Drawing reflecting on art

Velazquez 'Las Meninas'

Sometimes when you are working it becomes apparent that what you are most interested in is art itself and the various images that we associate with the practice of being an artist. Even an artist as protean or inventive as Picasso at certain times in his career turned to art itself as his subject. Could he translate the language of Velazquez into his own style?

Picasso: Drawing after Velazquez 'Las Meninas'

There are many ways to engage with art as a subject matter, the most common is to work directly with images of the past, exploring how a contemporary language changes our understanding of the classical canon. Roy Lichtenstein has in the image below employed his signature style of 'Ben-Day' dots and flat colour derived from comic book printing processes, to a futurist image by Carlo Carra. (See link at the bottom of this post for more detail) In effect Lichtenstein's image works to freeze Carra's attempt to inject dynamism and movement into painting. Is Lichtenstein trying to reflect on the fact that once a painting becomes part of the historical canon, it is in effect 'frozen' in time, its original impact now lost and it becoming instead a commodity fixed to the blue chip art retail index? Whatever the reason Lichtenstein is now himself part of the art canon, his work now ripe for someone else to make work about.

Carlo Carra



Personally I'm more interested in this lithograph (below) that Lichtenstein made back in 1970. We have all made sketches and diagrams about new processes we have been trying to learn, my old sketchbooks have lots of them, how to make a 5 piece mould, how to prepare a silkscreen, how to etc. etc. These notes are in fact often interesting examples of visual thinking and Lichtenstein has decided to elevate his notes taken when embarking on lithography to the status of art, by making his notes the subject of the prints. I realise this is again very self reflexive but I think he was making an important point. We often dismiss those things we do to understand quite complex information as everyday note taking, he reminds us to think back and look carefully at how powerful a simple diagram can be.

Roy Lichtenstein: Lith/Litho 1970

His most iconic images in relation to the subject matter of art, or more specifically painting, must be his 'Brushstrokes' series. Made in response to the Abstract Expressionist movement's reliance on the importance of a signature mark or brushstroke. Lichtenstein copied the graphic comic book style of Dick Giordano to achieve his idea. Thus 'high art' appropriated 'low art'. Giordano is a revered comic book artist who has a long track record of working with some of the most iconic superhero comics of our time. It could be argued that as time has moved on and the status of comic book art has risen, Giordano perhaps now becoming more famous than Lichtenstein.

Dick Giordano

Roy Lichtenstein

Eventually Lichtenstein would make his brushstrokes into monumental sculptures, such as the one above, elevating the artist's brushstroke to the same status of a king or queen, the artist's gesture now taking on the status of a public monument. It would be interesting to read what future historians might make of this, and how they would read this image in relation to an understanding of our culture. The artist's gesture having such an importance that it is monumentalised, says much about cultural status and the role of the celebrity artist.

When Lichtenstein responds to the work of Picasso, it's interesting to look at what he does to the image; once again it's essential dynamism is lost, Lichtenstein making a sort of boiled down emoji of Picasso's work.

There are emojis for everything now and of course the artist cliché is still with us. The image of the artist with his thumb through his palette (very much a him) is quickly found amongst the many hundreds of emoji's to select from when you are texting messages. This boiling down of images into their most easily read components being one of the by products of the mobile phone screen. In comparison with the artist emoji, Renoir's painting is hard to read, there might me more to it, but in the days of image saturation, this emoji which has been constructed from simplified past images of artists, seems so much easier to grasp. Clichés are not just the lifeblood of emojis, the press and by extension people as a whole, find it much easier to work with simple stereotypes. Where this leads to is a mistrust of difference, a refusal to address complexity and political gestures rather than meaningful engagement. 

Although this post is about art as a subject matter, I do find it hard to avoid political issues. I am not alone in this. Another way of approaching art history is to take one way of working and to use it in conjunction with subject matter never before associated with it. For instance the portrait of Lenin below by Art and Language uses a Pollock drip technique where you would expect to find socialist realism. This connection has an interesting background history. Back in the 1950s Abstract Expressionism was often seen to exemplify the idea of what it was to be a free thinking US citizen, whilst socialist realism was seen as the typical state controlled art of communist societies. The Art and Language image suggests that what appeared to be freedom of expression, was far from it and that Pollock's work was as much informed by the complex needs of his society as any other. 

Art & Language

Portrait of VI Lenin in July 1917 Disguised by a Wig and Workings Man's Clothes 

in the Style of Jackson Pollock

A related but slightly different comment on Abstract Expressionism is Rauschenberg's erased de Kooning. In this detail below you can just about see a ghost of the original de Kooning. Rauschenberg is making a point about the idea of genius, about the status of art when it becomes part of the accepted canon. It can also be read as a statement made by a younger artist who is determined to be part of a new generation who will come through and replace the older artists. Modernism itself has often been seen as a succession of styles replacing one another, and Rauschenberg's intervention could also be seen as a comment on this. 

Detail of 'Erased de Kooning' by Rauchenberg

Sherrie Levine asks questions about originality and the idea of the artist's signature mark. She sets out to copy other art and presents the work as her own, not as a forger, but as someone that stakes ownership through a conceptual repositioning. I was particularly interested in her work, because several years before Levine became known I was doing exactly the same thing, re-making Duchamp's Bottlerack and making stone lithographs of Van Gogh paintings.  However making a clever point about originality in the confines of a small art school in South Wales, is not the same thing as bringing it to the attention of the New York art world. 

Sherrie Levine, After Willem de Kooning, 1981, pencil on paper

Garry Barker 'Hand made Bottlerack' 1972

Conceptual positioning and repositioning are much more likely to be the processes a contemporary artist would use, if they are to make work reflecting on art and its associated tropes. When making conceptual statements, artists need to operate as if they are in effect playing a game. The rules of art are well known, but occasionally someone thinks of a new move. This art game relates to what has been theorised as the Institutional Theory of Art. I.e. what we call art is really all the activities and things that belong to the existing domain of art practice. Galleries, art critics, styles of art, artists, art movements, art schools, studios, easels, paintings, art magazines, art history books, art fairs etc. etc. therefore art according to Dickie and others who advocate the institutional theory of art, is always operating as some sort of self-validating mechanism, the people within the art matrix are always happy to demonstrate its importance, simply because they have to in order to validate their own worth. 

Tyler Coburn: Thumbprints & Other Takeaways (1960-2010)

There is an article in Flash Art, 'Signature and Style; a nomadic platform for subversion' by Karen Archey, that unpicks several of the issues surrounding concepts of style and originality, this excerpt below from the article explores how several strands can be woven together to create a more complex narrative. 

'Tyler Coburn created Thumbprints & Other Takeaways (1960-2010), a set of three pedestals topped with reflective copper etching plates, creating a surface upon which viewers would leave their thumbprints. Upon these etching plates are three sets of Felix Gonzalez-Torres-style takeaways: a selection of smooth, round “sucking stones” (à la Samuel Beckett’s infamous Molloy, 1955); a sliced, oozing round of Camembert cheese; and a stack of white drawing paper with various signatures of Salvador Dalí etched in graphite. The three pedestals represent three unique methods of artistic production. The sucking stones — bringing to mind Rosalind Krauss’ 1978 essay “LeWitt in Progress” — represent working through a fabricated system of logic. Coburn’s liquidated cheese refers to the a-ha! moment in which Dalí sat down to a lunch of Camembert and first envisioned his signature melting clocks — or more specifically, the synthesis of work and leisure. Lastly, and perhaps most pertinent here, is the artist’s stack of heavyweight drawing papers etched with various signatures of Salvador Dalí in the bottom right corner. At first glance, the signatures appear to be authentically written in by Dalí himself — Coburn even goes so far as to credit him as a collaborator, which, needless to say, is illegal. The artist actually etches the graphite signatures onto the paper (the etching copper is a good clue to determining authenticity), toying with notions of forgery. Notably, toward the ’60s Dalí ceased to create art but frequently signed sheets of paper onto which reproductions of his previous work were printed out of financial motivations'.


What I think much of this type of work is about is the perceived lack of use value for works of art. I know several artists, including myself at times, that worry about what it is they do. What value is it to the world, how can it operate as a force for good? If there seems to be no purpose for something, but (and here is an interesting paradox) people are still driven to make it, then why not simply make images or artworks that reflect on the thing that you are driven to do anyway. If however you believe that art helps us enrich our understanding of the world, the art world is simply another subject matter. The art world being like any other sub-group preoccupation, concerned with roles and positions and familiar rituals of practice, that could be regarded as being analogous to other preoccupations and interests, the work done being understood as another metaphor for the human condition. 

Alan Brookes: Dix

Taking a different approach to art as subject matter Alan Brookes another ex LCA student, is more interested in those images we have that capture the artist at work or in their studios.
I still remember the large drawings he did as a student and it's interesting to see what he is doing now. As he points out sometimes you begin collecting things that at the time you are not sure why you do it, in his case this is what he had to say about the background to his drawings about artists and their studios.

“When I was at art college I began collecting pictures of artists working in their studio or making their artworks. This collection became an addendum to my interest in the artists’ work, a research method for the development of my own practice. I collected the images from magazines, old books, newspapers, postcards, anywhere I could find them. But at the time they weren’t collected with any particular purpose in mind. About five years ago I was sifting through this archive of images and it struck me that the reasons I had been originally fascinated in say, Ensor or Dix, had become lost in time. Dix is a portrait of the German painter Otto Dix, who is well known for his gruesome depictions of WWI violence and satirical images of life in the Weimar Republic".

Alan Brooks: Nauman

The Leeds based art duo Leeds United developed a rich vein of art world inspired works over a long period of time. 

Leeds United

Richard Long introduced walking a line into the art canon, and Leeds United's tongue in cheek version was to undertake a pub crawl instead. Art and heavy drinking are closely entwined in the mythology of certain macho art practices, such as those associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement, and Leeds United in this piece join two art myths together.
I've always loved Steve Carrick's take on Hirst's spot paintings and the convention of always having wine at openings. He stained each glass of wine to approximate the colours of a Hirst spot painting, and then laid out the table in the same configuration. During the opening of course the audience would effectively destroy the piece by drinking it.

Leeds United

The business of art is a very rich field to reap, as a student I was fascinated by it and made several pieces of work responding to various issues that at the time I was interested in. Kolmar and Melamid's 'Most wanted and Least wanted Paintings' is a work that has had resonance far beyond the art world itself, as it pointed to well established sensibilities in large sections of the general public and indicated a clear schism between what the average member of the public would like to see and what the art world itself viewed as good art. Below are some examples of the images we love and the images we hate, I leave it up to you to decide which is which.

'Most wanted and Least wanted Paintings' USA

'Most wanted and Least wanted Paintings' France

Komar and Melamid have also commented on the birth of drawing and painting. In Pliny's original story, Butades daughter draws around the shadow of her lover, so that she has a clear memory of his face, Butades will then go one to make a realistic bust of him. The implication being that the first drawings were tracings of shadows. In this case though the lover is the much mourned former head of the soviet state.

Komar and Melamid: The Origin of Socialist Realism

“We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture…We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.”
-Sherrie Levine

This area of practice has been often criticised for turning its back on the 'real world' and its problems. However, art like all other human activities is simply part of the experience of the world that we all have. You cant take art out of the world. It's a similar situation to the framed drawing. The frame is an attempt to separate out the drawing from the world so that you can contemplate the drawing without any distractions or outside interference. However in reality the frame is of course just another thing, another part of the world's furniture and so is the drawing that you are looking at. All things are interconnected and because of this analogies can be made that reveal rich echoes between what we might first of all think are totally separate fields of human endeavour. Komar and Melamid in the Origin of Socialist Realism, perhaps alluding to the sexual excitement that power can generate. 

Las Meninas shows the artist at work, but Kerry James Marshall gives us the artist and her work, a reminder that paint is paint and that it is a subject of art as well as an object in its own right, but also that the artist is an individual, each painting of an artist's studio being in one way or another a self portrait. 

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter)

I will at some point put up a post about Mark Tansey and his images that play with art and its associated ideas, but in the meantime find a couple of images to whet your appetite.

Mark Tansey

See an exploration of drawing and painting origin myths here.

See also an earlier post on this subject

More on the Institutional theory of art

For an excellent and informative discussion on the ben-day dot and Roy Lichtenstein

For a little light relief.

Mark Tansey and philosophy