Christopher Cook: Graphite and painterly drawing

Christopher Cook: Cumulus: Graphite 

I have looked at graphite as a drawing medium in an earlier post, but like all pigments graphite powder can also be dissolved in resins, oils and mineral spirits. Christopher Cook makes his own graphite substances which work more like lubricants, a role that graphite has often taken when used in metal casting, as it was used to lubricate the inside of moulds.

Christopher Cook

Cook uses his graphite in a similar way to certain mono printing techniques. Degas in particular used to work on glass plates with ink, rags, brushes and turps washes, in order to explore the potential of ink’s liquidity and ability to suggest forms by playing with the way light and form could be suggested by scumbling, stroking, washing and rubbing into the surface.

Degas

All you need to make mono prints like these is a sheet of glass or plastic, some oil paint, some rags, turps and brushes, then if you put an image underneath the glass sheet you can see it as you move the ink about, but not well enough to be restricted to copying the image below. It's a great process to use if you are trying to simplify an image and at the same time add atmosphere and painterly qualities. 

There are some how to do it videos online. 

A good introduction to tools and textures and working on a plastic sheet.

Monoprint combination techniques

An artist at work using mono print processes

Drawing on the back of the paper mono print process 

For best quality an etching press can be used for plastic plates, but Degas would have just used a wooden spoon and would have carefully burnished the back of his paper, carefully lifting it from one corner in order to see if he had transferred enough ink onto his paper. 

Below is a reference to graphite as a sculptural material which should be linked to my earlier post on graphite.
Life sized skeleton that can vibrate itself into nothingness.  

Post Graduate approaches to drawing

For those of you thinking about making post graduate applications, professor Stephen Farthing, Rootstein Hopkins UAL Chair of Drawing has made a pedagogic film featuring a brief introduction to how postgraduate students across a range of UAL colleges and courses use and apply drawing in their practice.

Watch

The drawings of Laurie Lipton

This is one of my occasional posts on a particular artist whose work I feel should be highlighted. Laurie Lipton says this about her choice to focus on black and white drawing, “Black and white is the colour of memory, ghosts, and old TV shows”.

Her drawing technique is one whereby she builds up tone using thousands of fine cross-hatched lines. The surface of her large drawings is mesmerising, as you get closer if feels as if you are looking at a tapestry or delicate fabric, the hatched strokes both serve to link all her various images together and allow for the white of the paper surface to glow through her network of lines as if the drawings are lit from beneath.

She developed this technique after studying the way that egg tempera paintings were made and has made detailed copies of Durer, Memling, Van Eyck, Goya and Rembrandt. Once again an artist has learnt how to find herself by looking backwards in order to find a way forward. In some ways it is easier to find a personal way through contemporary practices by researching different aspects of historical practices because you are able to distance yourself from the work and it is easier to discover something that is personal to you, rather than something that is simply fashionable.

Detail

I don’t like all her work, I think some of it relies too much on the cliché of the skeleton or death mask to achieve melodramatic effect, but when she looks at the sinister effects associated with our now total reliance on technology, I think her work really hits the nail. Her dystopian images of machinery and the glow of artificial light, suggest that the wiring and cabling that carries the life of electricity into our homes, also carries something else; a threat to our future existence. Her reliance on painstaking hand crafted drawing, seems in itself an answer to these visions, if we are to survive a time when machines take over production, we may well have to revive traditional skills in order to give ourselves a future role to play.

Technically it is interesting to see how she sets herself up to draw. In order to make sure she doesn’t smudge her drawing as she works over the surface, she has devised a system whereby she can rest her hand on a wooden strut that she moves with her as she works across the surface.

Laurie Lipton working in her studio

This type of control is vital to any sort of drawing and in this case she has re-invented the old marl stick. The marl stick was used by artists such as Rembrandt to steady their hand as they painted and of course to make sure they didn’t smudge already recently painted areas. Yet another reason to research how people worked in the past, is to see how they solved problems that continue to be issues faced by artists today.

Artist using a marl stick

See also this post on working from old masters

A steady hand

You can find more examples of Laurie Lipton's work here

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Mobile Home for the Homeless 

There were several drawing related issues that could have been highlighted as a result of going on the trip last week to the Liverpool Biennale. However I am just going to pick out what for me was the standout exhibition; Krzysztof Wodiczko at FACT.

From the video installation 'Guests'

The Krzysztof Wodiczko exhibition was particularly interesting in relation to how he uses drawing to visualize his ideas. He uses video, projections, objects and prosthetics to explore themes of immigration and displacement. As well as his immersive video projection installation ‘Guests’, on display were his body extensions, wheeled carriages, mobile home for the homeless and initial technical drawings and sketchbook drawings for his various pieces of work.

'Guest' used the device of filming all the participants from behind a 'frosted glass' set of windows, only their shadow could be seen, they were never in full focus. However their voices could be heard and text moved across the screen giving us an English translation. This device ensured that the 'migrants' who were at the centre of the piece were unrecognisable as individuals, they were in effect shadow people, a strong metaphor for their actual existence. They are captured by the lens in such a way that the process of capture, becomes an analogy for their status in the 'real' world. 

Walking machine

Drawing for Mobile Home for the Homeless

Some of Wodiczko's drawings are very technical and others more informal, but in both cases what you realise is that he needs to use drawing to work through what it is that he wants to do.

Drawings for various projects

He is a very interesting artist to look at, in particular he has been making work in response to the refugee crisis well before it became a big media story. His support for the ‘outsider’ and his interest in highlighting where power resides in our various institutions are both important issues, and demonstrate that an artist can be both politically active and still make interesting art.

It's interesting to look at the drawings above in relation to the actual video projection below, you can see how much is worked out in drawing before he sets out to make the video. 

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projection

See also:

 More on Krzysztof Wodiczko