Friday 22 April 2016

William Kentridge in Rome

For those of you who are interested in how drawing can be the focus of a spectacular performance, last night saw the opening of William Kentridge's Triumph and Lament in Rome.




Perhaps the most interesting issue is that of how to work on a large scale in public and yet still remain sensitive to the surfaces you work on. In this case Kentridge uses stencils and washes away existing dirt to make his images.

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William Kentridge




Wednesday 20 April 2016

The distorted or questioned grid


Take any patterned material and it will have an underlying grid structure, however as soon as the material is folded, worn or simply thrown over something the pattern is forced into new fragmented forms. This can be a very interesting way to stimulate ideas. It helps create spaces, gives existing forms a new dynamism and opens out an artist's work to diverse other readings. 


Bridget Riley 1962

Usually associated with Bridget Riley and Op Art the distorted grid can also be used by figurative artists. 

Yun-Kyung Jeong’s studio



The artist Yun-Kyung Jeong’s work is densely layered, often using patterns to build larger forms, or using small images accumulated into repeating shapes. The grid is sometimes preserved as an underlying technical drawing and at other times broken, but you always feel that it is there somewhere holding together a type of image making that without this underlying structure could become too 'fay' or too 'fantastical'. Many of the patterns she uses—composed in black paint on unprimed canvas—resemble the stylised brushwork of East Asian ink-and-wash paintings. Patterns are built up using a range of close tonal values, often using sepia with ochre or blue accents, these images are much closer to drawing than painting, the fact that she works on unprimed canvas perhaps being part of this reading. She also includes geometric forms, both in small-scale building blocks, and in the larger patterns to which they contribute; parallel bands of a Z-like shape sometimes occur slanting from upper left to bottom right. 


Yun-Kyung Jeong also works on silk; and describes the marks she makes as being “like controlled exhalations filling a space.” She also plays with perspective and exploits empty space to create complex, vaguely architectural environments, and intimates biological processes and is able to use technical drawing systems such as axonometric projection to create convincing three-dimensional worlds of overlapping planes. Compare her use of axonometric space with Paul Noble's.
Paul Noble


Compare both Paul Noble's and Yun-Kyung Jeong's work to Garth Weiser’s paintings, all rely on grids to hold their work together. 




Like Jeong, I would argue that Weiser is as much a drawer as a painter, he sometimes begins by making a three dimensional model of an abstracted form as a ‘sketch’ or model from which to paint. (This is a really useful tactic; when stuck just make a model and draw from it, I often do this and it always helps) Coating his canvases with thick impasto grids or relief outlines of his composition, Weiser creates a textured foundation which enhances illusionary elements of scale and perspective and suggests architectural space. Using this blueprint of spatial order as a departure point for painterly invention, Weiser then disrupts the spaces arriving, sometimes following the dictates of the underlying pattern, and sometimes not. Incorporating flat geometric shapes, irregularly angled lines, and organic motifs, Weiser confuses reality and illusion, an inheritor of Bridget Riley's optical fascination with bent grids, he forces an optical confrontation between the picture plane and our expectations of mark made surface interaction and illusions created by grids. 

The press release promoting Garth Weiser's work is an interesting exercise in rhetoric, if you were thinking of some artist's blurb and wanted to practice writing a bit of 'arty bollocks' it wouldn't be a bad place to start. 

Find an axonometric graph paper generator here. Get some large sheets of tracing paper and work over an axonometric grid, whether working figuratively or using abstract forms, you will find that the graph paper helps you control the space in a particular way. Compare this to work done using a perspective graph paper. 

Wednesday 13 April 2016

Garry Barker Exhibition

I have a exhibition opening tomorrow in the college gallery, Thursday the 14th of April at 5pm.

Garry Barker

-

When the past overhauls the present,

you will forget that you can't remember

15 April - 01 July 2016

Find an interactive 360 degree view of the exhibition here:

Follow the links below to information about other exhibitions or what I'm working on:



Garry Barker The languages of drawing

Garry Barker Why I draw Garry Barker Why do I draw?

Garry Barker Drawing the surrounding environment

Garry Barker New territories of the filth dimension 

Garry Barker  Textile focused exhibition

Garry Barker Writing about drawing

Garry Barker When the past overhauls the present, you will forget that you can't remember

Garry Barker Drawing water More drawing about water Includes animation 'Boat at sea' 

Garry Barker Charcoal drawings

Garry Barker SKETCH2017 submission

Garry Barker SKETCH2017 reflection

Garry Barker Piscean Promises

Garry Barker Collective and collaborative drawing in contemporary practice

Garry Barker Drawing as a model for life experience

Garry Barker What use is art?

Garry Barker 3D Printing: Solidified drawings

Garry Barker Animation

Garry Barker 'False Starts' Exhibition


Garry Barker (im)Material Disarray Exhibition. Together with other ramblings

Garry Barker (im)Material Disarray Exhibition

Garry Barker The evolution of an idea

Garry Barker Drawings for tattoos

Garry Barker Library Interventions: Quantum entanglement

Garry Barker Why it matters

Garry Barker Signs of signs

Garry Barker Drawings for a site specific proposal

Garry Barker Votives

Garry Barker Paul Klee and Markov blankets

Garry Barker Drawing in pen and ink

Garry Barker Drawing and healing

Garry Barker Visualising energy flow

Garry Barker Visualising energy flow part 2

Garry Barker Why interoception?

Garry Barker Analogue and digital processes

Sara Barker Glasgow exhibition



Monday 11 April 2016

Languages of Paper and Cardboard

'The drawing is already partly there - it's in the paper; and the paper is talking before you do' Richard Artschwager

If the paper is talking before you do, what is it saying? As with most questions the answer is context specific. For instance, what paper means in prison is very different to what paper means in an office or in an art studio. However as an artist you have to become aware of all these possible reads, because you will need at some point to control how audiences begin their engagement with your practice.
In jail, the everyday things we take for granted have their values changed. Paper, in the form of books, magazines, letters, toilet paper or simply rubbish becomes valued not only for what it is, but for what it can become.
A kite* adhered to the bottom of a table by labels from a stick of deodorant.

Read this article on paper in prison to get an idea of how important paper is to prison inmates and then reflect on how your own experience has changed how you value paper and how you might possibly be able to communicate alternative values surrounding paper in the work you do.
Look around you now and see how many uses of paper you can identify in your immediate surroundings. An initial list of things made from paper is fascinating and can take us out into a wide range of occupations and interests.


Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan by Matthew Hull is a book, again more paper, that explores how paper is essential to the construction of a city.

In the planned city of Islamabad, order and disorder are produced through the ceaseless inscription and circulation of millions of paper artifacts among bureaucrats, politicians, property owners, villagers, imams (prayer leaders), businessmen, and builders. The implications of such a thorough paper mediation of relationships among people, things, places, and purposes is that the ‘people of the book’ are not only shaped by religion but by a bureaucracy that is itself shaped by other people of the book, the Christian colonists  of the past basing their own bureaucracy on the Biblical need to list and document. Government of Paper explores these issues in the routine yet unpredictable realm of the Pakistani urban bureaucracy, showing how the material forms of postcolonial bureaucratic documentation produce a distinctive political economy of paper that shapes how the city is constructed, regulated, and inhabited. Files, maps, petitions, and visiting cards constitute the enduring material infrastructure of more ephemeral classifications, laws, and institutional organizations.
Sacks, seed packets, animal bedding, wallpaper, damp-proof courses, roofing materials, flooring, flame resistant papers, plasterboard, decorative laminates for  furniture, bill receipts, circulars, catalogues, filing systems, sales and service manuals, brochures, office stationary, fascia boards, door and roof liners, books, driving licences, writing pads, envelopes, newspapers, tissues, paper plates, paper cups, toilet paper, kitchen towels, table napkins, lampshades, clothes, wall charts, flip charts, report cards, insulating boards, electrolytic condenser paper, wrapping and identification for electrical cables, printed circuits, and battery separators, menu cards, paper hats, crackers, fireworks, wrapping paper, paper bags, cardboard boxes, programmes, playing cards, board games, kites, model aircraft, filters for water, air, coffee, tea bags, medicine, beer, oil, impregnated papers for polishing, waxing, and cleaning etc.etc.etc........... Look around your environment and add to this list.
All of the items above can be used as paper surfaces to draw on and each one brings to the table a different possibility in terms of both materials play and conceptual issue.  Office stationary in particular is a rich field to explore; any of you who have worked in offices will probably have been bored at some point and have begun to doodle on whatever is at hand.

Alan Brookes 'Fill (11) 183 x 183cm

Alan Brookes (an ex student from LCA) has this to say about 'Fill (II)'. 'It started as a found scribble on a discarded post-it note. I was attracted to its bored, absent-minded spontaneity, its author filling in time as well as the physical space of the piece of paper. I enjoyed its structure and its disciplined use of the square. By remaking the image, enlarging and magnifying its surface detail, my intention was to harness the attitude of the original and add to it a perverse, fragile peculiarity. The process and the image act as a container for managing an insane desire to make gestural marks'. The post-it has of course many other possible responses.


Marc Johns
Marc Johns draws on his post it notes, the paper is ideal for one liners and suggests an informal, throw away series of ideas. However he uses a conventional notebook to work his ideas out first. He is one of those artists that work in between illustration and fine art, but as all the images are his ideas, I would suggest he ought to be seen as a fine artist who uses popular graphic conventions. 




Mary Suzuki is an illustrator who draws on coffee cups, and the Leeds based fine artist Phil Hopkins often reuses old cardboard as a support for his work. But they are very different in effect; Suzuki reflects the world of leisure associated with going for a coffee on the surfaces of her cups, whilst Hopkins' use of discarded cardboard suggests a much more problematic relationship with paper based materials, one that suggests that in a society of the 'throw away' both materials and people are wasted. 


Phil Hopkins

There is of course a big issue around recycling in relation to this and as students you are no doubt already very aware of how expensive art papers are. Collage has always been a wonderful way to recycle paper and of course it allows you to generate new imagery by a process of image deconstruction and reconstruction. 
Hannah Hoch

Perhaps the most under used aspect of recycling is making your own paper out of papers that have been already used. However there is a certain taboo in relation to this because of the predominance of 'craft' looking recycled papers. The important issue as always is taking the technology onto a further level and making whatever is done conceptually rigorous.
A case in point is David Hockney's 'Paper Pools'.


David Hockney

Hockney's paper pools are made from compressed paper. Basically the paper is dyed when in a pulp state, then the drawing is done by carefully putting the dyed pulp into place and then before the whole thing dries flattening the image down in a press. I have done this in the past by 'painting' with coloured pulp on top of a felt sheet and when done pressing the whole lot flat using a solid flat wooden board, which I first of all stood on and then left with weights on overnight. I used an old felt blanket to ensure the top layer did not stick to the board. You can use cut out plastic stencils as guides for more complex shapes, like the shape of the diving board above. As you can see with Hockney's images, he makes them out of sections, so you too could work large without having to have a huge studio space. The conceptual issue here is of course the relationship between making a series of images about pools of water using a process that begins by floating tiny pieces of paper filament in pools of water. It's also important to remember that when in this state paper can be molded or shaped and of course can be drawn back into.
However if you try and search online for techniques in relation to these processes you will find it hard to not be inundated by hundreds of low quality craft sites, all trying to show you how to work with paper molding techniques. This is why I suspect most people steer away from this sort of work. But when an artist begins to refine the techniques some beautifully controlled surfaces can be made. Gill Wilson is someone worth looking at just to see how carefully she controls the process of working with paper.


Gill Wilson.

Once again this post just dips a toe into the waters of paper and possible meanings. The main point being that there is so much more to paper than simply buying the standard readymade artist's papers.
See also earlier blog posts on paper and this.

*A kite is an illegal written note passed between prisoners.

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