Cornelia Parker: Mythic conceptualism

Cornelia Parker is one of our most fascinating artists and it's because of the way her mind works. Her work always makes you think, but not in a straightforward logical way. She begins the process of putting an idea together by letting her subconscious dictate the direction that her artwork will take. It’s only later that she contextualizes it and gives it meaning. Because of this process she allows the subliminal to operate and therefore as your own mind works its way through to its not so well used neural pathways, when the penny does drop there is a great deal of satisfaction. 
So how does her approach help to make us think or feel? Perhaps it's got something to do with Jung's idea of the collective archetype, by allowing the subconscious to dictate some aspects of the creative process, the end result enmeshes both rational and irrational impulses.  

Poison and Antidote Drawing: 2009 

Rattle-snake venom and black ink, anti-venom and white ink on card: 6 x 4 in. 

Parker often includes culturally significant materials in her work, which both heightens our emotional response to what she is doing and helps us to memorise the experience. However you get the sense that she chooses these materials because of some sort of 'feeling' that they are right, thus beginning a process that fuses subconscious awareness with a sort of inductive reasoning. Parker also gives us the interconnections that help to bind memories for us. In 'The Art of Memory' by Frances Yates, you will find detailed descriptions of how memory was understood as a part of the skills of rhetoric, and the conjunction of different concepts or things that have unexpected associations or correspondences, is a technique often used to stimulate the brain to hold on to an idea. I suspect that at one time or another Parker has read Frances Yates and that she has herself recognised the importance of making visual imagery that asks questions of the viewer, especially because of an initial illogical or odd appearance.
In the case of the venom / anti venom concept, first of all it is important that it is 'rattlesnake' venom. She could possibly have used cobra venom as both snakes are culturally significant, but the 'rattlesnake' is of course more closely identified with an idea of the USA, and in this case it also makes far more sense in relation to Christian concepts of good and evil and the awareness we have of possessed preachers and the dark side of the American south. Black is an 'evil' colour, with an association with death and white is culturally associated with purity and goodness. Bringing these things together with the Rorschach blot taps into Freud and the unconscious and allows for a 'read' of the final image in the same way that any other Rorschach blot would be read, as a way to understand someone's unconscious motivation. The fact that many of these blots are either read as skulls or butterflies, reminding us of the nature of bi-lateral symmetry, a formal principle underlying both folding paper in half and the development of most life forms, especially if they have backbones. Parker describes what she did in a very straightforward way, ‘ I’ve made poison and antidote drawings using snake venom from a rattlesnake farm in Texas mixed with black ink, and anti-venom with white ink, to make Rorschach blots. The resulting drawings are a combination of 'good and 'evil'. (Maslen and Southern, 2014:54) She also states ‘For me the conscious part of making a drawing is deciding on a process, what the process then releases is something else.’ The 'something else' I presume is dependent on the unconscious. The fact that the process of interconnection releases certain metaphorical 'triggers' in the mind of the viewer, therefore creates questions, rather than direct 'answers' or clear 'meanings' is important here. Parker again; “I began with the idea of different sorts of oppositional things. I was thinking of Hitler and Freud, for example, in terms of how they seem to personify contrasting parts of the psyche. I also wanted to make something physically dangerous.” (Drawing, 2000). Opposites exist because we are fascinated by them; black is only identifiable as the opposite of white because our mental picture of these two concepts is set up in a particular way. In reality there are no opposites only continually morphing and changing relationships. What was once part of a helium atom inside a star might now be part of a calcium atom inside you. What you eat this morning might well have been part of a dinosaur sixty million years ago or a weathered rock from the same era. At a quantum level everything is transferrable to everything else. At one point Parker was using black Quink ink as a carrier for the poison and white correction fluid as the carrier of its antidote. The correction fluid is very viscous and the resultant texture when you fold the card over and print off the painted surface opposite is quite organic, almost hair like, reinforcing the fact that the blot could look both like a skull or a human being wearing a fur coat. Again as Parker states, ‘The material is often where my thinking starts.’ (Aesthetica Magazine, 2016) So the material can have two types of metaphoric operation, the first, its whiteness, signifying purity, the second, its tendency to be thicker and stickier, enabling it to make a texture that is similar to that of bone, or fur, or sick or semen. Signifying perhaps death in life or the comforts of a return to our furry animal nature, or the fact that sex and death are always close bedfellows. Hopefully you are beginning to get the idea of how her work can be used to build interconnections between things.

Cold Dark Matter: An exploded view

Cold dark matter consists of the contents of a garden shed exploded at her request by the British Army. The contents and bits of the shed itself are then collected together and are hung by fine threads from a metal grid situated above the installation, which is illuminated by a single lightbulb that hangs down into the centre of the suspended components, casting dramatic shadows onto the walls. It appears as if a moment during which the explosion took place has been frozen, and you can walk around the hanging pieces of shed and examine in detail,  what is there and where each piece is in relation to every other piece. We in effect come to inhabit a different time zone or we speed move so fast that things around us appear to become still. This device is also used in films, witness how the Quicksilver character moves in the X-Men film franchise. 

Quicksilver in the kitchen

This association with comic culture could be taken even further. Before developing 'Cold Dark Matter' as a project, Parker had been working on a series of ideas that looked at creation coming out of destruction. Some of her images appeared to be very like orchestrated cartoon deaths, the invention in a cartoon like Wile E. Coyote, being often at its highest in the various ways that the animators could think of bringing an end to the central character. 

Wile E. Coyote

Cornelia Parker has steamrollered brass band instruments and you suspect really likes the ‘exploded view’ images you used to get with Airfix construction kits. 

Exploded view of a tank, lower section

You also get a sense that she is enjoying the idea of inventing forms of destruction in order to be able to reconstruct the objects in new formulations. She kills things off in order to resurrect them, an idea that we have also seen at the core of some religions. An religious icon for instance could be described as a living image of a dead God. 

Breathless

The idea that art could be seen as ‘the living image of a dead thing’ is something that would have appealed to Roland Barthes. This was exactly how Barthes described the photograph, something that he argued it had in common with all portrait paintings and ancient Egyptian funerary objects; all those things were eventually going to result in living portraits of the dead. However for Barthes, what was unique to the photograph, was its punctum, which he defined as the sensory, subjective effect of a photograph on the viewer; as he states, ‘The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’ Barthes contrasted the punctum with the studium, which he described as denoting a more rational approach to the understanding of a photograph, one that is conditioned by historical and cultural experiences and is not categorically different from how other art forms are approached. However a sensory, intensely subjective effect of an image on the viewer, is something I would argue is a possibility for all sorts of images, not just photographs. What is unique about any experience is the encounter and how it is perceived. Because all encounters are initially brief and fleeting perceptual events, (we are hardwired to respond immediately to perceptions so that we either fight or flee) their initial reading has to be instinctive, it is only when we have more leisure time that we can begin to rationalize what went on and work out meaning. A sensation or emanation that carries an image, is essentially in an image form, so on the point of its reception it is also received as a type of pattern. Therefore we could associate the ‘punctum’ in Barthes definition with how we instinctively react in any initial moment in an encounter with an image. A reflection on the nature of the studium comes later. 

Evolution has hardwired our pattern recognition abilities to be instinctive and involuntary, however for them to go into operation at the speed they do, the thing we lose is a consistent ability to make the right call. Therefore we can begin to detect patterns that aren't really there. As James Geary (2011, p. 36) puts it, "The brain evolved to detect patterns of immediate significance, in do or die, fight or flight situations." Geary (p.38) goes on to describe McCulloch's experiments, that show how a frog is hardwired to try to eat anything that is about the size of an insect and that moves around in jerky movements. This automatic response to a certain type of pattern will sometimes mean the frog gets to eat inedible things that have simply drifted into its field of vision, however, the frog's chance of catching flies is greatly increased if it doesn't take time to think about where a fly might be and 9 times out of 10 that moving shape will be food and not just a scientist trying to fool it. We are not unlike frogs, and if we see something like a food pattern we decide it must be a food pattern. This process tends to make us create object agency, it can also lead to the giving of the characteristics of living things to inanimate objects. The behaviour patterns, or look of inanimate things, can be like the behaviour patterns or look of living things. Because of the bi-lateral symmetry created by folding a sheet of ink stained paper in half, at first glance it might be an animal, simply because most animals are bi-laterally symmetric. (Humans are of course animals with backbones, so we are hardwired to see that pattern). As Geary notes, "That swaying in the trees may be just a breeze or it could be a wild beast, coiled and ready to strike. You can misperceive the breeze as a beast or the beast as a breeze. Which mistake would you rather make? And if you were an early hominoid, which mistake would be more likely to ensure that you would survive long enough to reproduce?" (2011, p. 41)

This ability to give agency to things is at the core of how we produce metaphor, things are similar to each other, so one thing might be like another in other ways too. For instance we see images of human faces in old gnarled trees, in burnt toast and in the moon. We use a metaphorical technique called personification as an extension of this, something in advertising that is called 'brand personality', which is why a company might for instance strive to develop a 'sincere' image.  Associations begin alongside perception, whether we want them to or not, prompting behaviours that can be totally outside our conscious control. These representations, or perceptual/pattern recognition combinations, also come with affects. Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, & Johnson (2000) suggest that as we perceive, the representations we arrive at come out of what is called an 'affective pool' and as we pull them up into consciousness and judgement making, they come with what could be called unconscious bias. 

In psychology unconscious bias is explored by using the techniques of free association as first initiated by Freud. He would ask people to tell him what the first thing was that came into their minds when he gave them a word to respond to. His pupil Rorschach, began to use inkblots to initiate the same process. People see different things in the same ambiguous inkblot image and as they tell what they see, an analyst will record their thoughts and then determine the significance of the associations made. 

Something that evolved as a super fast response to flight or fight situations, now sits deep down in the amphibian brain, located at the centre of an activity that Johnson and Lakoff would argue was the creation of body schema metaphors. A typical body metaphor would be to be feeling centred or the opposite, of feeling off balance. These associations could be triggered by an awareness that well and healthy people stand up straight, but ill or dying people tend to lie down, or stagger about. Our concept of Justice holding her scales, is a metaphorical personification that stems from this idea. 

Cornelia Parker's thinking process is centred around the nature of metaphor. Her art is about destruction, resurrection and reconfiguration. Demonstrating the importance of process, she frequently transforms objects by using seemingly violent techniques such as shooting, exploding, squashing, cutting and burning. Through these actions she physically alters the object and she herself becomes an active participant in the development of its story. In order for Parker to engage with her subject she often has to destroy it. She might melt it down, blow it up, squash it flat, burn it or cut it up, but in the process she reveals something new about the possible meaning of something, the process of destruction leading towards various metaphorical readings. Hence in 'Breathless'; we associate brass band instruments with the 'blow', the deep intake of breath needed to exhale with pressure in order to sound them. If these instruments are squashed it is as if the breath was squeezed out of them.  The process of finding new meaning often involves a resurrection or rebuilding from the parts of the initial deconstruction. Her reconfigurations often involve variations of or associations with the original subject and/or its process of destruction. She states that, 'a squashed object is much more interesting than an intact one and I think brokenness is very much a part of society. Civilisations fall, for instance, or a very recognisable object can become mysterious and more open to interpretation when it’s in pieces. To me, that’s more interesting than what is whole. I use a lot of clichéd objects: a pearl necklace, a silver spoon, a hat for church, a window or the instruments from a brass band – things that are kind of commonplace and that are so ubiquitous everyone understands what they are. I take very simple things and use them to achieve the abstract'. Of much more importance is I think her interest in The Golden Bough by Frazer, a book that outlines the structures of various ancient religions, a book that states that some societies “had to kill something off every time they wanted something to be regenerated." 

Anti-Mass

Anti-Mass is made from the charred remains of a Southern Baptist church with an African American congregation, that was burnt down by racists.  She has used the timbers of the burned church to reconstruct a replacement, that is on the one hand an illustration of atomic forces, of a mass/energy configuration and on the other it is a resurrection of the church's charred remains, so that they can in effect perform their own catholic mass. Science and religion are brought together, these burnt fragments defying gravity and floating without weight, escaping their earth bound life to become a monument to an act of barbarity. As parker has stated, "For every death you get a resurrection.”

The most successful metaphors are those that you remember because of a new or unexpected connection.They are about rethinking the familiar, but with a conceptual link that binds the source to the connection. Without this conceptual tie, what you get when you bring two unlike things together, is as Geary states, "mere Surrealism." (2011, p149)

See also:

Stains and blots

Cornelia Parker at the Whitworth Gallery

Drawing and philosophy

References

Geary, J (2011) I is an other: The secret life of metaphor and how it shapes the way we see the world  London: Harper

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. London: University of Chicago press

Maslen, M. and Southern, J. (2014) Drawing Projects: An Exploration of the Language of Drawing London: Black Dog     Cornelia Parker talks about her work in this book of projects

Finucane, M. L., Alhakami, A., Slovic, P., & Johnson, S. M. (2000). The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits. Journal of behavioral decision making, 13(1), 1-17.

Vija Celmins, Frances Richardson and Peter Dreher: Nature Morte

Vija Celmins: Desert

I have briefly mentioned the work of Vija Celmins before, and her work came to mind again when I was looking at some of Frances Richardson’s recent drawings on display at the Karsten Schubert online Gallery. Celmins’ drawings of ocean waves, desert floors, and night skies touch upon what is often called ‘the sublime’, she is known for images of things that are endless vistas or views of the world too difficult to be fixed in the mind’s eye. However back in the 1960s when she was first beginning as an artist she made images of lamps, heaters, and other overlooked fixtures of everyday life. It is as if she became more and more amazed by what it is to look at things, and then she discovered photographs. In many ways a photograph of a sea that ends up in someone’s living room, is like a doorway into a magical other world. A photograph may sit alongside other domestic things, perhaps on a mantelpiece alongside a brass candlestick, but unlike the candlestick, each time you look at the photograph it opens out into other vistas, ones that are far away from where the viewer is standing. Celmins’ images of seas and empty deserts were made out of graphite and charcoal and were meticulously copied from photographs, their materiality replacing the chemistry of photography with carbon. The only quote I know from her is, “I believe if there is any meaning in art, it resides in the physical presence of a work.” Therefore I would argue that she is not that interested in her drawings as windows that look out onto the world, but that she is presenting her images as objects for contemplation as things in themselves. This is at odds with my previous assertion that photographs are also windows, but perhaps the reality of the situation is something to do with the imagined reality of the image, something that sits between what is imaged and what receives the image, a situation that in communication terms creates a membrane that stretches between the perceiver and the perceived. This is the space in which as I have argued before, we find life in death. 

Vija Celmins: Sea

Frances Richardson has been responding to the work of Peter Dreher. Dreher made a series of paintings called 'Tag um Tag guter Tag' that engaged him for several years, and which involved him painting the same glass over 5,000 times. This series of paintings, in English ‘Day after Day, Good Day’, was a meditation on time, painting the glass 2,500 times at night and just over 2,500 times during the day. He always painted the glass in the same position on a 25 x 20cm neutral grey ground, and from the same viewer distance and life size. You could argue that these paintings measured out the length of his days, in effect becoming his own personal clock. 

Peter Dreher: 'Tag um Tag guter Tag'

So what you may ask would another artist find interesting in these images of a glass? I think artists are always fascinated by other artists, and are driven to try to understand their obsession. But artists are particularly obsessed with artists that take on the still-life as a subject. It is as if the human/material conversation brings out something fundamental, it focuses on a material metamorphosis, in such a way that it is almost like a religious revelation. Perhaps I need to provide a little history. 

 Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (c. 1602), Juan Sánchez Cotán. 

Cotán’s painting of a stark, very deliberately arranged group of vegetables elevates this humble subject matter into a celestial dance. The vegetables are framed in a night sky darkness, their austere nature almost monk like; we are meant to worship in front of this image as at a vegetal altar. There is a spherical geometry that underlies this image, one that suggests celestial bodies moving across a night sky, a classical order that perhaps takes us way back to a time when vegetal Gods were worshipped and the night was a sky God's domain; a reminder that the first animal and human sacrifices were made to ensure the continuation of the yearly growth cycle. 

 

Chardin ‘The Ray’ 1728 

 In Chardin’s ‘The Ray’ the tense figure of a startled kitten stands alongside a dead ray, a fish that is painted in such a way that it’s vacant and ghostly gaze, becomes a metaphorical message as powerful as Rembrandt’s 'Carcass of Beef', this is indeed 'nature morte'. This is another still life that is deliberately constructed, the architectural arrangement of both alive and dead animals, being framed in a structural triangle of inanimate and animate objects. The frozen action is locked into a space initiated by a knife that almost pierces the picture plane with its handle, but which also establishes the compositional structure, a structure held down by a black jug that gives weight and gravitas to the image. 

 Morandi: Natura morta 1939 

 Morandi’s bedroom doubled as his studio, a situation now common as covid hits our ability to travel to studios and other places of work. He stated, ‘I’m a painter of the kind of... composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all’. Morandi uses very subtle rhythms to give a pulse of life to inanimate objects. He suffuses them with his own quiet life rhythm, created in this instance by the undulating heights of objects played off against subtle colour variations played as if by a colour piano and transforming a simple group of everyday objects into a meditation on time. His methodical approach also extended to the objects he used as his subject material; often painting them and then allowing dust to settle on the now slightly rougher surface, each object slowly losing its original sharpness and clarity, gradually beginning to dissolve and soften its form as dust settled. This slowing down of perception until it becomes a meditative experience is what ties all these artists together, and is the key to what I have called an almost religious revelation. 

You should try this; stare at an object, especially something mundane, something you have previously found uninteresting. Keep staring, stare at it for longer that you want to stare. Now begin to draw it, find its edges, feel the movement of its various planes and angles with your drawing materials, mark your way over its surfaces as if it is a loved one, locate it in the space it belongs to, focus on the light that envelops it until it dissolves back into the light from which it emerged, and then keep drawing. Draw until you cant see anything any more. Now stare again at what you have drawn, stare at it for too long. Take your time, look again at that object you found boring and insignificant and hold in your mind what you have seen and then meditate again on the experience. Gradually at some point in the process, hopefully there will be a moment of revelation, a realisation that you and this object are in fact entwined together in existence and that just for a little while you were joined in a harmonic relationship, one that is recorded in the materials of your extended mind. I often draw the things I'm about to eat, I regard drawing as a type of digestion, we are what we eat and what we look at. 

A beetroot

Frances Richardson is a sculptor, someone I have written about before in a post on drawing as ‘thin sculpture’. She was obviously drawn to Peter Dreher’s work because of its focus on the enduring materiality of time. This is what is said about the exhibition on Karsten Schubert’s website. ‘Hunter/Gatherer brings together Frances Richardson's recent ink drawings with a selection of work by Peter Dreher. An exercise borne from the solitude of our current moment, Richardson's new works on paper gather together a group of objects each of which holds a sense of emptiness. Paired with the works are texts written by the artist’. 

Frances Richardson: Ungrounded objects, 1, 2 and 3

 Frances is she says ‘full of doubt’ about this, she feels ‘representation tends to hold authority and domination over things, subjugates the object in a reduced form for the purpose of narrative or symbol; reductive nouns and images attach themselves to objects, a shortcutting of our sensory experience of the world. For me, representation was a ‘not seeing’ of things in themselves as a matter of vibration; but perhaps I need to deal with things as they seem to be the measure of us’. I was personally fascinated by her doing things over and over. The last time I was engaged with Frances’s drawings there was a sense of labour, repetition and the pricking of countless holes, as paper became sculptural as well as becoming a drawing. As a maker she was re-making paper in her own image, partly yes trying to exert her ‘authority’ on things, but partly I suspect being controlled by paper’s very own material language. I use a lot of ink, I use it with pens and brushes and sometimes I pool it and think of it as a metaphor for my own ageing skin, its ability to crack and seep and stain, coupled with paper’s ability to soak it up, to resist it and to pool it as the paper crinkles and bends, being in my mind a metaphor for my own materiality. I’m therefore excited by the way Frances uses the ink to capture the surface of buckets and stone axes, or should I write 'the bucket' and 'the axe head', or is it 'a bucket' and 'an axe head', are these general or particular things? As they repeat how do they do so? I often draw the same thing, but each time it looks totally different, I can never get back into the same place, the object is always dissolving back into the world it emerges from. Frances Richardson plucks her objects out of their spaces, she holds them firmly in their Chinese ink coats, dark surfaces floating in white, each image struggling to become a mass in a space, but as she realises herself, each object is only a vibration, the thin skin of each drawing, a stretched membrane that just needs the faintest of breaths to make it vibrate again. The work is a fine and proper salute to Peter Dreher, the hours that he spent staring at his glass, compressed into nuggets of time, each one like a hand grenade waiting for someone to pull out the pin, and when they do, like all universes that exist in a point of fluctuation, they expand to become everything that has been and will be, even an old bucket or a hand axe chipped out of flint 10,000 years ago or a drawing and another drawing and another drawing. 

Still thinking 1 (Bucket 1)

Still thinking 3 (Bucket 3)

Frances Richardson: Still thinking 3 (Bucket 3)

See also: 

Drawing water 

Drawing as thin sculpture

Karsten Schubert Gallery

Frances Richardson talks about her work 

Drawing and mindfulness 

X rated

Level crossing signs

There is something about an X that goes a long way back and we keep returning to it over and over again to create key symbols in our visual iconography. The common 'X' opens out some very interesting features about the relationship between drawing and language. I have touched on some of these issues before, often when looking at those entoptic forms that humans have been using for thousands of years such as spots, dots and zig-zags. 

Entoptic categories, each represented here by a typical form 

We have all signed off a text message with XX to mean kisses, which is a custom in language that dates back to the Middle Ages, when a Christian cross was drawn on documents or letters to mean sincerity, faith or honesty. It was also used in early Christian history to stand for 'Christ' which in Greek was χριστός the X standing in for the entire word. This was of course quite a useful thing to do when Christianity was a forbidden religion. The issue here is how the kiss, a physical act between two people, becomes graphically represented by an X. It does look a little like two faces coming together, and more importantly that tiny point of contact where we would expect the mouths to be is in the X a visually and psychologically heightened moment. 

The kissing X

We use X to target something. It is the centre of the X we aim for when sighting. We have come across this before with the point.

The point at the centre of the cross of the sight

Sighting formats

The cross set at a diagonal is called a saltire or Saint Andrew's Cross as in the Scottish flag or the crux decussata. It is often associated with something being wrong, and we come across this X when we make a mistake.

Chemical hazard

From being a sign for something not being right, it is a small step for it to become a sign for a hazard. 

So on the one hand we have the fact that the x has a precise centre and this gives us a sort of x marks the spot accuracy, a sign for a kiss and a sign of things being wrong. 

The British army when they were about to execute someone used to mark a piece of paper with a black X and position it over the heart of someone sentenced to death. The firing squad would then shoot at the X. 

The X can also be used as a replacement for a signature if someone is illiterate, to make one's mark was literally to make a cross. Signing by making a cross was something also akin to an oath, it confirmed that the person signing was honest and telling the truth, because you were indicating that you understood that Christ crucified was the truth.

An early Christian document in Greek with several crosses as signatures.

Because an X signified an unknown or nameless person, it also began to assume another meaning, that of mystery or the unknown. From 'X-Men' to 'Project X', this aspect of the X continues to be used in the world of comic books and filmed adventure. 

In the world of film, an X rating was a rating used to classify films that were meant for adults only. However as a symbol it was very quickly appropriated by the pornography industry and porn films began to be self classified as x or xx or even xxx, signalling to customers that there were several degrees of sexual perversion. 

Tapies

The artist Tapies was very aware of the loaded symbolic value that lay behind the X and used it over and over again in his images, partly as a signature, and partly as a ritualised religious mark, as well as a sign for the raw beginnings of language itself. 

Joseph Beuys was another artist that used the cross as a symbol but he used the much more positive + or right-angled version. 

Joseph Beuys

Because X is offset or at an angle to + it has long been recognised as an occult symbol for Satan.  

Various 'Satanic' symbols

The Ankh

The Ankh cross symbol predates the Christian cross, and it has been used by a wide range of faiths, new and old as a symbol for life itself.

Malcolm Morley

The cross can still of course be used in exactly the same way as it was when we were at school, as an indication that something is wrong. In 'Race Track' (1970) Malcolm Morley made a painting that was a protest (Morley was acting in defiance of apartheid in South Africa, where the race track was located) and an abandonment of Photorealism (he was also crossing out a picture made using the photorealist style), this was the last photorealist painting he ever made, he had decided that painting from photographs was old fashioned and outmoded. 

See also:

Points, dots and spots

The zig zag

Dotted lines

The wave form

The circle

The square

The spiral 

Entoptic forms and how they can be mixed in with representational drawing 

Flowing line drawings

Roy Oxlade, Rose Wylie and raw image making

Roy Oxlade

Oxlade's images are odd, funny, sensual, absurd and visceral. He didn't like French art  "The problem with French painting," he wrote, "is it all seems a bit Montmartre." I.e. it had become mannered and he was always in a battle with what he thought of as English insipidness. 

It is very hard to make a surprising image, the older you get and the more practiced and knowledgeable the easier it is to slip into tried and tested ways of making images. It is very hard to continually surprise yourself, but Oxlade in many ways achieved this and in doing so left a powerful legacy to those coming after him. Hopefully this is not a legacy in terms of how things look, or a style, but is a way of ensuring that art and life don't become separated. Life is surprising, odd, funny, horrible, tragic and visceral, is chaotic in nature and of infinite complexity and so why shouldn't art be the same? We have all at one time or another burnt the toast and thrown it in a bin, but how many of us have thought that it might be worth a drawing? 

One of the best responses an image can have from an audience is, "That's daft", words that for me mean that something has happened to raise a question in someone's mind about the nature of reality. It might also be funny. Never under estimate the power of humour. 

Roy Oxlade 

Objects can be very funny, look at those domesticated thingies that hang around the kitchen, what do they talk about to each other when you are out? How do they appear to each other, what is the kitchen pecking order? Who knows? But it might be worth a drawing to find out.  

Roy Oxlade: The Yellow Lamp

On some days the light source is more lively than the model. Who has never gazed at the angle-poise lamp with admiration. Pixar have branded themselves with it. Oxlade I suspect surprised himself when he made the image above, an image that is indeed, 'daft'. 

Rose Wylie lived with Oxlade for most of his life and painted her own surprising images that in many ways surprise us even more than his. 

Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie still continues to paint and as she does so, she seems to be able to tap directly into scenes from her childhood and a freshness of vision that is childlike. (Not childish, I hasten to say). Some of her images are very large and it feels as if the very struggle to work on such a large scale is part of the awkwardness of the images, an awkwardness that is part and parcel of why they feel powerful and direct. However, Wylie like Oxlade can also become trapped in that loop that can catch any of us out. As you search for a childlike or raw vision it can become a style, and as the policeman said to the art student, "Remember style is the enemy of all art". 

I saw some drawings by Nadine Fienson not long ago from her 'Sex Toy’ series. They had a freshness that suggested that she was trying to tap into things she was still finding awkward and difficult, like life. 

Nadine Fienson ‘Revenge of the Sex Doll’

Nadine Fienson

I hope that Nadine was as surprised by her imagery's arrival as I believe Oxlade was. It felt like that to me, but that's perhaps because I'm also aware of her sophisticated ability to handle paint. 

Pig Sticker

Nadine Fienson 'The matriarch' 

Surprising yourself with imagery is also about allowing it to emerge by itself and sort of catching if off guard. It's a lot harder than it seems, which is why so many artists end up getting fed up with themselves. What they are annoyed at is their own fear of letting go. I still have that problem. I can sometimes look at what I have been doing and realise that I'm making parodies of my former self and when I do I need to stop, walk away and begin again. Some artists look for a style, my feeling is that as soon as you have found it you need to lose it. Having a style suggests that you are more important than the world around you, but reality is far more important than any one individual and it has no style. Style also suggests that things are predictable, and as we well know, life is not like that. 

See also:

Josh Armitage

Louis Soutter

Images of the city (includes some thoughts on Bomberg, Auerbach and Creffield) 

More on life drawing and David Bomberg's influence

There is a link to Rose Wylie at the end of this post on colour, she lived and worked alongside Roy Oxlade for many years.

An on line exhibition catalogue of Roy Oxlade's work