Large scale detailed images

Sometimes as an artist you want to get across a vast amount of detail. Perhaps you need to reflect the complexity of a situation or simply engage your audience with a type of 'Where's Wally?' mass of details. Martin Handford's 'Where's Wally? books for children rely on their success by tapping into our interest in seeking out clues from masses of detail, something that probably goes back to our need in pre-historic times to seek clues of danger or animal presence within dense forests or other difficult terrains. 

Martin Handford: Where's Wally?

In the British Museum print department there is a huge woodcut print made by Durer in 1515, of a Triumphal Arch glorifying the house of Habsburg and emperor Maximilian's military achievements. It was printed from 195 wooden blocks on 36 separate sheets of paper. The ambition and energy that must have gone into making a print of this size is staggering, as as someone who has done a lot of printmaking, I'm very aware of the complexities of organisation this must have involved. What it does do however is demonstrate that sometimes as an artist you need to tackle complexity head on and make something that has the same rich texture as the subject it is trying to deal with. The deeply embedded need we have to study detail now comes into its own and an image of this complexity, added to its subject matter, can be studied with great pleasure and intense involvement for hours at a time. This type of image stands at a far distance from a current age of fast read technology, but I do believe that we still have a need for these types of experiences, hence my reference to Martin Handford's work. Sometimes the pleasures of childhood experiences can be dismissed as unworthy when we get older, but it could be argued that as we get more 'sophisticated' we can actually lose touch with our basic instincts and one of the roles an artist can have, is to remind us of our own natures. 

Durer: Triumphal arch.

Adam Dant is a Jerwood Prize winning British artist. His work deals with the fact that he now lives in London and he seeks to reflect his concerns with living in this teaming metropolis, that has a very well known history. He obviously looks back to artists such as Hogarth for inspiration and has produced a body of work that sits on the edge between illustration and fine art. This is fine by me, but I also realise that many people will bring up the old illustration/fine art argument and argue that his work is by definition weak because of being too close to illustration. I have had to deal with this issue over and over again, because like Dant my work is figurative and deals with stories that arrive directly from my experiences of living in Leeds. I might have an argument with the way he visualises space, (I think he is at times too predictable, perhaps because he has to produce a much higher volume of work than myself and I also have this difficultly with Paul Noble's drawings), but he has ideas about the world and is trying to communicate them using visual means. His language is one of detailed pen and ink drawing and I would argue that this is just as important a language as the 'hard won' image charcoal drawings of the Borough Polytechnic School or the various systematic grid based languages of abstract modernism. 

Adam Dant

Dant looks back to a long tradition of English drawing which includes Rowlandson and Hogarth and when interviewed he always cites Peter Bruegel as the artist that he most admires. However of all the images in the Tate Gallery's collection I suspect it is George Cruikshank's 'The Worship of Bacchus' that lies closest in effect to Dant's work. 

Cruikshank's 'The Worship of Bacchus'

Cruikshank's painting is huge and like Durer's 'Triumphal arch' very difficult to read as an on screen image. Which brings me to an issue that I have had to grapple with myself. If you do make work of this sort it is almost impossible to represent it on a computer or mobile phone screen. This link is my own attempt to solve the problem and is of a recent drawing of mine that will be shown soon at the the Royal Cambrian Academy in Conwy, in 'Imagined Landscapes' an exhibition selected by the artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Because most people will see my work on a computer screen I also make work that is about the 'centralised image' and this type of work is so much easier to grasp on screen. (See below)

Eye of the Hayfield

An artist much more in tune with the relationship between the small screen and monumental image making is Emma Stibbon. She is exhibiting at the moment in an excellent printmaking show at the The Zillah Bell Art Gallery in Thirsk, North Yorkshire.

Night Navigation - Intaglio print by Emma Stibbon

The Original Print Show is curated by Norman Ackroyd and is on until until the 14th October. Stibbon often works at a monumental scale, (see earlier post) but instead of trying to put in masses of details and lots of events into her images, carefully selects compositions that will make an impact. I would suggest her way of working is much more appropriate to an age of mobile phones, because the images transfer to screen much easier. However like Martin Handford I still believe there is room for artists that work with masses of surface detail. It might be deeply unfashionable and not mobile friendly, but when an audience is confronted with the reality of the scale and the fact they have to work hard to see all the details, it becomes an experience and in being that, I think an image can be all the more memorable.

Ensor: The entry of Christ into Brussels 1889

This is an old idea and one often disparaged by the Modernists, who saw in these issues the worst aspects of narrative art. However all ideas are meant to be tested and certain aspects of the Modernist canon do not seem to stack up any more. The one thing I think working as a artist for nearly 50 years has taught me is that fashions change and that what was once argued as being the only way forwards, will at some point be seen as a backwards step. I will leave you with two images, Ensor's 'The entry of Christ into Brussels', an image that in many ways ought to be wrong and perhaps given the time when it was painted a backward step. But it in many ways opened the door to Expressionism and is still a painting that people will sit and look at for a long time.

Ensor: The entry of Christ into Brussels 1889

The other image is of Stanley Spenser's painting in the Sandham Memorial Chapel. Again an artist that it could be argued took no account of what was going on in the then current art world, but if you go to look at his paintings they have an ambition and authenticity that transcends fashion and when you visit them in situ, they become experiential and deeply communicative. 

Stanley Spencer: Sandham Memorial Chapel

The current exhibition of Raqib Shaw at the Whitworth in Manchester celebrates this type of approach to making images and if you are at all interested in the type of work pointed to in this post, do go along and have a look.  

Gary Lawrence won this year's Jerwood drawing prize again with another of his very detailed images. 

Gary Lawrence 

The British Museum have commissioned a film about the conservation of Durer's huge Triumphal Arch Print. 

Manabu Ikeda is another artist that has taken on long durational drawing commissions. His 'Rebirth', a 13 x 10 foot very detailed drawing responding to Japan's recovery from earthquake disaster being typical of his work. 

Manabu Ikeda

See also:

The narrative drawing tradition