Thursday 13 August 2020

Pouring water

I have just bought a new electric kettle and the instruction booklet came with the image below. I have put up several posts about water as a graphic challenge for artists, but have yet to devote anything to the visual ideas related to how water shapes itself when it is poured. 

Image from a Phillips electric kettle manual

I was particularly struck by the graphic invention of what look like some form of very thin tadpoles to portray the idea that the water spirals around itself as it enters the cup.  

David Hockney

Once more David Hockney comes to the fore when we come to think about various ways of depicting pouring water. His restless exploration of how to depict the things that are always in movement is central to his thinking about the continuing legacy of Cubism. This is an intriguing image that in its composition reflects a scientific diagram, but in its various renderings of water is a celebration of invention. It is interesting to compare Hockney's drawing with the one below taken from a scientific text. These drawings have been taken from photographs, and although they are similar to Hockney's, the invention is in the slow motion technology of fast film and a well adjusted camera lens focus, rather than long slow looking and drawing. 


Watching a cup of coffee being poured and then re-watching the liquid coffee as it travels from the lip of a cafetiere down into an empty mug, can become a wonderful series of intoxicating revelations. The design of the lip, the speed of pour, the make-up of the coffee, the height between the lip and the mug, the time of day, the angle of light as it illuminates the rich brown stream of coffee, your position in relation to the event, all of these factors are operating and are part of the miracle of seeing something. This type of experience is important because it sort of explodes an idea of what is in fact happening all the time. We are immersed in a field of constant change, movement is central to what it is to be. To become aware of this, is to become aware of being alive. But we rarely regard the table as being something in constant change, seen from the viewpoint of the rock on which sits the building, within which the table sits and where you observe it, the table could be considered a very flighty thing; one minute being a tree, the next some sawn planks and then a thing shaped by carpentry.  

Some drawings of water are simply just strange. I love the drawing below of water issuing from a tap. I comes out almost like a droopy sack and the fact that the tap itself just floats in the air and is made of the same drawn marks as the water, suggests that some sort of physical exchange has taken place, perhaps similar to that between the policeman and his bicycle saddle in Flann O'Brien's the Third Policeman. The water is no longer water and the metal tap is no longer metal, they are now a water/metal composite, a new hybrid thing that has never been seen before. 


Now that I come to think of it, if you have never read the Third Policeman you have missed out on reading what is probably one of the seminal theoretical texts about how to think about drawing. Look carefully at the drawing below and imagine what must have happened for the water to be poured at that particular angle into the glass, there is something of the physics of the impossible here.
Water pouring into a glass, emerging from a logically impossible position

Now read this extract from the Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

“Did you ever discover or hear tell of the atomic theory?” the sergeant inquired.

 “No,” I answered.


He leaned his mouth confidentially over to my ear. “Would it surprise you to be told,” he said darkly, “that the atomic theory is at work in this parish?”

“It would indeed.”

“It is doing untold destruction,” he continued, “the half of the people are suffering from it; it is worse than the smallpox.”

He walked on, looking worried and preoccupied, as if what he was examining in his head was unpleasant in a very intricate way.

“The atomic theory,” I sallied, “is a thing that is not clear to me at all.”

“Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the atomic theory.

Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?”

“It would surprise me unconditionally,” I said.

“Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is nearly sixty years of age by plain computation and if he is itself, he has spent no less than thirty-five years riding his bicycle over the rocky roadsteads and up and down the hills and into the deep ditches when the road goes astray in the strain of the winter. He is always going to a particular destination or other on his bicycle at every hour of the day or coming back from there at every other hour. If it wasn’t that his bicycle was stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than halfway now.”

“Halfway to where?”

“Halfway to being a bicycle himself,” said the sergeant.

“Your talk,” I said, “is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”

“Did you never study atomics when you were a lad?” asked the sergeant, giving me a look of great inquiry and surprise.

“No,” I answered.

“That is a very serious defalcation,” he said, “but all the same I will tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small particles of itself, and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical figures too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. These diminutive gentlemen are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently?”

“Yes.”

“They are lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jig on top of a tombstone.”

“Now take a sheep,” the sergeant said. “What is a sheep, only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?”

Now that you have had a taste of the O' Brien text perhaps you have an inkling of why it is so central to the development of drawing theory. Art is about the making of the impossible possible, of creating new realities for the mind/body and woven straight through the middle of it all, is the fact that it can also be very funny. 


See also:


If you are wanting to develop your Illustrator skills there is a very good 'how to do it' tutorial here


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