A reflective response

This morning's drawing with a new model at Angela Palmer's class at Brockweir in the Wye Valley is the first following my period of analysis and reflection which I have been recording in recent posts and which terminated yesterday with the five postings of deconstructive artists which I entitled 'Searching Deconstruction 1-5'. How would I react? More of the same, or a noticeable step, or something radically different. Accepting that a main difference is that most of my drawings are of 30 minute poses with me standing at my easel, here I spent about 90 minutes and sat. It was also a slower drawing in that I recall myself thinking about what I was doing........I did not enter (as far as I was aware) a sub-conscious meditative depth of engagement with the pose. I maintained what I might describe as an 'academic interest' in the process of making the drawing as it evolved. This was not an ongoing objective critique (I have always insisted that analysis and criticism should be kept quite separate from intuitive response and the act of creativity). What I am trying to say is that I was interested in discovering what my response would be this morning, I wanted to continue with my deconstructive anagram approach, but once I selected my starting point (the central part of the pose placed across the central part of the paper) then the composition which emerged seemed to have a life of its own. There are references back to the five postings 'Searching Deconstruction', but there is something new in the overall composition and in the more considered mark-making.

The case for not deconstructing

I missed including this drawing from the relevant posting about a week ago. But having just put together the series of postings "searching deconstruction" including it at this time makes a significant point. Whilst I am loving my deconstruction/reconstruction process and feel it is something most personal in that it has emerged, almost unnoticed to start with,  from my experimental approach to life-drawing, I feel that there are a number of approaches and processes taking place simultaneously which can be illustrated with other drawings. Here is one such example: a beautiful reclining pose, which I wanted to draw at a largish scale. So to fit it on the paper I started with the length of the legs, but this took up the full diagonal. The leg seemed to increase its elongation as I explored it on the paper. The leg was the first attraction. When my feeling for this attraction was satisfied by the drawing of it, my attention became focussed on the delightful rested head and the arm. So in it went. I considered a greater degree of overlap of the two parts, but the outcome is just about right. A lovely model, a lovely pose, for which a further deconstruction would probably appear as a violation.

Searching deconstruction 5

This is the first of the deconstructivist artists I have been looking at to use two different scales in their work. Meltem Isik places a big picture of a body part from the model before the model's body, in the series "Twice into the stream". As with the others I have been looking at her aim is probing perceptions and to challenge us to ask questions of how we perceive the human body.

Searching deconstruction 4

Here is the work of Patricia Voulgaris who combines sheets of paper and card to aid in the deconstruction of the body. Not what I do but again it provokes the beholder to look more than once and challenges our perceptual processes.

Searching deconstruction 3

This is the challenging symmetrical deconstruction of William Farges. Or better described as symmetrical reconstruction. He uses a white line down the middle of the sheet in his "White Line" series. Then in the fourth example of his work he uses a black line and the composition has a far greater affinity with my recent work in that it is fully assymetrical. I have a feeling I may find symmetry in my own work soon.

Searching deconstruction 2

Although I am including the work of James Bullough within the scope of deconstruction I do not have the same affinity with it as I do with the other artists I am including in this search into deconstruction as he does not then enter the process of transformation into the area of reconstruction. These are paintings which remain as fractured imagery rather than new compositions. However, they still challenge, and are compelling works which require close study to work them out.

Searching deconstruction 1

I began to use the term 'deconstruction' to describe what was happening in my life-drawing in early February of this year. I was deconstructing the pose and reconstructing it in a new spatial organisation. I was including in the drawing those parts of the human body which I had a feeling for at that moment. The concept of the human body as an anagram which could be rearranged to express the significance I was feeling about the pose at the time, but also saying something about myself.
Recently I have been researching 'deconstruction', and I will be posting my findings of artists and their work who appear to echo my approach. All talk of placing an emphasis on 'challenging our perception of the human body'. Some are more relevant to me than others.

In this posting I introduce Flora Borsi who abstracts her anatomy to form "Siamese" self-portraits. She morphs and meddles with the human body with a surrealist slant. This is photography and I enjoy her creations which I can closely associate with my recent pieces.