The sharp-edged path

I am going to write a bit about a group of artists I have only recently discovered; I should expand a little on that: what I really mean is that I have known some of these artists already but I was not aware that they formed part of a  group called the Precisionists by Alfred Barr, of the Museum of Modern Art.

Here are two of the most prominent members and a link to a piece from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York about them

Charles Sheeler -Water 1945

 

Charles Demuth -After Sir Christopher Wren 1920

 

:http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prec/hd_prec.html

They were tightly focussed on the machine age in America and one of their members - Paul Strand, a photographer - made a documentary paean of praise to his city in 1921 -'Manhatta':

 

Of note in this are strong remblances to Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' and if you watch very carefully you will see a skyscraper that might have been an inspiration for some of Philip Johnson's later work.

There is a cerain innocence about the film to our slightly cynical post-postmodern eye but some of the images are very sharply made  - after all they were new then.

It  is not realised perhaps that Georgia O'Keefe was a longtime participant in the group ideal right up to the 1960s long after it had ceased to be a coherent movement.
Another thing that caught my attention was that the Met piece described their work as 'hard-edged'.
There you are - it just keeps appearing.

Now  -announcing a new feature :

The Spot Diary

This will appear daily (or almost) without comment (hard for me) or as in French :

Sans Parole.

The bound path

Here are three books published by Taschen. Despite some issues with some of their other publications they produce magnificent art books at ridiculously affordable prices. In the past, Thames and Hudson were the only ones to do anything like this but their bigger books always cost a lot.

I bought these in a remainder shop called Khan's in Kilkenny and you might wonder at the rather eclectic choice but anyone who has been follwing my doings or looking at my contextual notebook would see the relevance of the two outer ones.
Velasquez was mentioned in my CCS Essay in relation to the Baroque and ever since (name-dropping here) I visited the Prado a few years ago and saw Velasquez 'in the flesh' I really love his   r and particularly the affinity he shares with Rembrandt for the sweeping brush-stroke (dspite the general difference in scale).

When I was discussing the further progress of my animation project with Sylvia Shortall she mentioned Sean Scully and I told her I had seen his exhibition in the Kerlin which they shared with their gallery in the Gulf States. She made the point that I had never considered that Scully's work is very popular there due to the Islamic prohibition on imagery. His could certainly be interpreted as graphic.
Here are two pictures of the catalogue which came in a box

-lovely presentation

 

To fnish with for now here are prints from yesterday's session in the workshop. They are hanging in the corridor. How about that for hubris!

 

 

 

The Path by Daylight

Here I am at my desk - Is there a measure of control beginning to appear here?  No, it wouldnt do to get too excited.........but anyway, I was at my first print wo/shop this morningand it totally lived ip to expectation:

 

 

So here are a few shots of the process of multi-block woodblock printing - while they do not relate directly to the present stage of my edge project, they do hark back to the beginning (the 3D mouth) and to my constant feeling that simply looking is not enough; seeing and talking about what you see is important.

I know that probably sounds a bit pretentious, but I do feel quite strongly about this.

Tomorrow I will put in a photo of the final print.

 

Last Friday, we had a group crit with Grainne Smith-Higgins and in the course of the morning she mentioned an artist called Pae White with whom I was not familiar, that is until I saw her work and I realised I had come across it several times before

 

Chapter 1

Chocolate Mint

 

I remember when I saw this work the first time I thought of Danaë

and the Shower of Gold

 

Watch this space for more noisy animation!

White path, Black ground

I'll explain the title in a minute

Where animation is going -to be continued

I promised to return promptly and here I am.
Print engaged my mind last Monday and Tuesday when Des MacMahon gave a lecture on the former and on the latter I attended a dem in print workshop, both of which I really enjoyed
Here is a monoprint which he produced during the dem and I must say I would really like to be able to do something like this -tomorrow morning print workshop -I have a woodcut ready and an image I would like to try out as a monoprint.Will keep you up to scratch as to the scratchings.

This was where the monoprint was in progress.

The print shop is a wondrous place where everything is kept so clean (of necessity) and everything has a place and is returned to it when not in use.

One has to live up to a place like that.

Other interesting things happened last week.  I had a very stimulating visit from one of my tutors Mary Nagle -and she once again steered me in a slightly different direction, some of the product you see at top of this post. I will be pursuing this further and I now have a thought to use stop motion introducing objects or figures into the 'landscape' of the cast.

 

At the end of the week I got an invitation to speak to the Level 5 class in Colaiste Mhuire in Thurles where I had a great year  with PJ O'Connell as my teacher. There were about eight students present, most of whom want to go to art school and so I told them that there are other schools in Ireland (or so I am told) but they needn't really think any further than LSAD. Seriously though ( I WAS being serious) I told them that thay would get so much out of their time here, but that they had to put in to get back.

....Perhaps  a bit pretentious, but true.
 

I was very priveleged to be asked.

Too many paths

Deep levels of contrition should be felt and expressed for abject failure to post considering the amazing things that have been happening during the last week...........however, I plead extenuating circumstances,m'lud.
What? ...you say?
Well, overstimulation, m'lud

Get on with it.

Really what has been occupying my 'down time' for the last week has been the first CCS essay assignment and strictly speaking I have done enough of thse that I shouldn't be moaning -but it's never like that. A new subject, a new essay, different areas of research, different methods of referencing...anyway, this evening I have finished it and submitted it to Turnitin -again something new to me -so I will just have to sit back and keep my fingers crossed... will update on that later.

 Two of the best things that happened during the week were  kind invitations from Kieran Whitelaw and Elaine Riordan to attend a lecture and workshop/demo from ceramicist extraordinaire Ken Eastman.

Voyez:

 

The Man

The Work...or some of it

His lecture was wonderful and the theatre was wedged: I felt priveleged as a lowly first year to be here where people had come from far and wide to  see him.                                                                          

In the afternoon, I went to the workshop/dem and his performance with slab clay was just wonderful.

When he stood the slab up for the first time there was a collective holding of breath...........but of course he knew,didn't he, that it would work: and how it worked.

It was like a Pauline conversion to me,or indeed another one! I never knew you could do that sort of thing with clay.

Oh,the future!

 

Fatigue sets in and I have to pack up for tomorrow so I'll talk about Print. the other piece of excitement, next post.

 

Art Path

Friday free due to conferrings so took the opportunity to head to Dublin to see two art events.

One was called VUE and I had got a mail from the RHA with an invite to this (let's not get too excited here -I think the invite was sent to everyone on their mailing list) - it is a new a event (2nd year), being an art fair with about twenty galleries showing.
I would have to admit that past experience of art fairs has not been great, but I was amazed at this. The very best of contemporary work in Ireland and some from England was on show and a lot of it was impressive. One relatively new gallery from Dublin -Oonagh Young -was showing an English artist Amy Stephens whose work I loved:

Icelandic Glow by Amy Stephens

 

This picture really doesn't do her justice because this is a 3D piece, the yellow section being made of  flock - I would go out of my way to see more of this woman's work.

(By the way, I checked with her by email and she was happy to have this published):

Here are some other pictures from the show:

 

 

 

The other exhibition was a major retrospective of Alice Maher at IMMA in Earlsfort Terrace and this was a perfect demonstration of how there need be no limits to an arists work.

 

 

This, again, is a relatively poor photo taken at VUE but is representative of work in IMMA where no photos were allowed. Scale is hard to judge from this but in fact it is about nine feet high and is a charcoal drawing of hair, of which she did quite a lot at one stage. I happen to know the artists brother and he told me that when she was doing these she had him and other family members collecting hair from barbers and hairdressers so that she could make models from which to draw.

She had some animations there and now with my very limited experience of same, I really appreciate the amount of work that has gone into her pieces.

I think I will revist this exhibition before it finishes.

 

We are constanly being exhorted to think outside the box, Here is an example of same:

 



More like a river than a path

So much for the wonderful rail journey of early morning in the frost and cold sunshine; for the second time in a week, no train at 7.35, but no bus either, at least not immediately.....and I wasn't waiting.
So, into the car, parking fee lost and off to school. At least there was very little traffic because other schools still on half-term.

Loads of work done in research on material for CCS essay question - Caravaggio and Rembrandt with a taste of Velasquez -more about that later, but just a hint:

 

 

Colour is poor in this.

 

 

More CCS in the afternoon - and interesting discussion on the motivation of Ingres in his nude paintings, and on a rather more prosaic note I learnt how to comb-bind paper courtesy of those wonderful people in the library!

 

I mentioned the work I did with acetates before. Here a some of the pieces I produced with acetates and overlays:

Its probably a bit presumptuous, but some of them reminded me of Rothko