Where's that "void" then?

Putting a charcoal-encrusted paper on my drawing board, I noticed that my shadow made a darker area; that fits well with my "secret story", or subtext, for the "on the edge" topic. This time the idea for the research drawing is to leave a dark "void" in the middle, and make the edges lighter.

The technique we recently used in Extended Drawing class, of using the wiped-away charcoal to make a companion drawing, seemed useful here. The "blank" paper was a bit of tracing paper with some rubbings on it, but never mind, those marks will add to the interest (or disappear) -

Those shadowy-person shapes are irresistible... and here's some energetic use of charcoal, just to get in the mood -

After a while the tracing paper was full of graphite and the charcoal was full of conte. And the marks were much the same everywhere...

 Adding some little squiggles in oil pastel, then wiping over with charcoal -

After a bit of effort the marks became more various - using the rubber, brush pen, felt pen on top of the graphite -

 using rubber in the borders of the charcoal paper -

Here's a right pair - not a "void" to be seen! -

What is it, a sugar loaf? a cone of yarn? -

No, it's turned into a giant thimble in the jungle! -

"Void" #2

At first I had, instead of dimples that sunk in, balls that stuck out - it's all in the amount of highlight. But now they definitely look like dimples, so I feel successful on that front, even though the shading on the larger form doesn't work. That's one of the dangers of working from what you think you know, rather than being able to check what you're seeing.

And ... it's hardly a "void", nor is the idea for the edges developing. Next time...

I'm pleased about coming up with some new-to-me marks with some of my not-much-used materials.

"Hurley, the irrepressible"

"...Hurley, the irrepressible ... perched like a dicky bird on the top sail
yard arm is taking a colour photo of ship and ice..."

If polar exploration is your thing - and even if it's not - the current exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society in South Kensington is a must-see.

It consists of the photos taken by Shackleton's expedition photographer, Frank Hurley, who had tough decisions to make when the expedition's ship, the Endurance, broke up in ice as they were forced to over-winter. Most of his plates (this was 1915) had to be left behind.

What happened next is well known: the men set up camp, hoping to hold out till the ice broke up; eventually some set off across 750 miles of sea in a small boat to get help, and did manage to rescue the others.

The story is told, and imaged, so vividly in the exhibition, at the heart of which are more than 90 of Hurley's images, newly digitised from the originals, which have been stored at the RGS for more than 80 years. It also includes "precious survivors", personal artefacts that returned with the men.

"As one of the first truly modern documentary photographers and film-makers, Australian born Hurley hoped to have his images seen at as large scale size as possible. 100 years later, this intention will be honoured with giant dimension prints, some over 2 metres in width and height, at the heart of the exhibition."

If you can't get to the RGS, the online exhibition is accessible here.

Serendipity at Museum of London

A lunchtime lecture drew me to the Museum of London midweek - "The Formation of our Galaxy", one of Gresham College's free lectures (very well attended) - and afterward I wandered round looking for something to draw. Mike Hawthorne's 1987 drawing, based on his sketches in 1981, of the Brixton Riots

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is impressive in its detail -

and my attempt to emulate his cross-hatching was instructive -

On hearing an announcement of a 45-minute tour of the highlights of the medieval gallery I went right along, and sketched while Jenny brilliantly explained living conditions, the evolution of armour, what people ate, diseases, and the transition from medieval to renaissance. An excellent tour, one of several that happen every day.

A typical house about 1100; it would have had quite a bit of space (mud!) around it

A chance to look more closely at Old St Pauls, which took more than 200 years to build

Cooking and eating around 1400-1500 - note the bone handled knife in the centre

More drawing, however hasty, and fewer notes

Oops!

Looks like the new traffic scheme on Exhibition Road is getting bumped about a bit.

Oh. Not so "new", this shared-space scheme: it's been going since 2012! At that point: "It [was] 20 years since towns and cities across Europe began redesigning their streets, moving from the traffic- circulating zones festooned with railings and traffic lights beloved of British town planners. Some 400 European towns have converted thoroughfares to spaces adapted for all to use, with redesigns that respect rather than abuse the buildings facing onto them."

In shared-space traffic "Walkers do not have to go via barriers and signalled crossings. Drivers do not have to wait, burning fuel at lights, with unoccupied road space ahead. Rather than drive at a stop-start rate of 12mph they can usually drive at a steady 15.

Everyone just gets on with it. In Germany, Denmark, Holland, France, where shared space is commonplace, traffic speeds have increased along with safety.

This is an intellectual as much as practical revolution. "

Sharing space outside the V&A, 2012 (via)

Poetry Thursday - Homage to my Hips by Lucille Clifton

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homage to my hips

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

these hips are big hips

they need space to

move around in.

they don't fit into little

petty places. these hips

are free hips.

they don't like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,   

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them

to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top!

Asked about the brevity of her poems, Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) said, "I have six children, and I can only keep about 20 lines in memory until the end of the day." Her first book, published in 1969, is centred around her family, and was cited by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. Her work emphasises endurance and strength through adversity, focusing particularly on African-American experience and family life.

Reading about Lucille Clifton (here) I lost count of how many books she had published (plus she wrote books for children). This one particularly interested me - it seems to be structured much like a quilt itself is structured:

"Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (1991), also won widespread critical acclaim. Using a quilt as a poetic metaphor for life, each poem is a story, bound together through history and figuratively sewn with the thread of experience. Each section of the book is divided by a conventional quilt design name—"Eight-pointed Star" and "Tree of Life"—which provides a framework for Clifton’s poetic quilt."

As for the image at the top of the post - this is "Grateful Dance" (2010) by Ranell Hansen, who says: "I created it in commemoration of my two hip replacements and in gratitude that I have mobility again."

Seba's snakes

Having found out about Albertus Seba's cabinet of natural curiosities in a drawing class, I was delighted to be given a copy of the book and especially love the way the snakes writhe across the page. They are found both only with other snakes and also in plates with other animals -

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Many of the plates can be seen online; if it's just the snakes you're after, click here.

The book has inspired this funky cabinet -

Each volume is a drawer.

Starting on "the void"

It's high time to start my piece for the CQ challenge, "On The Edge" - April will soon be here! There's a sort of tradition in CQ not to talk about the challenge in the online group ... progress is shrouded in secrecy, perhaps through fear of not being selected for the exhibition. But blabbermouth here is about to break that taboo, and perhaps others of whom I know not are doing the same on their blogs.

Last week I received this card* (thank you, Helen!) and it clicked in to an idea that had been swirling round in my thoughts -

...hmm, not swirling: I had a very clear mental picture of what "On The Edge Of The Void" would look like ... the sort of "clear" mental picture that is actually very fuzzy, a concept not a picture. It would be the edge, with no middle. A void where fabric usually is. The quilt size is 60cm x 100cm and my thought was to have 10-20cm of fabric round the edges, a nice straight outer edge and either sticky-out-bits or maybe a cliff-like thing for the inner edges, shapes to be decided (or evolve). Both inside and outside edges would be crisply faced, and there would be adequate room at the top for the regulation 4" sleeve at the top (and maybe a pocket at the bottom for inserting a rod that would help the quilt to hang straighter). Maybe the Void would be represented by an extra layer of fabric (an extension of that wretched 4" sleeve, left to flap at the back?) or maybe there would be ... nothing.

Those are the practicalities. Now for the arty bit! I knew it would have to start with drawing, and here's the first one getting going - again, the coincidence of receiving something through the post played a part - the exciting unmatched socks (thanks, Erika!) were wrapped in a nice big sheet of newsprint.

Void#1 getting going

About drawing on newsprint ... flimsy, cheap, expendable - but it's there, at hand. I have other paper of various sorts, but cannot bring myself to use it! also, dread the task of having to find it. (yesyes, I know this means I have Too Much Stuff...)

So ... so what you can, where you are, with what you have. I taped the newsprint, smoothing it as much as possible, to my "easel" - a piece of hardboard on its way to somewhere else, eventually, as are the trestles, still in my room after shelves needed to be painted. They made a useful place to put the little dish of various crayons etc.

I simply started making marks, arm outstretched, and before long a charcoal-mark "nest" had developed. Or maybe a tunnel?

Charcoal rubbed off, graphite added.
Rubbings in charcoal and graphite

The smudgy marks are white oil pastel, dabbed with the paper
used to rub off the charcoal earlier; they hold the charcoal (no smudging!)
and feel soft and oily

On the left is the stick (under the paper) that was rubbed along
to make a nice straight mark

White conte over graphite and over those oil pastel/charcoal marks

 Adding some ink ... too much void, not enough edge!

Void#1

And the size is wrong... but these are research drawings.


*The card is based on the work of Anne Wilson, as seen recently at the Whitworth, Manchester.

Volcanoes

"Volcano: Nature and Culture" by James Hamilton is an offshoot of a 2010 exhibition at Compton Verney, Volcano: Turner to Warhol. The book considers artists' and writers' perception of volcanoes and its change over time.

I've been curious about Krakatoa since reading Twenty-One Balloons (William Pene du Bois, 1947) as a child, in which the protagonists escape the eruption in a hot-air balloon raft. Yes, science fictional fantastic, and the illustrations are very old-fashioned; for the reality of the event, Simon Winchester has written an excellent account. "Volcano" has Krakatoa, and rather a lot of Vesuvius, and Etna, and lots of other volcanoes, as seen and recorded by artists - and these are set in the context of scientific thought.

Three things I was particularly drawn to in this book:

1. "Kilimanjaro Southern Glaciers 1898" by Georgia Papageorge (2010), incorporates poured ash from the mountain and represents the oldest known photograph of the mountain -

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She is "among the first artists to begin the task of creating an iconography for the dormant volcano in Tanzania. Her palette consists of paint and canvas, photographs, charcoal, tree bark, red and white chevron barrier cloth and the fertile product of the volcano's own interior, lava dust. [The photograph] is enlarged by her and streaked with trails of liquid lava, and articulated by a red zigzag line representing temperature fluctuations and glacier melt on the volcano over the twentieth century."

2. Ilana Halperin's visit, aged 30, to Eldfell, the Icelandic volcano born in the same year she was. The result was an exhibition, Nomadic Landmass, in Edinburgh in 2005, and some of the work was shown in "The Library" at the National Museums of Scotland in 2013. I saw it there and would have liked to spend more time with it. This drawing wasn't part of "The Library" -

Ilana Halperin, Nomadic Landmass

"Nomadic Landmass" says James Hamilton, "included photographic images taken from the aie over Eldfell, and geological specimens and drawings taken from photographs of the destruction caused by the birth of the mountain. ... Halperin has taken the extreme detachment of volcanic activity as her subject, and has personalized it, drawn it to herself, and invited it to become intertwined with her own life. The mountain's pulse, and hers, become one."

3. In 1665 Mundus Subterraneus, by the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, was published, with many illustrations (see some here); in 1669 it was translated from Latin into English.

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"Kircher was driven by the admixture of extraordinary genius and religious obligation to become the most learned and active savant of his age. While he may not, as traditionally claimed, have been the last man to know everything, he did hold the world's knowledge in his hands and cherished it all, publishing on every subject under the sun. [He] led a charmed life that spanned the Thirty Years War and the Counter-Reformation. He had not only the intellectual capacity but also the organizing genius to prospect a route through knowledge and its accumulation, to its expression and distribution.

"Volcanology was only one of the topics covered in Mundus Subterraneus, along with the working of the tides, the weather, fossils and early man [but] it is Kircher's understanding of volcanoes and the illustrations of them that particularly caught the imagination of the fellow scholars and the narrow band of literate Europeans in his day.

"Kircher's worldview was maintained in the English version, which was liberally extended from the original by other accounts and amendments. [It] goes on to describe many other volcanoes all over the world... Kircher's central task for his readers was to try to demonstrate with engravings and text how volcanoes work.

"As a courageous example of extreme information-gathering, Kircher had himself lowered into the heaving red crater of Vesuvius at night in 1638, during one of its actively threatening periods. His report is graphic in the extreme:

Methoughts I beheld the habitation of Hell ... An unexpressible stink ... and made me in like manner, ever and anon, belch, and as it were vomit back again at it."

Drawing Tuesday - Wellcome Collection

Some of us were in the Reading Room, some in the Tibet exhibition, and some elsewhere.

Fresh from "3D drawing" the previous evening, I drew the forms of these bottles

 with the loopy "3D drawing" technique we'd been using ... but not with nice smeary charcoal: with ivory black watersoluble colour pencil. Using a brushpen on the bottles turned them into lumpy, bumpy things, rather than smooth glass -

Also in the Alchemy section of the Reading Room was this artwork -

John Newling,"Token Hammers", 2002

 It plays on the idea, says the label, of hammering out coins from slugs of metal, thus achieving the alchemical dream: transforming a base metal into something of value.

It's possible these were shown in Newling's 2003 exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Currency and Belief. I will try to track down a library copy of the book of the show.

The hammers are in a mirrored box, lit from a ceiling spotlight, which throws shadows both onto the mirrored floor of the box and - magically by reflection? - onto its ceiling, which would otherwise be dark -

 The hammers have two heads, for the two sides of the coins -

This time I used charcoal and again made the wrong choice - finer lines were needed -

Never mind, it's about discovering through looking. Love those lathe-turned ash handles.

The faint lines on the right-hand page are a quick drawing of two lions from the facsimile of the Ripley Scroll that was laid out on the table. 

The description of the scroll on the British Library website writes out the text that I couldn't quite decipher: " and a further inscription ('Heere is the Somme the evch is called the mouth of the Collorick').- a burst of flame and on either side a lion salient before a wall, and two scrolls ('The mouth of the Collorick beware' and 'Heare is the last of the red stone and the beginning to put away the dead the elixir vita')."

My faint lines were laid down very quickly, starting at the end of the tail of the red "lion salient" and progressing to the tail of the other, miraculously fitting into the space available. Quite possibly it helped to be drawing at a 90 degree angle - the scroll was laid along the table, and I was sitting on one side, with the book turned and the drawing appearing "sideways". The furry bits were awkward to do (must practise) - and I couldn't figure out what the "wig" in the middle was - it's a flame, of course.

Watercolour added later (must practise)

We had lunch under the canopy of lights of changing colours in the cafe, so the photos of the work may be tinged with purple or red, or in shadow - cafe lighting can be a challenge!

Joyce tackled the straightjacket, with its folds and shadows -

 When you lift it off its hook on the way, there's a notice telling how to put it on, suggesting that another person should assist, and warning about possible emotional effects.

Janet B couldn't resist the chair (and filled many other pages as well) -

 Among Mike's closer views was this larger view of the gallery itself -

Sue S first drew a complex mask in the Tibet exhibition, then started with the overlapping shadows of another, finally adding the mask itself -

 Michelle found the glass sculptures of micro-organisms and focussed in on a bit of MRSA  -

From micro to macro, in Jo's drawing: the enormous sculpture, by John Isaacs, is called "I Can't Help the Way I Feel" and captures the lived experience of illness (read about it here)

 (When it was first installed in 2007, it was so big it couldn’t fit through the gallery doors, and had to be winched up through the space by the spiral staircase. "Cleverly sculpted from polystyrene and painted wax, it is so terrifyingly realistic that many visitors mistakenly believe it is a representation of a real-life person, or a very serious genetic disorder. Anything but – it represents plain and simple obesity. ...  It is a literal embodiment of obesity in a highly idealised, abstract form. It represents the feelings of those who live with and confront obesity, and how these feelings are defined in response to social ideals and expectations." (via))

Meanwhile, in the Tibet exhibition, Sue M was engaging with a peacock-feather headdress -

Coincidence of the week - both Mike and Janet were drawn to the old dentist's chair -

Wax crayons in an interesting box brought by Jo, which she's had for ages -

What's IN a book...

Consider this book work, by Lisa Kokin (from makinghandmadebooks.blogspot.co.uk)

One woman said she wanted to cut it open, to see what's inside. People have said that of my "memory balls" - how will they know what's inside if it can't be cut open? Ah, but that's something they have to take on faith, I say, as they contribute to making one themselves, winding in whatever's at hand.

The contents are locked in forever. Is the speculation about them - or, taking them on faith - "enough"?

Alisa Golden writes of the woman who wanted to cut open the "rock" -

 I believe, instead, what she really wanted to do was to get at the mystery of the creative process, which is an unsolvable mystery. Artists don't really know where the first spark comes from or just how the work evolves. The creative process is mysterious, which is part of the thrill of creating and of viewing a thing created. I can think of two results of dissecting, halving, or dissolving the work: 1) the woman could lose interest in the art once she lost all desire to excavate it or 2) she could reconstitute it and create yet another form (discarded book to papier mache rock to ??) which might ultimately contribute to, as Dean Young writes in The Art of Recklessness, "an endless procession of quote marks" (31-32).

I don't think we can examine art too deeply without removing its charge. Over-analyzing something tends to kill its liveliness. "Desire vanishes at the point of capture…" (21) writes Young. Mystery laid bare is not mysterious anymore. What was curious is no longer a curiosity. It deflates. "Anything fully known offers us no site of entry, no site of escape, no site of desire" (85). It seems to me that my friend's piece was successful. Although it may not have been in the manner that she had intended, by embracing that mystery of creative process and making the work, she stirred a longing in the heart and mind of another human being.