Video record of art/dance collaboration with the Whitworth Wallpaper Dancers. Not so much a finished piece as an idea to be developed:
Concentrated drawing on till rolls. Kinda Zen!
Friday, 27 August 2010
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Whitworth Dancers 2
Intense following of line.
Never really keeping up.
Letting go and following the energy.
You can't draw a dancer.
You can pursue the energy.
The hand dancing with the dancers.
Yoga stretches
Whitworth Dancers
I have been drawing dancers at workshops led by Gerry Turvey at the Whitworth Art Gallery. It's hard work and really puts me in touch with my limitations. It seems like all I can do is try to concentrate intensely on 'energy lines' i.e. some sense of the flow and direction of the dancers. Somehow I have to connect the energy of the dancer through my eye, to my brain, into my hand and the pencil, pen or charcoal. Another way in is mirroring the dancer with my hand - so I am not drawing so much as dancing with the hand. The results are more like energy maps and often the figures get lost.
'Whitworth Dancers - Day 1'. (Photoshop variations)
Sunday, 22 August 2010
Hockney Quotes
From 'Hockney on Art':
"I'm convinced now that there is no such thing as objective vision. We choose all the time to look at what we see. We realise that we are always attracted to certain things."
"Each person notices different things, but everybody sees people first. You look at people, or you deliberately don't look. If you don't look, it's a very conscious choice. If you are a painter you look at paint, and if you are a book dealer you look at the books, and so on and so on."
"The moment that you leave Cubism, everything becomes based on a fixed point. My joke is that al ordinary photographs are taken by a one-eyed frozen man! But the joiners are to do with movement. I'm moving around when I'm taking them. It's not possible to use a tripod, not the way I'm working."
"The experience of art is more real than in photography. The moment is longer, and we can feel that moment. In a photograph we can't. Perhaps that is why there are so few good photographs. The good ones that do exist are almost accidental, one fraction of a second that looks as though it's longer than it is. We don't know what an isolated fraction of a second is. We can't isolate a second in our lives, can we? The photograph must be a much more primitive picture than a painting is. But, if you asked the average person which looks more real, they would say the photograph. I'm convinced it can't be true."
"I'm convinced now that there is no such thing as objective vision. We choose all the time to look at what we see. We realise that we are always attracted to certain things."
"Each person notices different things, but everybody sees people first. You look at people, or you deliberately don't look. If you don't look, it's a very conscious choice. If you are a painter you look at paint, and if you are a book dealer you look at the books, and so on and so on."
"The moment that you leave Cubism, everything becomes based on a fixed point. My joke is that al ordinary photographs are taken by a one-eyed frozen man! But the joiners are to do with movement. I'm moving around when I'm taking them. It's not possible to use a tripod, not the way I'm working."
"The experience of art is more real than in photography. The moment is longer, and we can feel that moment. In a photograph we can't. Perhaps that is why there are so few good photographs. The good ones that do exist are almost accidental, one fraction of a second that looks as though it's longer than it is. We don't know what an isolated fraction of a second is. We can't isolate a second in our lives, can we? The photograph must be a much more primitive picture than a painting is. But, if you asked the average person which looks more real, they would say the photograph. I'm convinced it can't be true."
David Hockney. Place Furstenburg, Paris, August 7,8,9th, 1985. Photographic collage.
Saturday, 21 August 2010
'Jutika: Starting to Relax'
'Jutika: Starting to relax' (drawing & adjusted photo-print). Outside the Lowry arts centre, Salford. 21/8/10
'Jutika: Starting to Relax'
'Jutika: Starting to relax'.
Ink drawing outside the Lowry, Salford. 21/8/10
Watercolours & Photo-prints
Playing with the idea of printed frames with watercolour or acrylic painting. The first image keeps the painting within the frame. The second starts to break out of the frames. The third imports photos of watercolours into the frames.Ongoing exploration of the relationship between photography and painting.
The 'Post-Photographic Age'
I have been reading 'Hockney on Art: conversations with Paul Joyce'. Excellent read. The main theme of the book is Hockney's extensive exploration of the relationship of photography to painting. He, of course pushed the bounds of photography with his polaroid joiners and large scale photo-montages. But he always came back to painting as primary. In 1999 Hockney said:
"You know it was Ingres' great rival, Delaroche, who exclaimed on seeing a daguerreotype. 'from today painting is dead'. Perhaps he meant that chemicals were to replace the hand. It was, of course, a prophetic statement, and one which has entered the common language to be acepted up till now as self-evident truth. But it's not a truth for all time! It's perfectly clear to me that the period of chemical photography is over. The camera is yielding itself up to the hand, those hands which now operate computers. We have entered the post-photographic age. For an artist, this has to be the most exciting time of all."
"You know it was Ingres' great rival, Delaroche, who exclaimed on seeing a daguerreotype. 'from today painting is dead'. Perhaps he meant that chemicals were to replace the hand. It was, of course, a prophetic statement, and one which has entered the common language to be acepted up till now as self-evident truth. But it's not a truth for all time! It's perfectly clear to me that the period of chemical photography is over. The camera is yielding itself up to the hand, those hands which now operate computers. We have entered the post-photographic age. For an artist, this has to be the most exciting time of all."
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