strategy is taking place. This is not a conscious designed strategy........it is simply what happens...…..
This blog is basically a weekly diary in which I post my drawings and attempt some sort of analysis of them, and at times provides a context following my reading and research which itself is usually prompted by what has occurred. A few days or the evening before a life-drawing session I often look though my previous drawings, sometimes I may go though the hundreds stored on my tablet, and just think about what has been happening, those I like, those I find have a radical aspect, those which suggest something to pursue, etc. So this then is the conscious part of the overall process. What happens when I start to draw? What is different? What is it that drives one forward? I believe that activation is maintained in the unconscious by the intense desire to solve the problem at hand. At Paul Fowler's Extreme Poses in Stroud the 30 minute pose creates a problem. Basically it is one of time. Something will be produced within the 30 minutes. The intense desire to solve this problem can produce stresses that in turn cause associations that are not possible in conscious thought. Hence my surprise on occasions of what I have produced.
During the evening before February 28th at Extreme Poses I made these notes in my note-book of a kind of summary of what I was seeing in my latest works:
- depth through transparency, and not depth through perspective
- ambiguity via my morphic fusions
- different scales in one drawing
- an overall pose alongside several selected anatomical parts
- parts confined within the parameters of an outline of the overall pose
- layers (Cezanne)
- the big, confident line
My overall term for all of the above is 'Spatial Ambiguity'. And I place this alongside the term 'Transparency Drawings' which I borrow from Francis Picabia which may be defined as 'complexely layering them and piling them on top of each other to provoke confusion and strange associations'. Picabia was around in Paris with Picasso and Braque and can be seen to have developed his own version of cubism through overlap, different scales, and transparent layers of drawings on top of each other. I first came across the very complex drawings of Picabia perhaps 4 or 5 years ago, found them fascinating but did not study him or his art at all. In fact I rather dismissed his work as too complex and not relevant to me. But very recently in reading about Picasso's cubist journey I discovered that Picabia's ideas and approach to figurative response and representation seemed to appear so similar to that which was emerging with me. One may conclude that my un-conscious took note when first coming across his drawings 4 or 5 years ago, and then in the stress situation (noted above) of the 30 minute pose at Extreme Poses caused an association within the un-conscious thinking taking place around the current drawing.
I feel that my own version of cubism is flourishing. Metzenger and Gleises in their seminal publication 'Du Cubisme' unleashed the standard definition of cubism as representing a scene as if the observer were "moving around an object (in order to) seize it from several successive appearances".
A Miller is his writings on Picasso suggests "How you look at it, that is what it is". That is really encouraging, and I have no hesitation in placing a great value on my own drawings 'cause I now have confidence in believing they do say something about how I am seeing things. Salvador Dali spotlights the creative aspect of one's own particular and peculiar way of seeing "Knowing how to look is a way of inventing". Rene Magritte suggests a bountiful outcome from this "Each thing we see hides something else we want to see". And it was Picabia through his transparency drawings who revealed how we could show that which was normally hidden and therefore frequently not drawn. If I now add a further challenge in my quest to comprehend what happens when I do life-drawing, and to remind myself that it is the process, but more specifically the perceptual process I am fascinated by, I quote Marcel Duchamp "It's not what you see is art. Art is the gap".
Finally, I want to touch on the 4th-Dimension, which I have introduced and discussed in recent postings, and suggested that on occasions my process is of the 4th-Dimension. Duchamp described Picabia's 'Otaiti' as "creating a 3rd-Dimension without resorting to perspective". Depth rather than surface is the chief characteristic of transparency. The 4th-Dimension is about space and time together. A variant on a Metzenger quote from an article of 1911: a cubist picture can be likened to "moving around an object to seize it from several successive appearances, which, fused into a single image, reconstitute it in time". In many of my 15 or so drawings from my 3 days at Niel Bally's studio in Talgarth I did not need to move around the muse because either the muse took a step forward and around every five minutes, or she lay and rolled over every five minutes, in both cases recalling Duchamp's figure descending a staircase. However, I believe I am fully and truly taking my process into the 4th-Dimension, of space and time, when I am in front of a single pose and I select a part or anatomical event to draw because it captures my attention for one reason or another, then I select a second part or another anatomical event and include it probably at a different scale, and so on and so on. There emerges perhaps a narrative which helps juxtapose these individual parts, and they gradually relate together. Each may (will) have its own perspective. Each may (will) be drawn to a scale which seems natural to that part. They will be added overtime and reflect my journey in and around and through the pose. Each part will have its place within the space defined by the parameters of the paper, yet the space will go beyond the edges of the paper, and will go into the depths of the paper. And further more, the drawing with the above spatial qualities, will take place within the space between me and the muse, a perceptual- kinetic space which probably extends beyond the 4th-Dimension (but I have yet to research this).
On 08.02.2019 I wrote in my note-book:
A very new/different feeling today with the first three drawings...…..as though my drawings were taking place way beyond where I was in my journey.
Explanation: when I photograph my drawings and place them on my blog, and complete some text, to go with them, I am in effect drawing a line. But this is not a 'conscious' line. Not a deliberate act. Yet, this is what in fact takes place:
Is it possible to draw in a future state?
OR
To draw in a way, different to anything in the past, but not be aware/conscious of what is happening?
'Life-drawing is a figurative art' ………. not a quote from anyone as far as I can recall …….. but I have noted that in descriptions of the developments in cubism that following Metzenger's promotion, formalisation and intellectualisation of the works of Picasso and Braque that someone like Gris went on to begin to loose connection with anything that resembled a human figure and eventually people such as Kandinsky departed completely. I am absolutely certain that my muses will never be transformed into the abstract, just as Picasso (according to A Miller) could never come to terms with an abstract art devoid of any figurative content whatsoever. Mine may be deconstructed, re-arranged, morphed, and they may have their anatomies strangely juxtaposed, but I am hoping that the way I see, and the sum of the marks that appear on my paper, say that 'the whole goes/takes one beyond the sum of the parts'. I have always recognised the therapeutic and meditative qualities and benefits of life-drawing and I am now relishing the confidence I have in my ability to enter a deep sub/un-conscious state which has an outcome which can more than often appear evolutionary but at times can be surprising and on rare occasions be...……. well, here, I am lost for words ……. perhaps 'spiritual'.
On 08.02.2019 I wrote in my note-book:
A very new/different feeling today with the first three drawings...…..as though my drawings were taking place way beyond where I was in my journey.
Explanation: when I photograph my drawings and place them on my blog, and complete some text, to go with them, I am in effect drawing a line. But this is not a 'conscious' line. Not a deliberate act. Yet, this is what in fact takes place:
- the completion of an enquiry
- the termination of a task
- the compiling of a statement of a set of five drawings which have dealt with something particular and probably something new.
Is it possible to draw in a future state?
OR
To draw in a way, different to anything in the past, but not be aware/conscious of what is happening?
'Life-drawing is a figurative art' ………. not a quote from anyone as far as I can recall …….. but I have noted that in descriptions of the developments in cubism that following Metzenger's promotion, formalisation and intellectualisation of the works of Picasso and Braque that someone like Gris went on to begin to loose connection with anything that resembled a human figure and eventually people such as Kandinsky departed completely. I am absolutely certain that my muses will never be transformed into the abstract, just as Picasso (according to A Miller) could never come to terms with an abstract art devoid of any figurative content whatsoever. Mine may be deconstructed, re-arranged, morphed, and they may have their anatomies strangely juxtaposed, but I am hoping that the way I see, and the sum of the marks that appear on my paper, say that 'the whole goes/takes one beyond the sum of the parts'. I have always recognised the therapeutic and meditative qualities and benefits of life-drawing and I am now relishing the confidence I have in my ability to enter a deep sub/un-conscious state which has an outcome which can more than often appear evolutionary but at times can be surprising and on rare occasions be...……. well, here, I am lost for words ……. perhaps 'spiritual'.
No comments:
Post a Comment