The back straight

I have been reading up a good bit on Robert Smithson who died tragically at 35 while on ra flight to survey for a new piece of large scale work. He is most famous for:

 

Spiral Jetty - Great Salt Lake Utah - which is now invisible as the water level has risen (shades of Deliverance about which I was recently writing). However what is not perhaps realised is that Smithson was very interested in the process of decay of the built environment also and he was fascinated by the decaying mining equipment around the side of the lake. I would be very interested in pursuing that possibility with regard to shopping centres and in seeking out ruined "malls" and documenting what can happen to once glossy establishments.

 

Binaries again - growth/decay ; gloss/rot ; steel/rust;  enamel/decay........you get the picture.

 

Back into school tomorrow - exam first - then hand in essay.

Nice to check the to-do list from beginning of vac and find that everything has been checked off- watch out for smugness - smack in the kisser coming !!!

 

Here are another couple of images:

 

 

 

 

This one you have seen before but what about this:

 

 

This is an Andy Warhol print from 1966 and it looks as if similar ideas are at work here!!

 

Ok -back to the coal face.

 

Ps every so often I need to ressure myself that I can still draw because not enough is being done, so here is something I did the other day:

 

 

Peter Mathiessen - writer - recently died

 

pencil

 

 

 

The Path of Pages

One thing I did not mention was that we have had a new temporary tutor while Breda has been away- her name is Marian Sheehan; here is her card:

She is doing her MA with Noelle Noonan as her supervisor.

She gave us two short talks on her subject which is fairy and ghost stories and related a visit to a castle in Charleville which has a rep for psychic happenings; when she showed us some of her work I immediately remembered her degree show from about two or three years ago. her drawing skills are extraordinary and her embroidered birds were amazing.

Anyway the second day she was there she did a tutorial with me and was very interested in my work with artists books and made a few very interesting suggestions which have led directly to another step on the path.
The artist she mentioned was Nobuhiro Nakanishi:

 

He makes landscapes from multiple sheets of what appears to be heavy acetate with marginally different images which can be looked through.

 

Another artist using multiple sheets was suggested by Liam Lewis  - Marlene Oliver:

 

 

who while using the multiple technique deals more in biological images.

 

Anyway Marian suggested I might make acetates of my shopping centre images and put them into book form.

 

Here is the result:

 

 

 

 I have doctored an old encyclopaedia, cutting out pages and completely rebuilding the cover with one of my own. It is reasonably successful but I still have some way to go with the proper attachment of flyleaves to the covers to allow satisfactory movement ...but I'm getting there.

 

I may have mentioned before that the bitmapping process didn't hold a lot of appeal unless one was going to turn the image almost to abstraction by making the dots really big and by 'dithering' them but I will come back to it again.

 

Meantime I found a 'bitmapped' image in my travels that amused me:

 

 

Think about them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Springing along the path

The last post(!!?!!) was in some ways incomplete in that I wasn't able to get all the images in that I wanted - they just wouldn't load properly - c'est la vie.

The other thing I didn't return to was  that I never made the connection with the artists I mentioned; Peter Doig's etches chimed with the tones I was getting in my etches and the colours Peter Hallay uses are what I would like to put into my screens and I hope in the fortnight remaining I can do some of this.

There was a very interesting visit from a conceptual artist called Dennis McNulty whose talk was really fascinating

 

That's him with the megaphone

This is part of one of his installations - I particularly liked the one done in London - Precast - as  it dealt with the built environment and this chimes well with my Façade Edge project. We found afterwards that we had a very strong shared in interest in the SF writer William Gibson and the concept of cyberspace. All-in-all I enjoyed this visit far more than I had expected to and I would look out for his work and where I could see it.

Another conceptual artist whose work I was alerted to by Michael Canning is Luis Kamnitzer, a german-born Uruguayan, living in the US:

 

What I particularly like about this work is the emphasis on repetition and multiple and its apparent relation to the book - also he uses photo a lot  and here are my chief interests all being drawn together  - at  least potentially - in the artists book.

 

I briefly mentioned Elizabeth Scherffig on the London visit but I have been back to look at her work again - admittedly online, as I couldn't find anything in the library, even in the journals....................immediately, I contradict myself! -I forgot about Vitamin D2!!!! - and here she is:

 

 

The upper two are untitled and the lower ones come from the Vitrea series and are drawings of glass in all its forms  - all are done with chalk lead (sepia dark ) on Arches paper.

I would recommend anyone interested in drawing to seek out her entry in Vit D2 ( in fact just look at that book ) and it becomes apparent that her interest in industrial objects, discarded and broken, would be of interest to me.

 

A propos  of that I was working on something else in my studio (home) the other day when I got this terrific urge to make marks on paper:

 

r

 

This is the one piec in three stages - black and red ink on paper 120 cms wide.

 

I think that is where I am now.

... Oh I almost forgot -I have received Ground Art II from Blurb - its good but not as good as the first principally because the quality of the pictures is not up to the same level... but the next one will be Façade Edge.

 

Nor did  I mention Rumpus but I think that has probably been well-covered elsewhere...

 

 

 

The path of shame.....

Oh really, this won't do! This is the longest gap since I started posting  and while I certainly have been very busy, the truth is one can just fall out of the habit of putting stuff up.
OK - we are now into first of two weeks holiday for Easter ( more of that in a minute) but really the 'holiday' will be a lot shorter than that because on the day of return we have an exam in the morning and a essay to hand in in the afternoon plus a number of projects to get up to date incl. this!

Good news first -finished the essay last night - not printed yet in case any mod to be made; it was about:

... a film which made a very deep impression on me when first it appeared; interesting to revisit and see how ones own views and attitudes have changed.

A few interesting artists have been introduces to me on the basis of my interest in shopping centres and the gloss they form on the surface of society.

Sercan suggested I look at Peter Halley and Peter Doig; the  latter I knew of already -but not his printwork; the former I recognised immediately as having seen in Waddington gallery  and not knowing who he was. Later you will see why these artists are certainly of interest to me.

Peter Doig, from 10 etchings:

Peter Halley

 

You might be surprised at these but it is the type of colour and structure that rings a bell - in passing I would have to say that this artist owes something to Joseph Albers.

 

I'll come back to other artists later but lets see where I have got to.

 

The last thing I showed was the bitumen plates so her are the sugar lifts - I only did two of these:

 

 

left bitumen, right sugarlift

 

 

upper sugarlift, lower bitumen

 

I must apologise once again for the quality of the pictures but  it was difficult to stop work to take pictures; equally that is why there are not as many of the prints as there should be. I will show what is here; most are at least double printed.:

 

 

ie the positive sugar print is dropped on the negative bitumen

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some pictures sowing some of the stages involved in a particular etch which was later monoprinted:

 

 

One of the other things I did with the images on the screen was to make some screenprints and to use these to print over existing work and in one case just to take out a part of the image and repeat it:

 

 

 

 

This one has attracted a certain mount of interest and I have already put larger verions of the images on the screen and hope to do an edition on return:

 

 

At one point there was a workshop in collographs and carborundum prints which induced me to take a little side excursion:

 

 

 

Here are some of the overprints

 

This one is quite big

 

 

Finally, for now here are a couple of editions of the wall at different times: