Tertal - Bare Bones Part 1

As an artist, I find looking at other people's sketch books and working notes at time more interesting to look at than the final piece, which can look too refined and polished. It is fascinating to see how the ideas swirl around, the roads not necessarily taken by the person. Do you see something in an image that is the hook, but when you come to work on it. It defies you?

You reorder and re-do the drawing. You stop put it to one side and start again. Repetition in drawing an image has worked for me. Looking and changing certain aspects of the image. Taking it as far as it will go and then starting again, maybe using a different technique, either a charcoal mix media or a lot of pen and ink. You don't see much ink being used in pictures now. I used to use a lot of dipped nibs into 'proper' ink pots; they sit down in blue art tool box, buried at the bottom, properly dried and dusted. Waiting, waiting.....

Black ink was to give me a solid black line (which I thought) would straighten the image overall. Possibly I was too scared to let the image sit on its own without support. Something that comes from a personality trait and has taken a long time to shake off.

One of the things in this blog is to look at my work and I have started on a piece. This is meant to be one of the pieces for the Library of Metaphors. The starting point was taking one of the photos I have of a landscape taken near to Silbury Hill in Wiltshire. Silbury Hill is a man made hill, situated near to other prehistory monuments as the West Kennett Long Barrow and Avebury Stone circle. I had stopped to have a look at the 'hill', which you can not climb up any more, due to erosion by the walkers.

At that point I was fascinated by the interlinking of branches in a chain. A dance across the page, from side to side. There was an idea to have a series to link each image from one picture to another. This idea for these images never really took off. Perhaps it was where I was or the photos were buried in box somewhere. I have to retrieve them from the garden shed used for storage as I did not want any small creatures deciding to eat them or use them for making nests; as one was trying to do some letters I still had in the same place.

I took a page from an old copy of The Winter's Tale. I had kept saving this book for nearly 14 years waiting for the right time to use it. I felt that if I didn't do something with it, then nothing was going to happen, I had already used one book previous on other drawings as frames and texture within the image. I decide to paste the page straight into the image, as a reference back to my series of Dreams of Deucalion. These 26 images were based on a physical walk through a landscape and the alphabet. Yet they were framed within a frame, all the same size, same mount and same image area.

The page was to form one of the two central columns of the bush. This was why it was positioned on the left hand side (as you view the image) on the image. I will normally lay my images out using the paper sizes of the SRA or B sizes as they have been based on the Fibonacci numbers sequence. Then cutting both the verticals and horizontal into quarters and thirds. This gives me a framework to position pieces within my image, notice the green foreground and how that lies in below the line. If something needs to be changed then it should lie within the framework, only when I want to break the boundaries of a frame to emphasise an idea.

Yet this picture has a broken page on it a frame within a frame. That turn of phase, 'a broken page', is part of a duality that often features in my work. Perhaps 'torn' would be better word to describe the glued text page, but I like broken better as it signifies something lost or smashed. Can a page be broken from a book; you can break the spine of the book. It can link back to this title of Bare Bones as you might find broken bones in a burial site, but Silbury Hill was not a burial site.

The Book of Days

I have an idea for some time. It is to place a page out in the day and let the weather have it is way with the paper. I would place a page out for every day and collected them over the whole year. Each one would be then bound in a book and become a book of days. Not quite an illuminated manuscript as the typical Book of Hours of the Medieval ages. What you would have is a page that has been cracked and weathered over the time.

Instead I have decided to do is to leave my old book that had been used for a Library of Metaphors instead and leave it out. Seeing how the garden reacts to it. This follows a little in the foot steps of an ipal and how we first met with sharing a love of re-structuring books to create new pieces.

The idea of the a frame, seems to go back throughout my work. This is when I learnt of the golden ratio and the need to place the image in a structural composition. Yet a frame can be a coffin or a building, the idea of a burial service surfaced via the poem, The Wasteland. The first part of the poem is named, The Burial of the Dead and I use the term to be both the losing of something or its remembrance.

This book is half buried and I expect to see the book change with the weather, the plants and maybe the wildlife will effect the development of this piece. So I will be taking photos and adding them into a layout. The question is what format should it take? 7 days to a page of 7 images and how to lay them out on a page. Or squeeze them into a month on a page? Should I start the structure now? Or let it gradually develope as I build up the pages?

Earth Works

When I was 7 or 8, my father took me Green Road trail riding. Was it the first trip, probably, but in a way it was an early influence. Green roads are road than have not been macadamized, but you do have a right of way. Usually, these roads are old drover roads that have fallen in to disuse over the years. The green road we drove on was the Ridgeway, this is an old track that starts in Norfolk and runs down through the Home Counties to the depths of Wiltshire. Whilst others took their motorbikes, my father and I drove in a small four wheeled truck, made by Puch. I was on gate opening duty, having to close the gates behind us to stop cattle roaming.

It was always sunny and I can't remember any rain. I am sure if was more grey than blue. We went pass some of the greatest prehistoric monuments of the Uffington White Horse, the castle beside the chalk figure and Weyland Smithy. Stopping at Marlborough overnight, in the morning we went to Avebury stone circle, the West Kennett Long barrow and Silbury Hill. I was fascinated by these ancient earth works.

They sit in the landscape as part of the landscape, yet as a viewer. These man made hills stand out with later walls or hedges circular the barrow or cairn, rather than disturb. Recently on the South Downs, walking by a Tumulus as marked on the Ordnance Survey. I had the same sort of feeling. It was pieces of farmland, but the farmer had worked around the mound. How long had it been there, it just was there. Standing like a watchtower, perhaps, with a burial underneath signifying a long dead warrior who would protect his prehistoric tribe. If you looked north across the weald up to the North Downs and south to the coast, where any potential invasion was likely to come from.

We can make assumptions about what they were for, but never really know really know the complete story. This makes them mysterious to us as we come across them. A ruined building is something similar, why was it there, who built it and why was it ruined. We do have records and so it would be possible to trace these buildings. Yet, it is an aspect of lost and the many people that might have lived through this landscape.

This is one of the reasons, I admire, Andy Goldsworthy's work. His sculptures are placed in the landscape setting that is natural and yet unnatural. Man-made and organic. He is refining nature and distilling common elements down to make 'supernatural' objects. These can be weathered by the countryside, so that they decompose over a short or long period of time.

His recent show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park http://www.ysp.co.uk/view.aspx?id=3 had several gigantic pieces. A wonderful log walled room that reminded me of the West Kennett Long barrow. Rather than a vertical chambers, it was circular and when should in a half light as there was no lighting. You had the impression of reverence. The logs were laid in such a way that you had a swirling effect around you, not a giddy dizziness, but gentle and uplifting. The giant slate cairn shaped as a pine was harking back to the large monolith stone from prehistory, but this has been made from dry stone wall techniques, so it was not a great slab stone.

One of my previous companies printed a catalogue for his Leaves exhibition at the Natural History Museum, using duotone of black and purple to reproduce his pieces. This was an exhibition organised by the charity, Common Ground. http://www.commonground.org.uk. Taking dropped leaves and then using then to make shapes of delicate complexity. These pieces are shown in a museum, so this added gravitas to the whole exhibition.

The Sum on My Past

When did I begin to draw? How did I begin to draw? Why do I draw?

I have an old photo showing me as a child in the back garden of my very first home. It goes back to the 60's and shows me looking at a desk with a pencil in hand on a pad. Am I drawing? I suspect that I am. In our school draft books, there were lots of doodles. One time, when my mother (who was a supply teacher at the time) taught my infant class for a few weeks. She was marking our class work about Christopher Columbus. Recently, I had got a wall poster of the voyages of exploration and marked with the Viking discovery of Vinland fascinated me. Why shouldn't the Viking get the credit they deserve? When she came to my work, I got a below average mark, so obviously, I asked why? The answer was, you have done too much drawing and not enough writing. Perhaps my fate was seal at that point, but they were some great pictures of ships.

Looking back over the years at school at my art lessons, I don't remember having much structure in drawing and painting. There might have been a curriculum, but it passed me by or perhaps the past is becoming a strange country. I struggled with paint and lacked a good colour sense; there was no theory in my lessons. The secondary school class never had any formal lessons about famous artists and their work. This was a mistake, I feel now. It would have given the pupils, a better idea of what to look for in a picture, composition, colour and ideas. This would have helped with their own work. At the beginning of the forth year, we were told that we would have to our own ideas, if we were going to get a good grade rather than an average.

My own work at the time was heavily influenced by fantasy and science fiction. Is this a phase all boys go through. I think I started early, when I discovered Marvel Comics. As children we were allowed one comic a week. I can remember the British ones of Victor, Valiant, but the memory of getting my first copy of the Mighty World of Marvel no 28 at the Watford Gap Motorway Services on the M1 is fixed in my mind. This event has fueled my passion for comics and collected in decent cased and paperback books, now called graphic novels. It interested me in the art of fantasy and coupled with my reading habits.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series had me hooked, and then I read Michael Moorcock's Runestaff history and others in his Eternal Champion sequence. Rodney Marsh was my favourite artist at this point as he illustrated MM's work and I have several posters on my wall. This is what my artwork aspired too with pictures of mysterious and adventure. I managed one or two paintings for my CSE art show, but I found that my use of a paintbrush was poor. One would think that painting should come naturally, but it took a long time to get to grips with brushes and still does today. I rarely paint. Cunning in the final exam piece for secondary school, I avoid having to paint by using coloured pencils and a strong image based on silhouette and a figure from a Rodney Marsh poster. In one of my old school reports, I found my art teacher advising that I need to practice my painting, so no wonder a set of gouache paints appeared one Christmas.

It was not until I got to Art College, that I had any formal art history lessons. These were on Friday afternoon; usually it was watching a film about an artist and then talking about it. Unfortunately, we weren't a very talkative bunch and after one or two remarks. The room lapsed into silence and we waited to dash out to catch the bus home. The one thing that was useful was the repeats of Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New TV series that were being shown on TV. It was a great introduction all the history of modern art and has stayed with me over the period.

Looking back, it seems I struggled between structure and too much freedom. I can see the relationship between my art, technique and personality coming through. Yet the needs to make marks and describe the world round me. Nevertheless, it does answer the question, why?

A Blank Page

If you have a sketch book, where do you start? At the beginning? I might write my details at the start of the book, but then I have to start not on page one. I had a dreadful habit of wanting to alwys produce the perfect sketch book. Each image would have knock you sideways and be ones that you wanted in your own folio to show.

The way round I discovered, this fear of 'perfect sketch book syndrome' was to start further in and work non-linear by mixing up drawings & sketches. This allowed me to not worry about the previous picture or the one I was going to do next. At some point, I knew I would be filling in the spaces inbetween the sketches. Then it became a point of trying to link the chain, but this prove easier to accept.

Ways of working, a straight linear perspective of one drawing or idea leading to the next. I suspect that m general working practices were shaped by working in printmaking. You have to step from one point to another point. You can not build a create a multi layered image and in somecases, b & w work without this stepped approach. One of my foundation tutor, told me that sometimes, you need to leap into the dark to the next three or four stages ahead. This blog is one of those leaps for me.