02 May 2016

Extended drawing

No class this week as Monday is a bank holiday. Last week started with consideration of the work of Jessie Brennan. This is A Fall of Ordinariness and Light, 2014, and involves photos on crumpled paper, redrawn, to mirror the decay and demolition of the Robin Hood estate in east London -
the green cast is due to the decay of the projector in room 406 of City Lit. Suboptimal, wot?

The next artist is Norbert Schwontkowski, with unsettling, atmospheric landscapes ... mostly brown and yellow; there's a sense of isolation and melacholia -
 When it came to "doing something" I started with a found bit of paper and splashed it with ink, having put torn bits of masking tape here and there to mask some clear space
 The clear spaces were filled with simple drawings of cups and bowls, and the centre became a sort of vortex of washing-up. While I was doing it, I had no idea what it was "about", and still don't ... it was just something to be getting on with until a better idea arrived.
"Something better" did come along. I started folding cartridge paper, thinking either to make a book out of splotchy inkyness, and go on from there, or to flood the folds with ink and let it puddle ...but during the folding (folding bedsheets??) remembered Durer's pillows and gave a corner of the (cartridge) paper a good crumple -
 Inky splotchiness on one side - not nice ...

 But on the other, a sort of frottage of the hills and valleys -
Something to be getting on with -

No comments: