Drawing : Landscape Drawing

Showing posts with label Landscape Drawing. Show all posts

Friday, 26 August 2022

Visualising energy flow: Part two

When drawing from life you are in effect visualising energy flow. However the way you approach the task is very important. Every mark you make is a captured moment of energy, the action of looking being a transfer of energy from the world via the eyes into the brain. A growing awareness that there is constant energy transfer within yourself, between yourself and the world, and between the complex of animals, vegetables and minerals that make up any surrounding environment, is central to the concept behind these drawings. Once a drawing has been used to capture various visual and invisible energy flows, it stores the energies recorded like a battery; something that can both store energy and when it is in turn looked at, release energy back out into the world.

Trees demolish walls

Tyrannosaurus in the woods

An emerging giant

These three drawings above were made, like so many others, from situations encountered on one of my walks through Leeds, all done on the same day and made within 50 yards of each other during a walk over Sugarwell Hill. Walking is a rhythmic exercise and it is also an indication of health. It is very easy to spot someone walking who is not very well, their gait will give them away. I begin with this connection between health and rhythm, because all life has a rhythm, but sometimes it's blocked or the rhythm breaks down. When you are healthy, focused and on top of things, visual scanning and grasp of what you can see is much more insightful and observant than when you are feeling under the weather or not very well. When drawing, you can also have an insight or intuitive sense of the wellbeing or not of the environment you are observing, drawing in this case being a sort of conceptual two way health check.

I'm particularly interested in how nature removes blocks from the energy flow, how it in effect heals itself and all three of the drawings above touch upon my feelings about that.

Detail from 'Trees demolish walls'

The drawing 'Trees demolish walls' was made from the edge of the wood, in an area once built upon but now left for nature to reclaim. Some walls have disappeared, others remain jutting out of the ground, broken and uplifted by trees that have pushed their way out into the spaces left by the ruins of buildings broken and ravaged by the weather and ceaseless erosion by organic life. In this section of drawn wall the bricks are still held together by a very strong mortar, its surfaces are though by now severely eroded and moss and tiny plants grow from crevices. It is drawn, like the rest of the image using a dip in pen and ink, first of all the linear marks are made, small curves, made by a slightly quivering hand as the surfaces and the forms are searched for and then the 'pen' is turned around and the brush on the other end comes into play, small patches of diluted ink flicked onto the paper to indicate both a suggestion of moving shadow and surface presence.

Brush with a nib attached to the other end

The important issue for myself as I draw are the different rhythms set up by visual encounters with the situation, for instance the brick wall itself is still, even after many years of erosion, beating its heart to the regular rhythm of carefully laid bricks and mortar. My job is to both pick this out and to embed it into the other rhythms of moving grasses, broken stones, trees etc. that surround the wall and which are working to gradually dissolve the wall rhythm back into the older rhythms of the woods. The trees are pushing vertically up, powerful forces that surge out of the ground towards the sun, the walls are in contrast now broken at angles, angles that remind myself of broken bodies. As I draw it, a nearby slab of concrete feels to me as if it could have come from a cemetery and it now becomes a tombstone for a dead building.

Detail from 'Trees demolish walls'

The issue is again one of rhythm. It is in wave forms that rhythm emerges. Seen up close the drawing is simply marks, small lines that are made of tiny curves. However when you pull back from the surface marks coalesce into something recognisable, in this case an old wall, a concrete slab that is breaking down and being over taken by encroaching grasses and trees. These tiny marks are at times indicators of surface texture, or perhaps of a blade of grass, or a sign for the passing of a slight breeze through the surrounding vegetation or they might be a response to the movement of light as it moves from brightness into shadow.

The rhythm of marks is also a vibrational trace of my hand movements. I stand to make the drawings, so movement begins in my feet, rises up my old wobbly legs, is carried up my aching back, down my arms and into my now arthritic fingers. I am ageing just as the building that once stood here has aged. At some point, like the broken wall, I will join it in dissolving back into the world I emerged from.

The dinosaur drawing is also about energy transfer but with a slightly different emphasis in relation to time. I was trying to get through a very overgrown part of the wood in order to draw something else, but as I broke through some undergrowth, I looked down and lying in grass on the floor was a bright red plastic tyrannosaurus. It was so incongruous that I was initially baffled as to how to deal with it, but as usual drawing sorted the problem for me.

Detail: Tyrannosaurus in the woods

The issue I found I had with the tyrannosaurus was the power of its image. It was still pristine, its plastic surface unscratched and unsullied by dirt and grime. It felt put there on purpose. I gradually became aware that the tail was missing and that it was in fact broken and therefore probably discarded by its owner, who must have taken it into the woods and left it as some sort of ritual ending to its short toy life. As I drew it, I was able to reconcile its form with the surrounding vegetation, able to dissolve its edges into the more energetic marks that I was using to suggest the life of the flora that surrounded it. It will eventually be covered by fallen leaves and will sink gradually into the ground and become a type of fossil for future diggers to uncover. This drawing of what had been a top predator of its time, began to look as if the dinosaur had just been defeated by something far bigger than itself. It was a fallen giant, now made small; the fast drawn marks made to suggest surrounding grasses, could perhaps be indicators of giant ferns seen from far above, time collapsing in the mind's eye. The image of the dinosaur, something glanced at in a brief moment, also being a window into deep time. The dinosaur's red plastic was once a carbon fossil, then fossil fuel and as a high molecular weight organic polymer, it became morphed into a form alongside cups and saucers, other toys, medical equipment and the myriad of other plastic goods that now threaten oceans and their residues begin to live in our bodies as micro-plastics. The drawing arena is small, not more than a couple of feet to scan, I don't stay long, don't attempt to describe the light change, don't dwell on textural differences, I simply draw mark rhythms. The toy dinosaur's form had been made clear by its designer, stomach ripples looking to me like wave forms, lines of energy that I could play off against marks made to signify the forms of plastic muscles on plastic legs. Legs, that like its arms, are stuck out helplessly, now air running to the rhythms of waving grasses growing nearby.

The third drawing 'an emerging giant' was made over a longer period of time. The tree at the centre of the image, was in my mind getting ready to take over, ready to reclaim its territory. The tree had grown out of the side of what appeared to be a mixed pile of earth and rubble. Slabs of cut stone, old bricks and other remains of a former time when this was an industrial site, poke out around the tree's base, all of which felt very inconsequential in relation to a dominant tree, that as it was drawn demanded more and more pressure to be exerted on the pen, its rhythms energised the place, so that as it pushed its root system out into and down into the world, it took up the space necessary for a powerful presence. These tree roots were alive with a muscular vitality that visually grabbed the ground and anchored the growing tree to a mound that was now part of itself. The tree's twist into space dominated the rhythmic forms of the area, other vegetation taking a very secondary role. As in a visual opera, tall grasses set up a background rhythm that could support the loud vitality of the tree. As I drew, I felt myself falling over as my feet slipped on the slope I stood on, this became confused with my attempts to depict the slope that surrounded the tree. Disorientated by being off balance, the energy I had to invest in standing upright, was channelled through my drawing hand into the way I was drawing the tree gripping onto the ground. It became more like an octopus stuck onto a rock.

An emerging giant: Detail

The above approaches to drawing have gradually evolved from a lifetime of drawing that initially used the visual checks and balances of a William Coldstream inspired grid of looking to assess where things are in relation to each other, and which then for many years used the 'giron and fesspoint'* method of spatial drawing as an attempt to capture the flicker and movement of perception. I have spent hours looking at and thinking through the implications of the drawings of Cézanne and have nearly 50 years experience of teaching drawing and a lifetime of making drawings behind me, all of which has only led me to have an uncertain certainty about these issues. I am however still learning, every week something new occurs to me, but I would hope that these recent drawings have enough to them to convince the viewer that they are the product of serious research into how it is still possible to stand in front of the world without a camera and make an interesting drawing of it.

How to visualise magnetism

Wednesday, 15 April 2020

Patrick S. Ford: A Dialogue with the Landscape.

Guest drawing blogger: Patrick S. Ford

A Dialogue with the Landscape.

I Grew up in England, with its long tradition of landscape art, and studied at Jacob Kramer College (as Leeds Arts University was known at the time). I first studied there from 1977-78 and then again from 1980-81.

Among the many wonderful and unforgettable experiences I had at Jacob Kramer, the week-long drawing trip to Wharfedale was arguably the high-point for me. I could never forget sitting up on the hills in the cold for hours on end making marks, erasing marks, making new marks, struggling to capture the particular character or personality of a specific section of the valley. The search for the appropriate marks that could express weight and convey distance and form in the landscape were the goals of those drawings. I quickly became aware that the resulting drawings were not simply an objective recording of the chosen landscape, nor were they merely an attempt to depict the landscape as a two dimensional image. The final images were more than that, they seemed to be a struggle to find a way of conveying a physical experience by recording that experience as a specific collection of marks, in a similar way to how binary code stores complex sets of information about the world.

‘Wharfedale’, 1981

As I made these drawings I first had to ignore the temperature and the fact that I had not dressed appropriately for a day on the hills. I sat on a plastic sheet, with snow lying all around me. As I drew a stick of compressed charcoal across the sheet of paper, I followed the lines of the drystone walls I could see on the opposite side of the valley. I imagined myself walking there, hugging the walls for protection against the wind, climbing the hill towards the crest. As my imagination walked across the hillside, the piece of charcoal in my hand scraped correspondingly across the paper surface.

The resulting drawn image may not have been an exact visual copy of that part of Wharfedale but that would only be apparent if the drawing were held at arm’s length to the valley beyond. Once a drawing has left the location that triggered its creation it must work as an independent, resolved image able to exist on its own merit and not reliant on any comparison with a particular place and in my case a particular part of Yorkshire.

Fast forward now around 40 years and I found myself living on Cheung Chau Island, part of the territory or Hong Kong. During the 6 years I had been living on the island I had developed a regular late afternoon walk which I undertook every Saturday and Sunday unless it was raining heavily. Along the route of the walk I had noticed numerous boulders that lay in various parts of the island. Some of them lay very close to the path I traced and as I walked quite slowly I had time to look at them closely. On many of them the surface had been eroded by the wind and water into a texture that resembled miniature vermiculation reminiscent of the type to be seen on the lower stories of renaissance buildings. One in particular attracted me due to a large crack that ran vertically down the rock. The combination of the fissure in the rock and the surface texture I thought was quite striking. It could almost have been sculpted deliberately.

At the time, in my notebooks, I had been testing various drawing materials, such as willow and compressed charcoal, pastels, soft pencils and so on by laying thin sheets of paper onto the floor on my balcony to see which materials picked up the details of the floor surface in a more effective way. I was investigating different methods of mark making although at the time I did not have a particular application in mind. When I saw the fissured rock on my weekend walk I put the two together and decided to trace the wonderful texture of the rock with the most effective materials I had determined from my tests.

The next weekend I took out a few sheets of thin, Chinese ink painting paper, some willow charcoal and located a few rocks that could serve as experimental subjects.

I spent a few minutes deciding which part of the rock to lay the paper on and then laid out my materials to be at arms-length while I worked. I would be holding the paper with one hand and pressing the charcoal onto the paper with the other. I carefully picked up the texture of the rock by utilising the frottage technique, the kind often used to record brass memorials in old churches. Care was needed and some practice required as I found that a certain amount of pressure was needed to pick up sufficient texture from the rock, but not too much pressure as that would tear the thin Chinese ink paper. I worked on 3 different rocks before moving on to the one with a distinctive crack running through it. This I felt to be the best of the group as it had an individual, distinct character. Although I was picking up the natural texture of the rock by rubbing the charcoal across the paper, I found that I could intensify certain parts of the emerging image in order to create emphasis. I therefore realised that I could exert some control over the marks being made and it was not simply a matter of recording the rock texture mechanically. The hand that held the paper in place while I drew was forced to move as I concentrated the drawing on different parts of the paper and through that hand I could sense the texture and temperature of the rock beneath.

In this way, as I used my hands to sense the form of the rocks, I gained an understanding of their make-up and which allowed me to respond later in an empathetic way. I had already expected that I may then have to work further on these initial images in order to clarify the visual imprint the rocks had left.

The drawings were the end result of a direct tactile interaction between the natural landscape and my hands. The experience was quite sculptural in a way, almost as though I was physically shaping the rocks in clay or a similar malleable material. It was as if the activity I was engaged in would somehow record the residue of the rocks’ presence onto the paper. Paul Klee would suggest that this residue would be generated by the naturally occurring energy of the rocks. Although the scale was different, I now realise that this ‘presence’ was what I was attempting to record onto paper back in Warfedale.

Reviewing my first round of drawings on Cheung Chau, I sensed that some drawings seemed to be almost fully resolved while others required some further work in order to resolve them. This further work was completed back in my studio and it was important for me to reflect on the experience I gained out in the landscape, so that my responses in the studio would be sympathetic with the marks made out in the field.

My overall aim was to combine the natural marks and textures created by the technique of ‘frottage’ and the sympathetic application of marks and tones added later in the studio.

Relief Drawing A – 33(h) x 22cm(w)

Relief Drawing B – 29.5(h) x 34.5cm(w)

Relief Drawing C – 32.5(h) x 35cm(w)

Relief Drawing D – 31.5(h) x 34.5cm(w)

Following this initial experimentation, I decided to move on to the next stage.

For this second round of experiments I chose a spot on a local beach. Here I found horizontal rocks emerging from the sand, full of character and ideal for my project. As these rocks formed the ground I walked upon it was therefore easier to lay out larger sheets of paper and use rocks as weights, rather than relying on my left hand to hold them in place while I worked.

On the day I chose to make my drawings it was very hot. I wore a straw hat from Okinawa that gave me shelter from the sun and allowed air to circulate through the weave. During the session that day I aimed to make two drawings. I took the roll of Chinese paper and a large square of paper that was not as sensitive as the Chinese ink paper, but being much larger it allowed me to experiment on a larger scale. It made sense to document the process and Nina, Yiu Lai Lei made the video recording for me.

Video: the making of relief drawing1

Working on the beach: Relief Drawing 1

Video: the making of relief drawing2

Working on the beach: Relief Drawing 2

Back in the studio I laid out the two drawings and reviewed them. The one I had made using the roll of Chinese ink paper seemed to me to be fully resolved. It had recorded quite a lot of the surface texture and the overall image had a strong personality. It seemed there was nothing missing and therefore nothing for me to add that could have improved it.

The larger, square sheet seemed a little unresolved so I felt I had to work more on it. Perhaps as this sheet of paper was not as sensitive it had not picked up as much of the surface texture. The contrast in the marks was greater (fewer half-tones had been created) and the marks seemed quite linear when compared to the other drawing. At first I was disappointed. I had been so pleased with the first drawing I assumed the larger drawing to be similar but more extensive. However, as I began work on it I realised my assumption was wrong. The paper surface was different, it was thicker and smoother and had not picked up as much of the delicate texture, only recording the main lumps and bumps beneath. I was mistaken to think that this paper could result in an image similar to the other paper that had such different qualities. Instead of being disappointed I embraced the larger drawing and as I continued to work I began to sense this drawing’s own personality. The image that began to emerge was not as three dimensional, the marks were almost calligraphic in nature and did not merge together so much in places as had happened in the previous drawing. Once I had found the new direction for this work I found the work much more enjoyable.

I tried to find equilibrium between the marks that were directed by the textures and fractures in the rocks and my own, considered response to them. The rocks led the way by setting out a basic structure, the scope of the drawing, and I then later followed their lead by responding to their clues and hints.

In order to make these drawings I had to adapt my usual method of working that would eventually allow me to make an honest and direct response to the form of the rocks. It is so easy to impose preconditions on a drawing and then attempt to push it in that direction rather than allowing the work’s specificity to dictate one’s working methods.

I have always found experimentation exciting and I enjoy the thrill I receive when I am not in control and don’t fully understand where a particular project is headed. In future I now plan to explore this topic more and test the specificity of this method through the use of different surfaces and different types of drawing support. The fact that the results of such a project would be unpredictable is what drives me on.

Relief Drawing 1: Chinese ink paper drawing – 138(h) x 35cm(w)

Relief Drawing 2: Layout paper drawing – 119(h) x 88cm(w)

Patrick S. Ford’s contact details

patricksford@live.com

www.patricksford.com

https://33temple.blogspot.com

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCblXHEcuFvMw91ccpFybvcg?view_as=subscriber

Monday, 25 November 2019

Clouds

Clouds are vital to the imagination. My first imaginative experience of them was as a boy lying on my back in the long grass looking straight up into the sky and getting lost in looking for images as clouds passed over me on a hot summer's day in Dudley. Peering up past long stalks of grass uncoupled the clouds from any reference point beyond the now giant grass stalks that surrounded my head and this allowed my thoughts to drift and take me away from my home town and into somewhere else far more exciting.
A personally very significant cloud moment was watching the film 'The Agony and the Ecstasy' on the TV. This was the film version of Irving Stone's book based on the life of Michelangelo. There was a scene where Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston, looks up at the clouds and sees for the first time a vision of his painted images covering the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and he now knows what he is going to paint.

Charlton Heston matted into the frame looking at the painted clouds

This is the image of clouds as painted by Emil Kosa jnr.

At the time I hadn't realised how the images were constructed and was convinced that if I looked long enough at the right cloud formation I would find fantastic images of all the things I wanted to draw. This was just about the time it was dawning on me that I wanted to be an artist and this film gave me a very unrealistic Romantic idea of what life as an artist was like but like many untruths, hidden inside was a truth that stuck with me.

Godzilla?

I like the fact that this photograph of a cloud formation was seen by many as Godzilla. It suggested to me that things that are designed to appeal to our imaginations, like Godzilla, are much easier to read than objects based on reality. For instance a real dog is seen in all sorts of positions, but a cartoon dog is nearly always seen from the side. Like the dog, when Heston sees an image of God it is also from the side.

Dog like cloud

I'm sort of drifting off the point, seeing things in clouds or similar amorphous suggestible things, such as blots and splurges of paint is a type of apophenia, or the tendency to perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things, technically the sub category is 'pareidolia', or a tendency for the incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music. Humans that are attuned to see other humans in everything perhaps though need a retuning, so that they see other possibilities in things and take at least one step away from a tendency to see human values as running through all eventualities. (This is an OOO objection, most psychologists would say that it is perfectly normal for people to see other people in random patterns, because that is what they are mainly interested in; which for me is where the root of certain problems might lie).

This tendency to see more than one thing at once is interesting as it creates action within a static image. It forces the mind to constantly question what is there, which is what normally happens when you see something in movement. It takes a few moments for the brain to sort out a collection of percepts. Add into that time of questioning a peculiarity of language, that for instance these percepts indicate that there is a 'rabbit' within the surrounding complexity, and you have a moment whereby 'chaos' is suddenly clarified and 'fixed' by a noun. The doing or perceiving becomes a thought. The drawings above echo that perceptual problem and show the potential of switch between one possibility and another to give energy and 'life' to a still image.

If you didn't know what rabbit looked like you might miss it

The photographer has already drawn our attention to what is supposed to be interesting in the above image, which brings me to another issue about contemporary lens based culture. By constantly referring to photographic imagery, sometimes I wonder whether or not we are becoming more and more reliant on technologically mediated images and that we now feel more comfortable with these than we do with ones that are the result of confronting the world directly. For instance this shot of a rabbit was chosen because in profile the rabbit is more recognisable, a fact that allows us to pick it out from a very similar coloured and textured background, however the photographer would have chosen this image from several possibilities, and would have picked out the one that was deemed to be the most clear or understandable by the audience. I.e. the photographer is doing all the work of picking out and defining what is of interest, so all the audience has to do is receive the image. I have worried about this issue before, so will park the thought for now. (But there is no escaping that rabbits, dogs and God have some profiles more recognisable than others)

If you are interested in clouds as a subject matter the artist most people would turn to first of all is John Constable, a man who lived through the period 1776 to1837.

Constable was very much an artist of his time and was responding to a wider awareness of the romantic nature of landscape, as well as a growing belief in the power of science and objective reasoning. Clouds in particular suggested both something uncontrollable and indefinable and something that could be studied by close observation. Constable at one point below a drawing of clouds quoting Bloomfield’s lines from his poem 'Winter'.

As when retreating tempests we behold,
Whose skirts at length the azure sky unfold,
And full of murmurings and mingled wrath,
Slowly unshroud the smiling face of earth,
Bringing the bosom joy: so WINTER flies!...
And see the Source of Life and Light uprise!
A height'ning arch o'er southern hills he bends;
Warm on the cheek the slanting beam descends,
And gives the reeking mead a brighter hue,

Constable: A sunbeam descending through clouds

Nature is seen as a place of drama and romantic thrill, and in some ways an extension of the human, tempests have skirts, and murmur and the earth is un-shrouded, revealing its smiling face. So it could be argued that Constable was looking for other things in his cloud studies, things suggestive of human temperament as well as meteorological exactness.
His tiny sketchbook studies are a lesson to us all in brevity and a reminder that when trying to make notes a conjunction of words and images is sometimes better that just one or the other.

Constable cloud studies

Constable used the word 'skying' to describe this practice of drawing clouds, as in, ‘I have done a good deal of skying’. A description I would suggest links him to a phrase from our own times, 'blue sky thinking'.

It is illuminating to compare Constable with Cozens, an artist I have referred to before.

Cozens: cloud studies

Cozens was interested in how to turn the process of capturing cloud forms into something that could be a marketable teaching aid. His 'how to do it' approach reminding us that Capitalism was becoming the dominant economic force in England during this period. Cozens had already realised that ink blots and paint splodges could be used as marketable tools that could help the amateur painter come up with new ideas, the idea of the amateur being something that was also at the time new; like hobbies, these were activities only available to those rich enough and with spare time on their hands.

Cozens: ‘A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape’ 1785

This was a time when workers were being forced to sell their labour in an increasingly competitive urban environment; because people who traditionally had made their living from the land in agricultural trades, were increasingly being dispossessed of their traditional cottages and rural homes, as land owners turned to new industrial means of production and removed no longer needed people from their lands. The powers that ruled wanted a disciplined obedient class of wage workers who would work for a pittance, and the idea that everything could be turned into a commodity had become more and more entrenched as a model idea. The problem of creating a disciplined and regimented workforce was though difficult. After living in the countryside and leading a life led by responding to the various changes in the conditions of nature, submitting to the routine of going to work daily, for a set number of hours, usually inside a dark noisy building, was an alien concept. The working day under a pre-capitalist agrarian system would have been shaped by hours of light and darkness, as most work took place out of doors. The intensity and length of labour being dictated by seasonal considerations, such as planting or harvest periods and the sky was the main indicator of these things.

Here for me lies the paradox. As people were driven off the land, city living becomes the norm and the new industrial class of owners and managers become the people that can afford to buy Constable's paintings and who can take up Cozen's courses in art. Understanding the sky moves from being something everyone could do, to a specialist preoccupation only followed by artists and scientists. At the same time that Constable's 'Hay Wain' was receiving plaudits from the Parisian art critics, agricultural workers were being driven into the city only to find themselves homeless and starving because their skills (such as being attuned to the different cloud patterns and the weathers they foretold), were no longer needed.

I have to be careful as I write because as the words emerge, like a drawing, what I find myself saying wasn't what I started off thinking about. But this economic divide does worry me because it still exists and fine art is often seen as only for the well heeled collector.

So what use are these clouds? The fact that their forms are in constant metamorphosis is a wonderful stimulant for invention. At the core of image making is the fact that you don't know what you are going to do when you start. The reason you leave a drawing unfinished and in an amorphous state, is to let your unconscious take over. At some point all drawings on their way to becoming something pass through a 'cloud' of unknowing stage and that is why clouds are so important to our collective artistic imagination. This 'inventiveness' is useful for anyone, not just artists and is an essential part of how we respond to the rest of the world and accept the serendipity of interconnectedness. Clouds are also things that are 'undomesticated', they are nature at play and suggest a world other than the built forms that humans come up with. The more we live indoors, the more time spent typing on computers in dark rooms, the more clouds become a symbol for imaginative escape. Back in 1802, (click here) Luke Howard's 'Essay on the modification of clouds' had an enormous influence and created an appetite amongst the educated classes for images of clouds. In a similar way we can download from the Internet the latest advances in science and go beyond the clouds, out into space or down into the spaces of the quantum universe. However even in these 'sublime' territories Romantic clouds still exist. Images from the Large Magellanic Cloud and cloud chambers now inhabiting our visual vocabularies just as powerfully as storm clouds did in the romantic visions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Large Magellanic gas clouds

Cloud chamber trajectories

I've used cloud images myself in several different ways, sometimes as in the ceramic versions below to reverse expectations, in this case making light airy insubstantial things out of an earthy solid clay material and exhibiting them on the ground, so that they resemble coprolites.

Ceramic clouds

Coprolites

In the two watercolour images below I used clouds as a device to obscure what would have been central to the image, as if those clouds that stopped you looking at the earth from your passenger plane window, had begun to follow you around and to always get in the way of your ability to see the world for what it is.

Clouds as obscuring devices

Clouds are always with us and are fundamental to our visual vocabulary; different cultures will return to them over and over again, but each time with perhaps a slightly different intent.