Sunday, 14 May 2017
Horse drawings
These drawings and oil sketches are about the volume of the horse and how the light falls on its body.
Monday, 8 May 2017
Self portrait
Diana Hand self portrait 2017 |
I hope sometime to make drawings of other people and will bear in the ideas of Wolfgang Tillmans.
"For him, it is a collaborative act and a good "a good levelling instrument". No matter who the sitter -.. even the artist himself - the process is chracterized by the same dynamics of vulnerability, exposure, honesty and always, to some extent, self consciousness... highlighting the relationship between appearance and identity."
Notes from the catalogue to Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition in Tate Modern (February to June 2017).
Adrian Searle on paint and Peter Doig
This is Adrian Searle's fine tribute to Peter Doig and his use of paint.
"What Doig discovered .. is that paint is like mud and can be drawn out in to trails and strokes like dangling vines, tendrils or branches. It can make a clean white shape, like a canoe, or a broken inchoate mess of spatters, like a sudden cough or wind-whipped sleet. Paint can be like air or light, or solid as a bronze fire hydrant or a man's head or a truck. It can trickle like water on a windowpane. It can be inchoate and formless, or lain on to the canvas like rows of bricks or blind windows puncturing the side of a house, or a series of pictures hung on a wall.
Paint can be as emphatic as fence posts crossing a field, and can also be the boy in the field half-seen in the gloom. It can be as explosive as a snowball hitting a kid in the face. It can blur like a mirage of a couple on a hot b each. It can dry like cement trowelled into the cracks in a wall. It can be a headlight approaching or a canopy of stars reflected in heaving black water or lights on a distant shore seen through a translucent curtain covering a plate-glass windows, as sharp as long grass or a tangle of thorny bushes. It can be as heavy and sodden as wet hair, or as immatrial as a reflection in ice, or fog on the breath.
It can be a slab of light hitting a building or the concrete itself or the foliage that's obscuring the view of the building and a smear of sun richocheting off a shadowed tree trunk. It can be diaphanous as the material stretched over an old parasol, scraped across the painting in a translucent veil. It can be shiny as a truck and as fleeting as smoke blowing away from a chimney in a gale. It can be something seen or half seen, or the implication of something not visible at all. It can be both a parody and homage to another painter's touch. It can say many things at once.
Painting, in short, is language through which painters discover their subjects and also both lose and find themselves. This is why it is as much an act of recovery as it is one of discovering the unknown. As words themselves frequently tell the writer what to write, so the substance of a painting dictates where nuance lies and where meaning might be found, and where figures might lurk. There's always someone there if you look long enough. If painting is mirror it cannot avoid reflecting the one who made it."
Peter Doig Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott and Catherine Grenier Phaidon 2007 p. 79
Sunday, 7 May 2017
Wolfgang Tillmans
Tracing light directly onto paper |
The dismantled photocopier | r |
The folded sheet of paper |
Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) is a fascinating artist. Known originally for his avant-garde work in fashion and other magazines, he is also now more engaged in wider social issues.
In his practice he is very engaged with process and materials - in his case this means photographic media such as film, chemicals and paper, and often his images reflect this interest. He creates abstract images on photosensitive paper without using the camera, tracing light directly onto the paper. He sees his tools as artworks. For example, he dismantled a broken colour photocopies by undoing every screw is it and photographed it as a piece of sculpture. A folded sheet of paper also makes an ambiguous abstract shape.
He is interested in the "coexistence of chance and control - finding ways of resisting the idea that the photograph is a representation of reality" He does not distinguish between abstraction and representation, is rather more interested in what they have in common.
Printed material of all kinds central to his work, “the printed page is as valid a venue for artistic creation as the walls of a museum” , he says.
Although Tillmans' approach is highly conceptual, he is also very socially aware of how space is shaped and experienced by society, and also how new technology is affecting our worldview and culture. At the same time, he notices how urban nightlife (places where people might express their personal identities) is becoming more restricted.
His empathy for people is apparent from his photographs in the Neue Welt project (started in 2009). He travelled to five continents to look at new places and familiar places, both as if for the first time. Some of photographs from this period form a separate video work "Book for Architects 2014". This consists of 450 photos taken in 37 countries, emphasizing both the adaptability and fragility of human beings.
There is so much more to see and learn in this exhibition at Tate Modern (15 February to 11th June, 2017)
I particularly like the way his acknowledgement of shared humanity and vulnerabilty is combined with an enquiring technical and creative mind that takes nothing for granted and sees the world and his art in such a new way.
Saturday, 6 May 2017
Abstracting the horse
Really pleased with this total chance one which popped out today Blurred movement is probably a good way for my horses right now.
Now (10th May) working on a photo composition from Newmarket a few years ago. Experimenting, moving from a fairly exact version via a playful experimental sketch version through to version 2.
It is hard to see from the photograph what the paintings are like because texture and movement are quite important. I am trying to work out what is interesting and important, it has to be the stripes and the pink jacket and the denim legs, plus the horse's body and legs. Version 2 was enjoyable to do (it is unfinished as yet) because I felt much freer and more involved with it and it seemed that the subject was essentially the horse and rider relationship. But I don't think I have the proportions quite right. Version 1 appealed to my more logical side. I like the watery sketch too, it is probably the best! In all cases, I worked out the main colours first and prepared my palette, but was prepared to play with that (see the sketch version)
Next stage - I did another version with more paint and energy and eventually started to see beyond the surface (stripes and pattern) to the basic composition, rhythm and shapes. Huge moment. Having established the key shapes I then did a free drawing playing with the basic shapes, then moved into that with the main colours, which I know by now. This may turn back into a figure of a rider.
Photograph |
Version 1 painting acrylic on canvas |
Version 1 + |
Having a play acrylic on card |
Version 2 unfinished acrylic on canvas |
Version 2 blurred out a bit |
Shapes and rhythms |
Abstract version :) |
Wolfgang Tillmans "Book for Architects"
"The Book for Architects" is a video installation of 450 images, reflecting Tillmans' fascination with architecture and "the contrast between the rationality and utopianism that inform design and the reality of how buildings and streets come to be constructed and inhabited". Tillmans "hones in on the resourceful .. ways in which people adapt to their surroundings to fit their needs. These are individual and uncoordinated decisions that were not anticipated in architects' plans but still impact on the build the environment"
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(quote from the accompanying leaflet published by Tate)
Tillmans' statement:
Over the past ten years, I have photographed buildings in
ordinary and extraordinary contexts in thrirty-seven countries on five
continents. Displaying the complexity
and the irrationality – sometimes madness – and at other times beauty of
architecture, these pircutres in their totality seem to me a little daunting,
but have always been taken with a kind eye.
I’m aware that architecture is an expression of desires, hopes and
ambitions, s well myriad practical needs and limitations that shape a structure’s
design. I’m fascinated by the infinite
number of formal and structural solutions, seen en masse and the world over,
that human logic found for similar problems.
Book for Architects is not a book design but a
video installation, presented as a looped projection of still images on two walls.
My interest is not a typological examination but to show a dequence and
an arrangement of images that echo what examples of the built environment look
and feel like to me. I don’t use
wide-angle or shift lenses but a standard lens that most closely approximates
to the perspective of the human eye. The
various elements of architecture appear here at times clearly and cleanly,
while at other times in a layered and convolurted way. As such, the installation represents an d emulates
the randomness, beauty and imperfection that characterises built reality, both
past and present.
Wolfgang Tillmans
2014
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