Extended Drawing - module 6

A mixture of anticipation and dread (just a bit...) on the resumption of the drawing class. What would the project for the next two weeks be?

The short description on the info sheet said "Exploring shape, form and surface. Rubbings", and the first exercise was about space - one's shifting relation to the space of the room. Three drawings, please, 20 minutes each....

Too much scope, thinks I, paralysed into inaction. But ya gotta start somewhere, so I picked up a piece of tissue paper that was drifting around on the floor, and started (don't know why) tracing the marks on the floor -

quite a collection

 I turned my back on the room and worked, abstractedly, on a windowsill -

making it up as I went along. A happy discovery was the blending of chalky pastels in the shapes. An unhappy one was finding gobs of paint from the previous class on my work and fingers (but not clothes, thank goodness).

The shoe prints, of course, represent the human presence in the "room". The various marks represent the absence and eventual return of the painters -

 The floor, with its marks for replacement of easels -

After the break, frottage, and much activity in all parts of the room as we collected marks on acetate and tracing paper -

Week 2 - I came to class with an idea of how to use the rubbings (based on the format of the "suturing" book) and was delighted to see new marks on the floor -

Took a photo of the brushes because "they looked nice", not realising how useful they would be later -

Sue's examples of various ways to take rubbings, eg from folded paper, and with varied directions and pressures of strokes -

The varied strokes didn't work too well for me, as it turned out, but with the knowledge gained I'll try it another time -

At this point I wanted to add "objects" and found some squares of card and a small, flat paintbrush. So the paper got covered in graphite marks, and it came time to do the "inside", in colour. The squares and some sticks, both flat and round, were rubbed hard with chalky pastel and then smeared, adding one at a time -

 That left quite a firm line of colour, and a nice haze.

On the outside I had both rubbed the entire object (paintbrush, stick) and also carefully gone round the edge, to leave whiteness inside the shape.

The room - or rather, the objects it held - became a book, and the book-object became a room - or rather, it held some of what was contained in ... the room? the book? the objects? the making of the book? -

The size of the book-object (A1 folded to A4) makes it quite clunky ...but hey, it's a prototype ...

Cross sections

Jeweller Vicki Ambery-Smith makes rings and boxes based on real and imaginary buildings. Wonderfully detailed, some are cut away to reveal the buildings' construction and of course the interiors -

 The boxes too have interiors -

In the Sheldonian Theatre box, for example - which is all of 8.5cm high - the roof lifts off to reveal the seating plan etched into the base.

Thumbnails from vickiamberysmith.co.uk

The joy of grids

Going on from the simple structural drawings from one of the early galleries in the sketchbook walk

Charcoal mirrored on the opposite page, simply through closing the book

incorporating the "cages" that were part of Susan Hefuna's "Cairotraces" show -

I started cutting through the layers in various ways. Joining printouts of various magnifications of my drawings, for instance; cutting through sections, putting coloured paper behind the cutouts, looking through the holes -

Blowing up photographs, cutting out the various layers separately (with plain sheets under the top copy)

 which leads to grids that can interact with each other -

 and with other drawn grids -which can be photographed and printed out and cut through ... on and on (perhaps) -

Plan A is to use them as monoprinting, as for the cut-out maps in the Monoprint and Handstitch course last summer. It might be sensible to "seal" the flimsy papers with a coat of acrylic paint (=plastic) before finding the hard way that they tear all to readily when lifted off the almost-dry plate. 

Plan B is to enlarge the grids and translate them into textile layers ... not sure how (or if) this will happen.

Yet another plan is to keep drawing and try to get some real depth happening. The holes in the centre of each side really help with this. It's those holes that caught my interest in the first place. As though something could wind in and out and around and back in again, an endless ribbon tying itself up in knots. A path that crosses and recrosses [a badly-walked maze?]. Something to think about during insomnia.

A lot of these units, joined, could make a nightmare labyrinth - small holes high up to crawl through, the meshwork-layers making the path totally unclear. Something NOT to think about during insomnia.

On (in?) a sub

The Ocelot, a Cold War submarine - 90m long

Not easy to move around!

It would have been crowded - 60 or so men aboard

Equipped for surveillance duties

The periscope-thingy

...and what you see through it (Chatham Historic Dockyard)

Engine room - not as claustrophobic as I'd feared, but the 15-minute walkthrough was enough for me.

Art I like - Patricia Mourtizen

One of the many fabulous pinch-pots by this South African ceramicist. See more here.

(Found via the artpropelled blog.)