Using sketchbooks to think with

Tala Madani: Cell Men March: 2011: Silkscreen, digital print, marker, acrylic, ink on paper

I've been looking at the work of Tala Madani and in particular at the way she uses sketchbooks to help her think through ideas. As I use sketchbooks myself, both to think with and to record the things I see, I totally emphasise with her idea that sketchbooks not only allow you to work through an idea, they 'record' it, as well as preserving certain aspects of your ideas' gestation. I rarely paint from my own sketchbook images, being more a printmaker and sculptor, but there were moments of recognition for me as I looked at the relationship between her evolving ideas and their final realisation in paint. It's not good enough just to have the idea, you have to find the right format for it. In her case she has literally squeezed paint into a shape that carries her ideas. We all need to think more about our own ability to resolve ideas and how the various forms they might take manifest themselves out in the world. I wish I could simply accept that painting is what it is, but for me it also comes with a lot of other 'baggage' that unfortunately nearly always prevents me from taking the painterly route. However, whatever my own tangled up thoughts, I still think we can learn a lot from Madini's process. 

An Iranian-American artist Tala Madani uses her awareness of the complex relationship between men and women that occur in a society that is still dominated by ideas of the superior male and the 'domesticated' female. She is by virtue of her residence in the USA, able to stand aside from the reality of day-to-day life in Iran and see male/female relationships as partly funny, partly about inadequacy and partly about a real frustration on her part with attitudes that mean she cant express herself in the ways that she wants to in her own country. Her portraits of Middle Eastern men are used to play out possibilities that arise from a feminist imagination reflecting on the phallic centred Iranian culture. However by reacting in the way that she does and using oil painting as her communication medium, she is also engaged with a secondary debate in relation to the visual arts culture of the country she finds herself working and living in. Are women fully emancipated in the USA? Is she free to make her own way in the world as a woman? The line between how one society thinks of the roles men and women should take and another is sometimes not as clear as we would like to think. The USA has a strong tradition of Christian ideals including those associated with determining the roles that women should be allowed to play in society; the right to life campaign for instance seeks to abolish a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. 

Oil painting as a medium can also signify a particular history of art that saw women as unacknowledged background figures, whilst men played out heroic roles as genius artists.

Madani's work touches upon all of these issues, however making art doesn't solve real world problems, but even so, it does help us to think about the issues that surround them. Perhaps its real value is that we can begin to think about political and ethical problems without necessarily having to take up any one fixed position on them, and it is fixed positions that often lead us into conflict.

However, back in the world of sketchbooks, we are looking at a way of working that is traditionally seen as being about creativity and invention and Madani's use of them is very contemporary in that she is using those drawing tools we all have at hand now, such as felt tips and biros.

Pages from Madani's sketchbooks 

I like the fact you can see an idea evolving such as the thoughts about 'no nose', you don't need to know what this actually means for Madani, but you can see that she is thinking it through, emoticons have no noses and they are happy, so.....

Paintings that emerged from Madani's sketchbook ideas

I also like the fact that she uses little cardboard cut out figures to work out how her audiences might relate to her large paintings in gallery spaces. It's the sort of thing we might all do, it's easy and useful. 

Trying to work out how an exhibition might look

Tala Madani looks at the male gaze

Art21 has a very good video of her talking about her work, a resource that is live as of the date of this post: Find it HERE.

See also:

My own use of a sketchbook The evolution of an idea

Sketchbooks

Using sketchbooks to draw in the city

Sketch exhibition

Paul Klee's notebooks

Richard Diebenkorn's sketchbooks

Sketch

Drawing in Japan (Part two)

Hokusai's Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawings, is a drawing manual in three parts. Volume I breaks every drawing down into simple geometric shapes; volume II decomposes them into fragmentary contours; and volume III diagrams each stroke and the order in which they were drawn.

As an introduction to Japanese art these three books are a wonderful entry into a world that is both formal and strange. 

Hokusai's 'Quick lessons in simplified drawing'

We are used to seeing geometry being used as an underlying structural principle in Western art, but this is mainly for compositional use, not for individual image construction. Hokusai's drawings of animals, landscapes and people are cyphers, in that they are reduced to very basic elements; however his inventive play, the use of formal elements that go into the process of geometrical simplification, is of a very high order. Compare his drawings with a contemporary Western visual primer for children. 

How to draw a cat using circles

These 'how to draw using circles' exercises are easy to find but what they don't do is to go beyond first steps, the compression of movement and time that Hokusai puts into his image of a walking woman for instance, is very sophisticated. 

Hokusai's drawing of a walking woman above also reminds me of those classic Western art contrapposto poses, whereby someone stands with most of their weight on one foot, so that their shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs in the axial plane, a pose often used to suggest the body in movement. In this image of Hokusai's the figure is energetically moving along, forever walking, in contrast to the cat it has 'life'. Hokusai's human figures demonstrate a really high level of visual compression. 

Durer

Compare Hokusai's image with Durer's and you can see how much visual compression he has achieved. Durer is trying to sort out the body as it twists and has the weight on one foot, but it's still very fiddly and static in comparison. This issue is perhaps fundamental to an understanding of different traditions and in my mind reflects a difference between the Christian idea of original sin and the Buddhist concept of the continuous cycle of rebirth. Durer's figure is awkward in its self awareness but Hokusai's is just getting on with life. 

See also: 

Non western aesthetics (Japan)

Paper folding and the songs of trees

Emakimono hand scrolls

Indian aesthetics

The six principles of Chinese brush drawing can be found in this post

The Karshan Collection's Louis Soutter drawings

Louis Soutter: Un chat a mort

It has just been announced that the Howard Karshan collection of drawings is going to be donated to the Courtauld Gallery. This is a significant collection including Cezanne, Kandinsky and Klee drawings, but in amongst the well known 'classic' artists I see that the collection also has work by Louis Soutter. 

Soutter was put into a home for the elderly at the age of 52, as he had developed osteoarthritis and had become incapable of work. However he continued to draw, but in a much more direct way, as he could no longer hold a pen; so he dipped his fingers directly into ink and made what are wonderfully direct and totally engaging images. These are not naive images, they are too 'knowing' for that; the dark forms work powerfully and directly with the surfaces they are made on, figure and ground relationships handled with extreme confidence. The Courtauld Gallery's news has therefore given me an excuse to put up some of his drawings as a blog post; his images being ones that I have in the past liked to use as loadstones against which I try to measure the effect of my own drawings. It is always salutary to put your own images up against another artist that you admire. 

Louis Soutter

There is something elemental about Soutter's work, his figures are always in movement, holding that edge between being ink and being human. His figure's fingers are Soutter's fingers; ink stained scrapings, blots and splodges being records of physical performances as much as drawings. Above all Soutter's images remind us of the possibility of personal triumph over adversity; some of his best and most memorable work coming from a time when in most people's eyes Soutter was incapable of doing meaningful work. These are images that also tell us something about the body's limits, about the onset of osteoarthritis and how this destroys fine motor skills, but these are also images about that dark energy that pours forth out of the unconscious, about life and dancing and being still capable of leaving a mark on the world, even when it would seem that a meaningful life was over. 

See also:

Raw image making

Drawing and ceramics

Encountering sophisticated and direct art forms 

Yuksel Arslan

Magicians of the Earth

Barthélémy Toguo

The art of the banner

A John Midgley made banner

The artist John Midgley died recently, an artist who devoted much of his working life to designing and painting banners for the trade union movement and in particular for the various miners' unions. His death has reminded me of a long and powerful relationship between artists and working class political organisation. 

John Midgley banners made for the Durham Miners

John Midgley set up Chippenham Designs in 1970 and his company still continues to design and paint banners. His influence on the making of political statements remains and in many ways his approach to his work was I feel very similar to the way artists used to work for the church. We are so accustomed to the idea that artists work for gallery exhibitions, that sometimes it's useful to see an alternative tradition. The banner is often used to proclaim what is right; by walking the streets and carrying a sign, or putting a sign up over your place of work, (this could be a church or an art gallery, as well as a factory), you are making a powerful statement about your belief system. 

The baton of political protest was picked up by various feminist movements in the 1970s and perhaps the most well known of the artists who came to prominence at that time, who also used banners, was Judy Chicago. 

Judy Chicago: Drawing for a banner

Judy Chicago banners and woven banner making

Judy Chicago is very aware of the religious background out of which socialist banner making emerged and uses biblical text to make her own pronouncements. She also has some of her banners woven, an aspect of her overarching project of feminist awareness raising; in this case of society's association of women's work with craft and craft's difficult relationship with 'fine art'. A relationship that had seen a divide open up between two very different value systems; on the one hand 'men' being regarded as being 'genius' artists who belong to the avant-garde, while women being regarded as the craftspeople, who carry on traditional values. 

Both John Midgley and Judy Chicago were making their statements in the 1970s, Midgley in many ways working in a tradition that was fast disappearing, and Chicago being in the vanguard of a movement that was becoming more and more powerful. 

The banner continues to be an important communication vehicle,  it still fulfils its historic function, church parades continuing to take place with banners carried aloft. However banners can also be still be used to raise the profile of those who find themselves marginalised or dismissed by society as being unproductive or a problem. The Harris Galley's recent exhibition, 'The Unfurlings: Banners for Hope and Change', saw a collaboration between groups of people from across the UK working with artist Ian Beesley and poet Ian McMillan to create banners that were designed to be centre pieces around which a campaign for a better understanding of dementia could be built.

Hamari Yaadain: Banner

‘When we talk will you listen’ is an 'Unfurlings' banner created by ‘Hamari Yaadain’, a South Asian group based in Leeds. The banner asks us to listen, and to try and understand the concerns of people living with dementia. One of the symptoms of certain kinds of dementia can be the disturbance of speech, and the ability to speak a second language, something that has obviously had an effect on certain immigrant communities. The design is a collaborative venture, between the artist and the Hamari Yaadain group, which is typical of community art practice, the artist having to operate more as a facilitator than as an individual creator. This role is often undervalued, but as someone who has worked for many years supporting community art and community art education, I am very aware that the artistic skills involved in facilitating this type of work are just as powerful and involve perhaps a wider set of competences than what we might call traditional gallery art practices. 

Ian McMillan wrote a poem to accompany every banner, this poem was the one he wrote to support the Hamari Yaadain banner.  This collaborative venture giving the project a rich complexity in its realisation. I have not posted on community art practices before, but it should not be forgotten how drawing is still central to person to person communication and ideas development. Ian Beesley as the lead artist will have had to make a variety of drawings in order to both help design the banners and to show all the other collaborators how their various ideas could be made to fit in or in some cases he would have had to make drawings to show how one idea would work better than another. Drawing is for the community artist a key tool, often being used as the glue to hold everything together. 

'The Unfurlings: Banners for Hope and Change'

The banner still continues to be used to carry political messages, Cauleen Smith's 'I Cannot Be Fixed', or 'Leave me for the crows', are banners that have emerged from a practice that encompasses moving image, installation, textile, drawing, and performances that double as community gatherings. 

Cauleen Smith

It is perhaps in Smith's work that we see a more contemporary approach, the banner being one aspect of a multi faceted practice that attempts to embrace the viewer within an immersive environment designed to work across a wide range of sensibilities. This is not new, think of the banners hung in a church, they would be set alongside stained glass, sculpture, incense burning, candles and music. 

Cauleen Smith, Epistrophy, 2018, multichannel video, four CCTV cameras, four monitors, projection, custom wood table, stuffed raven, wood figures, bronze figures, plastic figures, books, seashells, minerals, jar of starfish, Magic 8-Ball, maneki-neko, mirror, metal trays, plaster objects, wood objects, wire object, fabric, glass vase and plants

If you want to see a banner being used as part of a multi-media environment you could look at Mel Brimfield's exhibition that is on at the Tetley in Leeds at the moment. 'From this world, to that which is to come', which is named after a quote from Pilgrim's Progress. The banner in this case being about collectivity and the need to unite in collective protection in times of stress and need. 

Mel Brimfield: Installation shot: The Tetley 2021

See also:

The frame and the banner

Drawing and politics

Drawing for site specific proposals

Drawing with stencils

Cave of the hands: Perito Moreno, Argentina

Stencils have been used for thousands of years to make images. In the cave painting above from 10,000 years ago in Argentina, the image maker was nearly always using his or her left hand as a stencil. As we look at this image, we begin to imagine a right handed human, spraying paint from a mouth full of pigment and saliva. This direct contact memory of hands on rock enables us to conjoin in our minds with early humans as they engaged in the image making of themselves. These are images of touch, of direct physical engagement with the rock surface, and it reminds us of how fleeting is the life of human beings and of how long in comparison is the life of a rock. It reminded me of those dinosaur footprint fossils, especially those of running tracks; preserved moments that are still as they were millions of years later. 

Fossilised dinosaur footprints

Today however we tend to associate stencilling with street art, Bansky seeming to have cornered the stencil market, at least in relation to a popular awareness, but stencilling is a way of working that has a long and interesting history, so its well worth investing time in exploring its potential and not being put off, simply because one artist seems to have made the technique his own.

Victorian stencil decoration

If you go to Harrogate spa baths for a traditional sauna and dip in the cold plunge pool, which many of us that live in Yorkshire used to do before COVID struck, you can as you recline after your sauna experience, gaze up at walls and ceilings covered in traditional Victorian stencil decoration. These decorations reflect the importance of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain at the time, 

From a 1910 stencil catalog by Sherwin Williams 

Both Charles Rennie Macintosh and William Morris used stencils, a technique which continued to be an important approach to surface decoration on through the 1920s and 30s in both Britain and Europe, in particular because the low tech approach was something most tradespeople could use when decorating both public buildings and a private house. However stencils weren't just for wall decoration. 

André Marty

George Valmier Pochoir technique

George Valmier Pochoir

André Marty and George Valmier were French artists that both used what was at the time called the 'Pochoir' technique, a stencilling technique that was very popular in Paris during the time of Art Deco. (1920s/30s) It was stencilling (sometimes combined with collotype) used as a very basic printing technique, but it has often been forgotten that it can produce very sophisticated results, both for making abstract and for figurative imagery. 

Here's a how to do it video.

Monoprint with stencils

The history of printmaking is very closely linked to the use of stencils, especially in combination techniques such as woodblock with stencils. 

15th century playing cards printed from a woodblock with a stencil used for the red colour

It is in Japan that we will find some of the most sophisticated uses of stencil techniques. Katazome is a stencil method used to make patterned fabrics. You apply a resist, usually made from a rice flour mixture, through stencils. Then the cloth is dyed and where the paste mixture covers and permeates the cloth, the dye will not penetrate.

Kimono detail cloth printed using Katazome as a stencil method

This process is essentially a silk-screen printing technique. The first known use of a screen printing technique was by the Polynesians, who would force ink through holes cut into banana leaves to make prints. However in Japan the process was developed into a very sophisticated art form. Katagami was an extension of the art of making paper stencils for dying textiles. The stencils were made by several sheets of washi paper being bonded with glue extracted from the persimmon fruit. This made for a strong, flexible, brown-coloured sheet, which could be finely cut out into patterns. These delicate pieces were then stabilised on a screen built from a fine silk mesh. Large swaths of fabric could then be printed by repeated moving of the screen and lining up the edges of the repeat pattern. 

Since that time of course silkscreen printing has become a standard printing process and stencils can be photographic as well as hand cut or painted. The University has a very good print facility which is well worth spending time with and getting to know several stencil techniques, not just screen printing. It was Andy Warhol that made silkscreen prints so familiar to us, but it's worth remembering that a lot of artist's screenprints look nothing like Warhol's and that it is a technique always ripe for re-invention. 

Jonathan Lawes: Screenprint

If you want to make your own stencils, the stencil material can be made from paper, mylar, thin plastic, or metal. However, if you do use Mylar sheets to make them, you will probably need a hot pen stencil cutter. The advantage in working with a stencil cutter is that you don't get those tiny nicks caused by craft knives when trying to cut sharp changes in direction.

A hot pen stencil cutter

Using a roller to apply the paint. 

The paint has to be of the correct consistency, not too thin or it will drip and run, but liquid enough to be rolled or dabbed evenly through the stencil holes. 

Stencil Brushes

Like every painterly craft stencilling has its own special brushes that come in different sizes. If you are using letter and number stencils in particular, you will find that it is so much easier to use stencil brushes than ordinary ones, because the long bristles of paint brushes push paint out under the edges of the stencils. However neatness isn't everything and Jasper Johns has worked with stencils of numbers and letters since the 1950s, using his orderly grids of stencilled forms to visually engage and play off against gestural brush strokes. In his case the paint sliding over and across stencil edges is part and parcel of the effect he is looking for.

Jasper Johns: Alphabet 1959

Jasper Johns: Numbers 1960

Christian Guémy (C215)

Bansky is not the only street artist to use stencils and Christian Guémy (C215) has been using them to make expressive close-up portraits of marginalised people for over twenty years. 

You might be thinking why am I bothering to spend time posting information about such a basic technique. Well besides the fact that most techniques are when you boil them down pretty basic, it's a reminder that so much of what we do comes out of an investigation of material possibility that has always been with us. In this case the making of a stencil and the application of a pigment. We sometimes need to dance with materials, to hold them close and move them around, so that between us we can find out the potential that can emerge from humans and bits of materials rubbing together for a few hours. The module first years are undertaking at the moment is centred on research, but people can get stuck in too much background reading or internet searches. Sometimes the research can be simply, what can I do with this material or this way of working? 

Spray diffuser

The first time I remember using stencils to make images was back on my pre-diploma course, but I used a spray diffuser to apply the paint with, which I see are still available for only £1.95. We used them mainly to spray our charcoal drawings with fixative in those days and I have noticed that a very cheap low tech option now being used is to buy children's felt tip pens with a spray attachment. Back then I was very interested in Pop Art, and I used spray techniques to make paintings based on the images you found on seed packets. I'm sure I would have played around with felt tip pens and these children's spray attachments, if they had been available then. 

Felt tip pen inserted into a simple hand pumped spray attachment

Avery Singer's paintings use masking tape and paper stencils and the paint is applied using spray. The spraying is done using spray pens or airbrushes rather than being spat out through the mouth. But the technique is basically exactly the same. She uses 'SketchUp' on her computer in order to work out her images, the very basic building blocks the software uses, being ideal for inventing scenes that have nice clean mainly straight edges, that can be transferred into stencil cut designs.

A 'SketchUp' idea being developed

Applying the paint through masking tape stencils

Avery Singer

If stuck play with some materials, go back to being a child in the sandpit and see what happens when you dig or push or scrape. It is only afterwards that you begin to find a story for what you have done and as you find that story it often goes into directions you never intended it to go into, but that's the great thing about open ended play, you don't know where you will find yourself, but that's exciting and if you are prepared to take the risk, it can be exhilarating. 

A couple of years ago the artist David Faithfull and fellow members of Edinburgh Printmakers set out to make a sustainable print out on the sands of the North Sea shore. Using a stencils made out of plastic bottles and a black ink mixture made up from squid ink and Scottish seaweed, they made one image using the black squid ink to mirror an oil slick and another image using stencils of the hundreds of plastic bottles found on the beach. 

David Faithfull 

The only materials used were those found on the beach, both natural and man made materials were regarded as possibilities, and then the tide came in a washed it all away. Sometimes you need to make things that only last for moments, but they can still mean something.

See also:

Lousie Despont: Drawing with templates

Avery Singer at work

Sustainability resources 

Drawing and printmaking

The Vignette

Edges

Shadow drawing