Invisible drawings?

Reading about Walter De Maria and about the invisible drawings he did in the late 60s, I hope to see one, but no luck so far... they don't seem to show up at all on the internet ...

However in looking around I came across the work of Marco Maggi, who does some amazing drawings, on perspex cubes for example, and notably this one in pencil on a sheet of graphite
"Looks like quilting," said my son.

In an interview Maggi says: "I did an MFA majoring in Printmaking at the State University of New York. My interest was not in the print process. I focused on plates and particularly in the threshold between two and three dimensions, using engraving and embossing. As I write today, I am engraving a plexi-glass sheet but I will not print from it. I stop here. The framed plexi-plate projects a shadow on the paper. The technique could be called printing with shadow. You see the projection but you cannot see the real drawing on the plexi-glass. A spacer between the plexi sheet and the back paper is a second referent to three dimensions. In fact, the relationship between two and three dimensions is another very important dichotomy." That interview contains a link to his first video, using an apple - one photo every 10 minutes over 40 days - the video is 4 minutes long.

"He compiles a thesaurus of the infintismal and undecipherable" says the blurb for one of his exhibitions.

Here you can listen to an interview where he discusses how he became an artist, the idea of slow time, the relationship between Maggi’s work and the experience of reading a text, and other ideas.

Sculpture week 9

Hoping to get the "outdoor project" set in place ... this involves making paper at home, and waxing it. I incorporated strips of torn paper (actually a previous version of my Statement of Intent regarding this project), laying pulp over it. The text, or rather bits of the words, will show on the inside, especially once it's waxed (waxing protects it from the rain). To make slits in the paper (to let the wind blow through), I painted lines with water and then tore away the wet areas. Here, the paper is ready and the wax is starting to melt -The base will be weighted down with stones from my collection -
Dipping in wax shows the text and changes the nature of the paper -
Here are the "ingredients" laid out. The ropey bit will form the floor of the "house" - the paper is strips torn from photocopies from arabic-english and mandarin-english dictionaries -
I so enjoyed using this lovely spirit level -Meanwhile in the rest of the room, other exciting sculptures are taking shape -

as is mine, in a rather kak-handed way -
Almost there - just the front wall to add -
Unfortunately - and I should have expected this - it wobbles alarmingly. There's no cross-bracing, and a top-heavy rectangle like this (all that wax!) is going to have problems.

After considerable thought and discussion, my domestic technical consultant and I worked out, on the back of an envelope of course, a solution to brace the legs at the bottom with L-plates - and if that wasn't enough, to add more weight with clay or plaster at the corners - it will be hidden under the cloth on which the stones will lie.
This problem-solving element is what intrigues me about sculpture.

Floods

With all the storms and rain this week, flooding has been worst in the town of Cockermouth. This morning the Guardian online had this photo -A child's toy racing car is tangled with wool and other debris Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/PA

So much wool! Other photos show the force of the flood waters, and how high they rose in people's homes ... so I wonder if Cockermouth is a town of knitters, and the flood swept the balls of wool out of home and down the streets ... rather like the stream eventually took David Nash's "Wooden Boulder" down to the sea -
Also in the Guardian's photos, a resident is reunited with her dog. That one made me cry (floods of tears?) -

Dr Frankenstein writes an essay

Writing The Essay was a bit like Dr Frankenstein building his monster.
First the organs - the descriptions of the works of the chosen artists. These fill the central cavity.
Then the bones - the argument of the essay is the skeleton that holds the organs into place - given that these organs will need to work together, what kind of structure is needed to get them to do so? How does each contribute to the argument?
The muscles that move the argument are the sources: judicious quotation and pulling ideas together. It needs to be all muscle, no fat - the essay has a word limit as well as a time limit.
The skin is the writing itself - ideally it will be concise, clear, accurate.
With any luck, there will be glimmerings of a brain...

The deadline was Friday at 4pm, and my essay was handed in at 3.30pm. My stumbling blocks were too much research (resulting in too many footnotes), procrastination, and possibly an excess of enthusiasm. Writing about the artists and works wasn't a problem - but pulling them all together came to be a weighty problem.
On Monday evening I had five descriptions and was about to start the sixth when reality kicked in - how did they fit together?
On Tuesday during class I had a Long Think about this but was getting nowhere. Driven to desperate measures, I did something I've not done before - a 'mind map'.On Wednesday morning I started writing the introduction and -magic!- the needed structure just appeared. No time for writing till Friday, but suddenly it felt ok - the bibliography was compiled, the photos were in a folder, all that was needed was "a little tidying" (quite a bit! and a conclusion) ... and choosing some juicy morsels from the books that were covering every surface and all those notes already on computer.
Isn't it wonderful when you get so immersed in what you're doing that the time flies by unnoticed? Suddenly it was 2.30, time to stop. Of course there's always another perfect quote to fit in, another sentence that could be more concise, a paragraph that could be completely rewritten. Quick skim, hit the Print key, grab shoes and coat....
Ah the sense of freedom with that out of the way! Now it's straight uphill to The Internal Assessment.
(The image is from 'Mary Shelley's Frankenstein'; director of photography Roger Pratt.)

Can't figure these out

'

These slab ceramics are by Ben Arnup. Here he says that they're influenced by the floors of the basilica in Venice, and that the "impossible" structures are prompted by 20th century painters such as Vasarely and Huizer. "The ceramics are handbuilt from slabs, painted with colored slips and reduction fired in a gas kiln to 1290 degrees C. The flat colors of the slips contrast with the varied texture of the wood ash glazes."

They remind me of the "flat vases" by Elizabeth Fritsch - her "Optical Pot" at the V&A, for instance -

But who are the artists that Ben Arnup mentions? Vasarely's official website is a bit whiz-bang for me (I like to read things that sit still, and not be talked at while reading) - here's one of Vasarely's op-art images, but he's probably better known for his series of black and white dots, and bulging lines -
Dirk Huizer is new to me - sort of a geometric Escher -
Lately Ben Arnup has been exploring what happens to clay when it's "subject to destructive forces" - see some examples here.

More ceramic houses

So many different ceramic houses! This is from the rowboatlondon site -

These are models of Hanoi's old quarter, on display there as part of a flower festival -
This one is called "Anne" - it's inspired by Queen Anne furniture and is made by Este Macleod

who also makes sand cast glass houses -

This one was inspired by her residency in Denmark -

Industrious Lily's wee ceramic houses are available from her etsy shop -

Something a little different from Shelley Combs - this is 12" high -

If handpainted is what you're after, have a look at these by Manousos Chalkiadakis -

Finally - though there are plenty more out there! - some old Dutch ones -

Ceramic houses

Entire shops are dedicated to ceramic houses for collectors, like these (very whimsical, no?) -

However let us consider a different type of ceramic house - the constructions by Mary Fisher

Unfortunately I can't add links because of working on an old @±§&!! Mac that doesn't show blogger's options. But I am entranced by Mary Fisher's buildings -

Swedish has a word...

... for its craft heritage: “slöjd”: the colours, techniques and the feeling of beauty and functionality in one.

I've been looking at the website of Swedish potter Karin Eriksson, who is showing with Merete Rasmussen and Ninna Gotzsche. Karin also has a section of "inspiration" on her site - an interesting mix of fashion and nature.

What does "Swedish craft" bring to mind? Well, the Dala Horses -
These roosters were a surprise - I associated painted roosters with Portugal -

Like all the Baltic countries, Sweden has a strong tradition of patterned knitting, especially mittens -
Remember these sweaters from the 1950s? -
Also in the Swedish craft tradition are the red-painted barns - the colour is called Falu red and it's effective in preserving wood. The most interesting photo I found is here. But everyone knows what a red barn looks like, right?

Gilbert Place, WC1

After class, a little wander on the way to CAA for the preview of the latest show. Gilbert Place isn't exactly a dark alley, but I doubt I've walked down it before. It's rather gloomy but has a few interesting reflections of windows on windows -The magic of digital technology (and Photoshop) brings the top windows out of the gloom (I didn't use flash) -
but the manipulation lost the reflection in the photo - here it is closer up -
At the end of Gilbert Place is the cheery comfort of the London Review Bookshop, where this tempted me (but I resisted) -
and this tempted me (but I resisted) -
I did buy Bridget Riley's collected writings on art, because of reading something enlightening by her in the London Review of Books, and because of dipping into it ("The Eye's Mind") and reading this:

"The scroll paintings in that exhibition of Chinese art at the British Museum were made by scholar poets, painter poets. After seeing the exhibition, I bought a book about the criteria by which these works were assessed. The Chinese had very, very exacting standards. They developed a way of judging based on the spirit, mood and feelings conveyed by the paintings. Shih, as I seem to remember, has to do with 'alive-ness'. The informality of the little brush marks means that they required great discernment. No matter how facile and vivid the brush marks might be, unless they were imbued with a basis truth, Li, the scroll painting was worthless. I liked the way in which the criteria were to do with states of being, and that the paintings conveyed frames of mind."

The illustrations consist of her paintings, and others ranging from Egyptian tomb decorations to Bruce Nauman.

Ceramics week 9

Two empty kilns -and here are some of the things that came out of them this week - my "mouths of hell" and "strange sea creatures", more of which next week perhaps...
Some shapes made of slabs, with patterning inside and out, and even some pins in the clay -
Pins were everywhere - in these slabby pieces made of crank clay (the ones in the picture above are white clay, Draycott) -
I spent the entire day glazing. First, grouping things according to their stage (biscuit firing, earthenware, or stoneware) -
The stoneware glazes I'm mostly happy with - or rather, won't be doing any more with -
The biscuit-fired lot includes this week's new things, as well as some I'd forgotten about; they'll be glazed eventually, if only to find out what happens "if" -
And the rest - some pinchpots from week 1 and some slabs from week 2, and some rings from week 3 (or was that week 2) that suddenly appeared on the shelf - and hiding in the corner, the saggar fired items -
I tried to be systematic with the glazing because it was all getting rather confusing! Here's my "system" in action -
I wrote down which glazes I might use (clear, white, black) and found similar pots to try them on at earthenware and stoneware temperatures, to see what would happen. The empirical approach. Very instructive, no doubt -
This lot is going in the stoneware kiln -
I get impatient to see the results, but have to wait till next week - and then a whole bunch of stuff happens the next day and then it's the weekend and then Monday is for office work, and then Tuesday is back to class (core subjects), and suddenly it's ceramics day again - the week passes in a flash.

No progress on the essay in the past 36 hours, but I'm hopeful that it's all percolating in the subconscious and will come pouring out at the 11th hour (nothing like a bit of pressure, is there!). There was quite a lot of discussion along the lines "how are you coming along with your essay" in class today, unsurprisingly.