Some wanderings on the weekend path

The business of making animations is becoming more and more fascinating and I have at last discovered, courtesy of a good deal of help from Paul Gardiner, how to change project files into a more accessible format.
Let's see if this new information has worked:

Wow! Can't believe this! Another step forward into the digital world. I think now I might go back and see if I can upload some earlier videos as I had planned.

So it has been a good weekend one way and another; lots of work and a great result in Thomond Park - Munster march on once more.

Distractions on the path to school

One of the advantages in getting an earlier train is that there is no fierce rush and consequently more time to observe. this caught my eye as I was walking:

 

I'm really not having much fun with the whole video animation process at present - need to learn more.

This is the next day and as you can see not a lot has happened with the business of uploading videos. I have managed to get my animations on to Skydrive and they aer playing but Paul Gardiner has told me anyone wanting to look at the stuff would need a password, so I think I will bite the bullet and start bringing my laptop in to school. It would certainly make things a lot easier when making a presentation to my tutors.

regarding the comment above about the video, I didn't realise that this actually runs on the log, so I'm not quite as digitally dense as I thought I was!

This is a two-day post but as I am working away I will continue and when I get home I will add a number of pictures to show where I am now. With regard to that I am going to post the statement I have made out for my tutors explaining my present position. :

To Sense My Space

 

Where am I now?                                                         October 15

 

The main thrust of my research and practice at present is into the concept of edge.

This is an idea which is open to interpretation in many different direction, but for now I am concentrating on a tight personal and concrete view, derived from an initial rather more monumental perception.

There are two distinct strands to my thinking and to my work

The first comes from an interest in the work of land artists such as the Boyle Family, Richard Long and to a lesser extent Andy Goldsworthy, and has taken the form of a plaster cast of part of my garden. This cast is here at present. I do not intend to pursue this for the moment because, in truth, the cast was not quite as inspiring as I had hoped but there are possibilities.

The other presently much more interesting project is based on a series of photographs taken at various locations, but sprouting from Limerick Junction, a site which I believe has a great deal more potential for development.

These images are views of familiar objects seen from an unfamiliar perspective, and for now I would prefer not to name them, as I feel that would reduce them once more to the banal.

The pictures may be used in various ways, but each can stand alone. At this time I have made a short animation feature, based on the work on Len Lye.

One of his 1930s pieces – ‘A Colour Box’ – was little short of revolutionary for its time and for the use for which it was commissioned – an ad for the Royal Mail parcel post.

This animation is a new departure for me, but I have found it fascinating and would like to pursue it perhaps even working with pictures of the cast.

 

Frank Rafter

Home again and on checking my email found this post from Carmel - thank you very much for that, Carmel.

Carmel Bergin 17 October 22:36 There's the post I was telling you about earlier and to look at other things on the site you just click on SOCKS there is an art and design category on that home page. Hope its helpful. http://www.facebook.com/l/xAQGIOJiUAQFvaUZ-jgxnsnAkD-8VnxGrcZZIi5hdSLdg-Q/socks-studio.com/2012/09/22/history-images-horizons-cities-photographs-by-sze-tsung-leong/ “History Images”, “Horizons”, “Cities”: Photographs by Sze Tsung Leong : socks-studio socks-studio.com Also visit: http://microcities.net/         The City photos were amazing and I will show some of them later.

Slippery conditions underfoot

Oh how quickly the days roll by! I have become a bit addicted to the making of videos and animation and I am going to try to load a slightly different one in its raw state:

Fine!!?! this is all taking rather longer than I had hoped so I wll leave it alone and go on to other things.
I was looking for something else the other day, first at home here, then in the library at school and in both places a different name came up(the same in each case) and it promptd me to retrieve a volume of the complete works of this artist to peruse. Her work bears on my concept of edge as you will see, but apart from that it gives me great pleasure to see such a wide variety as in real life I have only seen a limited range of her pieces:

This piece is called Nightscape(1959-64) and was typical of the Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) work that I first knew. I loved all the little sharp-edged boxes with their treasure-troves of found wooden objects all soaked in matt-black paint.
Later, she reversed the colour:

 

This was Dawn's Wedding Feast (1959) with the same process in white.

In 1977, New York honoured her by naming a plaza after her and commissioning seven site-specific pieces:

 

 

A wonderful artist.

 

On Tuesday last I was at my first workshop, and this was run in the Ceramics Building By Ciaran Whitelaw. Here are a few pictures:

 



 It was, admittedly just a taste of the process, but it was enough to whet the appetite for a longer contact with the clay.

The primrose path of dalliance

Guilt is writ large here when I see the date of my last post, and I wouldn't mind but so many times during the day I have thought of points I would like to make and things about which I would like to muse aloud , but ...... no screen or k'board handy ; I'm reminded of the late-lamented Janice Joplin who, when singing of her desire for a  Mercedes-Benz proclaimed:

My friends all drive Porsches, I MUST MAKE AMENDS;

well, no merc but I must make amends.

Before I go back to cover lost ground I must mention something that was on BBC4 -a series of three programmes about the making of the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour, and a complete showing of the film in colour - it was originally shown in b & w; I can remember creating mayhem in my home in Dublin by insisting on watching even though the reception was brutal and everyone else thought it was a load of rubbish.
Looking at it again........... it was an amazing piece of work to have been shown on mainstream television on Stephens' Day at that time (1967) and it is still quite a surprising achievement.

 

Ok- enough of the nostalgia, but the film is still interesting as an art piece.

 

 

The plaster cast was duly completed, cleaned up here, and brought into school where it went through another cleaning.

 

I would have to admit that it did not look quite so stunning as I had expected so a little more thought will be required for this particular branch of the path. I will retrieve it  from the drying cabinet  tomorrow and think about it - possibly a few more casts, but a little smaller and seeking out a less amorphous surface.

Nonetheless, it is what it is and that is an honest record of part of the earth's surface noting the edges that are there. It clould be  a satellite view from on high...........

 

Anyway, the path winds once more, this time in a totally unexpected direction. On Thursday, I met my tutor, Sylvia Shortall, in the library and she felt that I should pursue the image -making I had been doing with pictures of familiar objects and scenes but from odd angles and abstracted from their surroundings. I have shown some of these already but here are a few more:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just prior to this she had mentioned a shrt animation film from the 1930s called 'A Colour Box' by Len Lye and I had watched this and was fascinated by it. She suggested to me that I might try this with these images. I was a bit stunned because I had never done anything like this before, but nothing loth I have spent the weekend trying this out and I will put in the very first effort. It doesn't amount to much but I just wish to record this because it was the beginning.

................ Ok so I haven't quite mastered uploading videos successfully but I will be back to you on that!

Anyway, it wasn't quite Len Lye, and Martin Scorcese need not feel threatened but I was amazed  as I would never  have seen myself working in this area.
I can see alot of possibilities in this.

Anon

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

Narrow, and slippery

Never got to do anymore last night; tsk,tsk

I was looking at a journal in the library today - Modern Painters, Sept 2012 - and I was fascinated to  come across a gallery ad - James Kelly/Contemporary - for a show featuring an artist called Robert Kelly, but apart from  the names which I will come back to, the piece shown

Luchino's Nocturne II -2010

 



has all the look of a hard-edge. That name Kelly just seems to keep appearing - I wonder are the gallery owner and the artist related and are they related to Senior Kelly ( who is now in his 90s -good man Ellesworth!) Anyway the edge is still there.

What have I been doing? Digging in the garden, thats what. No, I havent got a sudden deep yen for horticulture, but I have been working on an area to cast in plaster; I will then bring the cast into school and there are a number of options as to how I will reproduce the surface : texture, material, colour, size. But here are some pictures of the process up to now:

The raw materials

 

The first pour, covered against rain

Too thin

Second pour, but needs another layer

 

I'll come back to this when I have uncoveerd and cleaned the cast.

 

Aptly, the first of our seminars today was on 3D and I was speaking to Elaine Riordan after to explain what I was doing and to get some further pointers. I won't say anything about these yet as there are a number of different routes I might take.

The other sem was on colour and this is an area which particularly interests me because I have always maintained that I loved the electric colours and yet recent works have tended to veer towards muted tones and earth colours. - Have to go contrary to that to see what happens.

 

The other thing I did today was to use a sheet of newsprint to do a charcoal and red chalk rubbing of the surface of the chair-lift outside the studio (FF18). There is a very interesting pattern of lines in the concrete of the unused courtyard and I think I might try the same with those. - So if I'm seen out there I'm not simply trying to be alone.

 

Lines, edges, spaces being separated from one another. When we look at something we see an outline but we know it is a volumeand it is in at least three dimensions, and when we attempt to draw,paint, print it we have been exhorted to suggest these three ds but what surrounds it?

Edge............................paradox?

 

The Path is Narrow

Its been a few days since last I posted - extenuating circumstances.

Anyway, I have been pursuing the Edge by considerably different means than hitherto in that I have taken the very good advice that I was offered and have made the search much more personal.
I gave a little taste a few days ago, but here are a few more recent, ie last three days:

I'm afraid you will have to excuse the rather arty placement of the images -I'd love to be able to say that it was designed as such but I'm afraid it's more a product of my inability to control the cursor properly! hopefully this will improve with practice......... or maybe I will just allow random to rule.

Anyway, as you can see I am experimenting with edges  of every shape imaginable and that last word really is the controlling limit - one's imagination.

But having seen or devised these images the thing then is to transmute them by some means into an art form that will communicate -in some way - with the receiver (viewer, observer, critic, even partner -because in my view the person who receives the work of art is partnered wittingly or unwittingly with the maker).
The hard-edge, highly-coloured images have a fairly obvious connection with past influences[Ellesworth Kelly(b.1923), Kenneth Noland(b.1924) et al.,

 

 and are taken maily from public signage. The more organic edges -above and below:

 

 

 

areconcerned essentially with formations made outside human control and I am planning to make some permanent record of some of these.


In passing, I caught this

 

and couldn't resist the comparison to this

Ellesworth Kelly - Blue Green Red II   -1960s


More later

There are lotus -blossoms across my path

I am almost going into information and stimulus overload..

Today was away from school and up to Farmleigh in the Phoenix Park for a ceramics exhibition called

For the third time in about eighteen months, my perceptions about ceramics have been challenged, although truth to tell I have now nothing but profound admiration and a deep sense of awe for these artists.

Let's just look a bit:

 

Alex Scott

 

 

                                                                                 
                                                                               Gabriele Gisi

 

SaraFlynn

 

 

Elaine Riordan

 

 

Christine Aschwanden

 

These are just a taste of what was a wonderful array of thought and art - no tea-cups here.

 

Anyway, I believe the catalogue is in the library or very soon will be and I would advise everyone to look at it. The sojourn in China that was at the genesis of this is really well worth reading about.

 

I will have to return to the path tomorrow, but I managed to get a few more ideas while on the trip today.