Louise Lawler
I have mentioned Louise Lawler’s work before
in reference to ‘tracing’. She is in a very good exhibition in Oxford at the
moment;
KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality - Modern
Art Oxford - until 31 December 2016
If you are interested in that interface between drawing and photography
Lawler’s work is very interesting, especially if you are also thinking of how
the use of vector graphic packages can extend the way you think about scale.
Over the last 30 years, Louise Lawler has been making photographs that
depict views of objects and artworks in their everyday working environments,
shifting the emphasis from the subject itself to vantage points, framing
devices and the modes of distribution that affect the reception of an artwork. Lawler
is showing a group of ‘tracings’. Traced directly from her photographs, and
made in collaboration with the artist and children’s book illustrator Jon
Buller, the ‘tracings’ are black-and-white line drawings that are converted to
a vector graphic and printed on a vinyl that is adhered directly to the wall.
Each edition exists as an adaptable digital file that can be printed at any
size. The largest work in the show is Pollock and Tureen (traced) (1984
/ 2013), a ‘tracing’ of Lawler’s photograph Pollock and Tureen from
1984. The original work is a medium-sized photograph, just under a metre wide,
of a decorative piece of porcelain placed on a shelf beneath the expressive
splatters of a Pollock painting. Pollock and Tureen (traced) has
been enlarged to almost ten metres to occupy a substantial section of one of
the gallery walls. At this scale, many of the lines in the vector drawing start
to behave less predictably, often taking on a form of their own when viewed up
close. Viewed from afar, the picture again coheres into a recognisable image.
Each ‘tracing’ becomes both a representation of a previous artwork by Lawler
and a wall based installation in a particular space.
The fine art use of what used to be ‘graphic design’ techniques is
becoming more and more prevalent and these techniques are tailor made for
enlarging work to different sizes in order to respond to the changes in scale
needed when moving an idea between different sites.
So if you are near Oxford over Xmas why not pop in for a look?
Exhibition view
See also:
Louise Lawler Some initial thoughts on her use of tracing
The Bézier Curve Thoughts on the maths behind drawing software programs such as 'Illustrator'
Painting by numbers A children's book illustrator is used to sort out and clarify the flat forms used for this process
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