The Path of Superstition

~I gave this title some thought - maybe the Rocky Road or the Path of Relief - but in the end decided on the above for the irony involved  -this will be explained later.

First lets go back to the collages because these have now morphed into A2 digital prints which grace the corridor outside the canteen:

 

Here are two close-ups:

 

The second one I did later as a Super A3 and both would look better as Tif files but they won't load as such.

Anyway, I would  have to say I am a lot more interested in the world of digital and of scanning in images even from my own smaller flat-bed here at home. Also I hope to do some more collage work here over the hols.

 

Before I go any further I should mention the print-off which took place in the workshop on Thursday evening with duels between Eoin and Barry(winner), and Des and Derek(yes, the same!); after Derek was declared the winner ....Des declared everyone expelled. I forebear comment invoking the 5th Amendment, but will show some carefully selected pics:

 

 

Stabbed in the back

 

 

 

If the pictures are less then perfect let us just say the conditions were less than perfect

 

I now have to return to the title and the irony. First let me just say that I don't remotely believe in superstition;  then let me show you this:

 

 

 

 

 

That is all that remained of my car  after 2.30pm on Friday the 13th.

 

Ok I exaggerate slightly but as they say on the TV news the other pictures are too unpleasant to show  - just lets say that car won't be going anywhere again. Interesting start to the hols.

People may have heard me saying that I intended to live to be 100 (!!?!) -well,I feel after Friday I really have been handed a get-out-of-jail card on the proviso that I use what is left to do something extra.

 

Enough of that.

 

 

Before I left I picked up some books from the library. I'll tell you about them:

Himself

 

Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield have become of great importance to me because of my growing interest in collage and Iwill post some uploads from the books later

 

Paul Kennard falls into a similar category with a greater emphasis on protest later in the 20c.

 

 

Berlinde de Bruyckere's sculptures speak to my work, with organic subjects which might be bodies and which might be the subject of violence or decay.

 

...and feeding into all this is the burgeoning fascination with Freudian theory (not that I necessarily agree with it), psychoanalysis and film; this, of course need not be limited to film but turns back on ideas of corruption decay and how these themes are worked together to form an art  of thought about our surrounding circumstances.

 

 

 

This book together with William Claxton's  Jazz Seen bring together an absorption with photography and music, particularly jazz.

 

The last thing I would like to mention is another book.

 From the beginning I have been fascinated by the concept of artists books and had decided that before I finished in school I would make one (in fact I already have an idea, but more of that later).

A while back I was looking through Printmaking Today and I came across an article about Tom Phillips and his  work 'A Humument' . This turned out to be   based on a Victorian novel he and Ron Kitaj had found in a furniture warehouse in the 60s after a bet from Phillips that he could make a life's work out of the first book he could find for thruppence - that was 'A Human Document' and he has been working and reworking this as 'A Humument' ever since and now Thames and Hudson have published a pocket edition. Here is the cover and some pages:

 

 

cover

 

 

as you can see, words are 'extracted' from each page making up a thread and the page is reworked around these in various ways; it is absolutely wonderful and I am going to have to get to see the original.

 

Ideas, ideas and more ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking back along the path

It's getting to that time of year when the path must be surveyed .

I think it is called Assessment.

Anyway I have been looking back along a windy, tortuous and at times narrow and broken surface and I realise thee have been a few omissions not least the source whence the w/cut came.

 

This actually came after the print and a number of people said that they were surprised that someone who avowedly loved books as much as I did should murder them in this way. My justification was that it was the content that was being attended to; anyway, as in most things in this world, I wasn't the first:

 

 

I hardly need to say it but this is The Book of Nails by a group known as Floating Concrete Octopus about whom at this time I know nothing.

 

However I decided to change the title of the murdered books for another object which murders books and I will do a print later of this with a metal spike through it:

 

 

...and no I am not a Luddite - I just don't like them

 

When I was taking the books down I had another idea:

 

Perhaps this speaks to the voyeuristic element of books where we spy on the lives of others, or perhaps it characterises the male gaze  or maybe it is simply creepy...... to be addressed

 

Let's just finish a little more lightly:

 

 

 

The accidental image - gold ink into which some white spirit had dropped prior to cleaning.

 

Reminds me of the  Mandelbrot Set - a fractal image from chaos theory.

 

...and finally today's date:

 

11/12/13

The Monochrome Path

I had omitted to mention in my last few missives the impact of photography and digital media so here are some images to make up for that :

 

The developed negatives

 

The contact sheet

 

 

Some test strips for enlarger exposure

 

 

Some prints including someone we know; the last one was a disappointment because it was a good shot of a guy in the street -however there was damage to the negative

 

 

The finished prints

 

The other area of activity has of course been the collages and these have taken on a life of their own

to a point where a number of them are going to constitute the required digital images although I can admit that at last I am beginning to make some headway with Photoshop. Here are some:

 

 

I am really not sure that any comment would add anything except that I am not sure where these images are coming from

 

Finally I should show where the woodcut finished for now:

 

 

I would say I am quite pleased  but I feel the project merits further development; I wasn't very happy with my registration and for the future I think  I will always make my own specific reg sheet.

 

OK enough  -train is arriving in Limerick.

 

 

Rolling Road

A title like that takes me back a long time to the ' Golden Age' of science fiction and a writer long since out of favour called Robert Heinlein - he wrote a massive future book  The Roads Must Roll -which described a society whose transport involved progressively faster travellators moving in parallel until the inner ones were at very high speed- fascinating and imaginative concept. I only later began to realise how fascist and racist was his writing.....as my own political awareness grew.

Here is where I am now:

 

First colour

The key block again

 

The first colour overprinted onto the key - later we will see the results of the other route

 

When I was finished the other day there was some black left so I dug up and old block which suggested something to me:

 

 

...and here is my first effort at blind embossing -something I have wanted to try for ages -thank you Pam for adjusting the pressure on the press.

 

We had a discussion yesterday about the assessments (Jan 8) and it was requested that the blog contain references to our sources -well most of mine are documented in my contextual notebook which will be upgrade further over the holidays but let me here refer to a few interesting people and points.

 

An artist who first I looked at simply for his anti-establishment stance in Germany at the beginning of the 20c I have now come to have a huge regard for is Otto Dix:

 

 

This is a self- portrait and is immediately seen to be different than his caricatures which are quite similar to Georg Grosz. In my context. nb. I have some much more elaborate examples.

 

The other artist I would like to write about is Lucian Freud.

He may not, at first sight appear to fit in with my briefs and ideas but let me explain a little. I have been fascinated and a little repelled by his portraiture for a long time and in fact one of my earliest paintings when I returned to work was a copy I made of one of his self-portraits:

 

 

 

 

 

 (haven't got the copy to hand now but will add in both later). There is a certain lubricity (is that a word?) about the flesh quality in the portraits particularly  the nudes:

 

but there is absolutely no contesting the brilliance of the paint  - what might perhaps be at issue could be the artist's motivation. To me there is more that a little similarity with some of Bacon's work in that there is a distortion  - the artist might argue for honesty but the human might suggest cruelty.

Chance would have it that London Review of Books (LRB) has a review by Julian Barnes of two new books on Freud and the writing has so impressed me that I intend to keep this for my contextual notebook. Barnes' view of Freud not uniformly positive and accords somewhat with what I have been saying. Anyway, I intend to put these two gentlemen together in a collage and we will see what eventuates.

(Just to compound  this I found an Irish Arts from 2007 in the top of the bin in the studio  and who is on the cover - Freud.  The articled inside will be retained for surgery.

Enough of this self-indulgence  -off to do some more work.

 

Another year

A few interesting things have happened since last year not least the fact that I am a year older ..... but actually feel younger...... what was that Gray chaps name with the picture? Except in this case the face is getting more wrecked and the picture is getting younger

Its all about how you feel inside!!

Last Saturday morning I stood behind a market stall for the first time - the Milk Market in Limerick - a lovely crisp morning and the odd bit of business done!.. One print :thanks Emily!

Hope to help again soon and really well done Barry for all the work you put in:

 

Back to the school house; this morning we had an exam for CCS1 and thankfully I think it passed off ok - and to complete the CCS day Kieran gave us back our essay on Mirrors of Enigma

 and once again, thankfully the result was good; equally good was the constructive comments that Kieran passed on as to how to improve the product .

More collage work today and I received great tuition from Luke as to how to use the flat-bed scanner in the multi-media room to produce high-res images - maybe the image making can move forward now without having to achieve high levels of virtuosity with P/S.

Today's improvements:

 

 

as you can see -getting slightly more disturbed

 

 

 

 this is an image that is developing and has potential for the future as Protest;

in the second one almost all the elements are from photos I have taken.