Klara Kristalova: Ceramics and drawings

Exhibition display of Klara Kristalova's 2D work

I first came across Klara Kristalova's work in Copenhagen at the Gammel Strand gallery. Sue and I had decided to have a short break back in I think 2017 and entering the gallery was an unexpected pleasure, in particular in relation to how Kristalova's work was displayed. Her 2D ideas were shown alongside her ceramics, in such as way that the drawings didn't seem secondary to the 3D making, they both held their own space and the narrative impact was very strong, as there were a lot of ideas all being shown at once. The gallery space in effect became Kristalova's world. I liked that and I felt an immediate affinity with her way of working. 

Portrait of a young girl

Horse girl at night

Summer breeze

I like the way that an image of hair being blown over a face, as in 'Summer breeze' can be made to feel as if the head is suffering an attack from some alien creature. By simply thickening the strands of hair, they become octopus like tentacles. 

Exhibition display of Klara Kristalova's ceramic work

The black painted wooden structure above which she used to show a range of ceramic figures in the Gammel Strand gallery, was just one of several approaches she has taken to presenting her work.

Strange Clay

Her work in 'Strange Clay' inhabited an artificial landscape, as if creatures from a fairy tale were becoming 'real', whilst in another exhibitions she has used a cabinet to house her work and tables and chairs as surfaces for both display and interaction with her ceramic figures.

Cabinet display 

Each approach suggests a slightly different reading of her work and this is something I realise I need to explore myself. In particular I want to be able to exhibit my ceramics alongside my drawings, in such a way that they support each other. Lighting is also very important and by putting lighting into the cabinet above, her work is intensified and given a relic like aura. 

The sleep of dreams: A response to Goya

Woman / Bat hybrid

I'm drawn to hybrid forms, so the woman / bat image above, like so many of Kristalova's images, intrigues me. The clay holds the image, but in its very malleability, it also suggests that this is but one moment in a series of changes that the figure is making. You may feel that the days of the fairy tale are over, but I beg to differ, and would suggest that the more we head into uncertain times, the more we will need new tales and fables, both as an escape from reality and as a way to develop new stories, designed to tell allegories and parables, that might at some point, help us to find ourselves again. 

See also:

Drawing into installation

False starts exhibition

Drawing and ceramics

Hybridity and permeability 

Artist as visionary

John Craxton and Jake Grewal

Too much to say: Jake Grewal

I recently saw the John Craxton exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and after spending some time with his work, moved on and found hosted within their more permanent collection some of Jake Grewal's charcoal drawings, that he had on exhibition alongside a few of his paintings. Craxton was born in 1922 and yet his work feels as if it still has resonance, especially when you put it alongside the work of an artist born in 1994.

Some days I feel more alive: Jake Grewal

Jake Grewal’s drawn landscapes include naked men, figures that you might need to spend time finding, as they are often hard to see clearly, because they are deeply set into the smoky grit of his charcoal marks.  He is obviously influenced by British Neo-Romantic artists, such as Caxton and Keith Vaughan and often works outside, which is perhaps why the drawings feel as if they are still in touch with nature.

For myself it was the issue of how we can be in touch with nature that I was most interested in. Both Caxton and Grewal are gay and I had the feeling that they were both drawn to the idea that in a natural state, conventions such as a male/female cultural divide could disappear. In Craxton's case the human presence is amalgamated with and locked into the forms of landscape by his particular use of pen, ink and wash, whilst for Grewal it is the charcoal that allows him to bring his figures into the same world as his landscapes. This is the magic of materials and how they are worked. By placing an idea into a material form, that idea becomes materialised and in that very materialisation it transcends the human and becomes a thing. The human becomes an ink thing or a charcoal thing and in becoming these new forms, is released from the conventions that bind real people. 

Craxton: Poet in a landscape

Craxton: Dreamer in landscape

The need to dissolve ourselves in nature is an old one, and it is Albrecht Altdorfer’s ‘Saint George and the Dragon’ that for myself epitomises this need. 

Albrecht Altdorfer: ‘Saint George and the Dragon.’ 1510

St George and the rather small dragon are really a pretext for the painting's real subject which is the magic of the wood and wonder of the lush but wild landscape. There is an arcane atmosphere whereby we understand that human deeds, even mythic actions such as Saint George overcoming the Dragon, are all subordinate to the power of nature. 

How we find a way of working that reflects a personal understanding of our place in the universe is important, and in this case it helps me to think about how to relativise the human nature divide and how to give nature its proper weight and importance in relation to human endeavours.  

See also:

Object orientated ontology and drawing

In praise of the dandelion

A drawing of beaked hawks beard

Drawing plants

Drawing and sexual politics

Simon English: Taking the rough with the smooth

Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood

Claudette Johnson: Afterbirth, 1990, pastel on paper, 118 x 83 cm

I was in Bristol recently and went to see the Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood exhibition at the Arnolfini. It finishes on the 26th of May, so there is little time to get to see it, but still worth I think a review as it raises several issues that are still very pertinent to contemporary art practice.

The exhibition sets out to balance our view of how motherhood has been portrayed in art, the introduction to the exhibition stating; 

'While the Madonna and Child is one of the great subjects of European art, we rarely see art about motherhood as a lived experience, in all its complexity. Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will address this blind spot in art history, asserting the artist mother as an important – if rarely visible – cultural figure'. Featuring the work of more than sixty modern and contemporary artists, this exhibition will approach motherhood as a creative enterprise, albeit one at times tempered by ambivalence, exhaustion or grief. Acts of Creation will explore lived experience of motherhood, offering a complex account that engages with contemporary concerns about gender, caregiving and reproductive rights. The exhibition will address diverse experiences of motherhood across three themes: Creation, which looks at conception, pregnancy, birth and nursing; Maintenance which explores motherhood and caregiving in the day-to-day; and Loss, which touches on miscarriage and involuntary childlessness, as well as reproductive rights. The heart of the exhibition is a series of revelatory self-portraits – a celebration of the artist as mother. 

I went to the exhibition with my partner and one of our daughters, so it was interesting to get their opinions as well as my own drawing focused reflections. 

"Has it taken all these years?" was my partner's comment, as she had worked with several of the artists on exhibition back in the 1980s and was remembering how few galleries at the time, except for the ICA, would show this type of work. A necessary rebalancing I therefore thought, but her point was that it is now all too safe and easy to show work of this sort after the event. 

My focus, as usual with most exhibitions I travel to, was on the artists who use drawing. This blog is supposed to be about contemporary drawing and I have perhaps stretched the definition at times, but it still seems to make sense to have this particular focus, if for no other reason that my own art practice is drawing led. 

I have put an image by Claudette Johnson at the top of this post, mainly because she is able to transcend what could be an old and tired genre, 'the life model', and turn it back into what it should always be about, an honest confrontation with a naked, human being. The drawing 'Afterbirth' is a straightforward drawing, using pastel to communicate the softness, but also strength of a woman's body. She is proud of what she has achieved and looks us directly in the face and makes no apologies for presenting herself 'afterbirth'. I really liked this drawing, as it seemed to me to involve very little artifice, 'what you see is what you get' and what you get is a mature woman, who is happy to be in her own skin and who makes us aware that she takes her space comfortably. 

Paula Rego: From the Abortion series

This drawing is in stark contrast to the printed images from Paula Rego's Abortion series. Her women are also weighty and substantial, but they are also suffering. Theirs is an internalised pain, a mental trauma as much as a physical one. There is little pride here, society has been something that they have had to cope with and endure. 

Bobby Baker Timed Drawings 1983/4

Images of Bobby Baker's sketchbooks were on display. A wall mounted computer screen allowed you to make your way through her sketchbook in a very simple but effective way. As a sketchbook user myself, I must investigate how this was done.You could scroll through the images easily and for once technology didn't seem to get in the way. These 'Timed drawings' were done in those moments of quiet that occasionally pop up when you are having to devote most of your time to looking after small children. All you need is a sketchbook and a few drawing materials to begin to record the features of your everyday existence. The drawings are so different to any collections of photographs I've seen, because they have to focus down on what is most important, a photograph can select out a composition from the world, but cannot edit out and add in, in the various ways that a drawing can. The intimate nature of a sketchbook, really suited these private moments of reflection. 

Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas had been working with one of her children. These larger than life portraits are covered in 'additions', such as a child's handprints. They reminded me of the time when my children were young and how they used to add additions to my own work. The image of the making of paper face masks in the bath, was added to and embellished by both of them. 

Bath masks

My daughter made the small red drawings that sit in the curtains and my very young son simply, but effectively, added a few marks beneath the taps, so that there would now always be running water. I have several sketchbooks from the 1980s, where both my children become involved. I often used to include things in my drawings then that reflected my life as a young parent, I was still trying as always to work out what I should be making art about, and as the children were about, it just seemed natural to include them.

Toy monkey in the bath

The toy monkey in the bath is another drawing from that time, made using Crayola wax crayons, which were at that time seen as drawing materials for children. I was trying to see how intensely I could build surfaces and an emotional engagement with them.  These were A1 sized drawings, with often tiny inserts, such as the bananas drawn by my daughter. Not long after these drawings were made my mother was diagnosed as being terminally ill and my domestic life now included trips down to the West Midlands every weekend to visit her. She still smoked and watched the TV all day. I tried to use the same Crayola crayons to deal with my feelings about her and the situation. She collected ceramics, including the rustic head sat on top of the TV. It seemed to mourn her passing, a life that was being switched of just like the end of the programmes she used to watch. 

At the time I was very influenced by the rise of feminist art practices and the fact that day to day domestic events could become the focus around which an art practice could be built. Looking back, this work still seems to have relevance, and in a time of gender fluidity, a man making work that was about the home back in the 1980s, sort of makes more sense as an 'act of creation'. But back to the exhibition.

Mary Kelly: Post-Partum Document. 

The postpartum period in medical terms begins after childbirth and is typically considered to last for six weeks. There are three distinct phases of the postnatal period; the acute phase, lasting for six to twelve hours after birth; the subacute phase, lasting six weeks; and the delayed phase, lasting up to six months. Probably the most famous mother/child collaborative piece of work from the 1970s is Mary Kelly's, 'Post-Partum Document'. In Kelly's work she takes ownership of what a Post-Partum document is and in particular de-medicalises it and brings the documentation into the fold of art practice. Very radical at the time, (1973) it still feels fresh and for myself, I now read it as a type of Rosetta stone, whereby the dumb people of the art world are shown engraved tablets that translate for them the work that a mother has to do, if her child is to flourish. Like the Rosetta Stone, Kelly's engraved slate fragments were split into three parts. The top records her child's marks, the middle a personal reflection of Kelly's on how her child is doing and the bottom section a more technical documentation. 

The Rosetta Stone

It is hard to escape history. The most famous image of mothers and their children in the National Gallery in London, being Leonardo's 'The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist'. The two women appear to be very close, physically and mentally, forming a collective mass, out of which emerge the children. It suggests to me the solidarity women feel in their collective motherhood and like Claudette Johnson's portrait, these women have a gravitas and weight that gives them an authenticity. I feel that Leonardo witnessed this, or at least a significant element of the composition, and this is why it feels so 'in the now' and not a dead fragment from the archives.

Leonardo da Vinci

See also:

A tall order

Sexual politics

Wax crayons and oil pastels 

Documentation and drawing practices

Feldman's model of art criticism

Vanessa Baird

Children's drawings in an adult world

Collaboration and copying

A Braarudosphaera bigelowii cell, with a black arrow showing its nitrogen-fixing organelle

Tyler Coale, University of California, Santa Cruz

Two of the strands that this blog tries to weave in and out of its fabric are collaboration and copying. Sometimes as a way to develop new drawing ideas in responses to experiences in collaboration with another artist, and at other times as a reminder that we cant really exist without operating in collaboration with the environment that surrounds us. Our very existence depends on collaboration. Not only our day to day survival in relation to a symbiological relationship with the world around us, but in a deep sense, related to the way that life itself has evolved and how it reproduces. I was reminded of this when I read recently that a bacterium that used to exist on its own has evolved into a new cellular structure that provides nitrogen to algal cells. At a cellular level it is quite common for one species of bacteria to live inside the cells of another species. I have mentioned before that humans could be thought of as hosts for bacteria, as there can be more body mass attributed to them, as opposed to what you might call us. This is a situation that exists throughout the natural world, for instance, cells in the roots of peas host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and cockroaches host endosymbiotic bacteria that provide them with essential nutrients. 

The evolutionary history of these collaborations can be explained using endosymbiotic theory or symbiogenesis, a theory that argues that bacteria began living in eukaryotic organisms after being engulfed by them, indeed the two major types of sub-cellular structures found in eukaryotic cells, (cells with a membrane-bound nucleus) are mitochondria and plastids, both of which evolved from bacterial endosymbionts. As all animals, plants, fungi, and many unicellular organisms are eukaryotes, this places symbiogenesis at the root of life's evolutionary history. 

At a cellular level gradually complexity is arrived at by cooperative collaboration

The fact that new mitochondria and plastids are formed only by splitting in two, supports the idea that it was in the coming together of different elements that basic life forms were created. This splitting is called fission and it is interesting to think how this is done and how the concept of copying lies firmly at the core of how life survives in the forms that it does.

Stage 1: The bacterium before binary fission has the DNA tightly coiled. Stage 2: The DNA of the bacterium begins to uncoil and has replicated. Stage 3: The DNA is pulled to the separate poles of the bacterium as it increases size to prepare for splitting. Stage 4: The growth of a new cell wall begins the separation of the bacterium. Stage 5: The new cell wall fully develops, resulting in the complete split of the bacterium. Stage 6: The new daughter cells have tightly coiled up their DNA.

A merger of an archaean and an aerobic bacterium created the eukaryotes; a second merger created chloroplasts which were the ancestors of green plants

The complexity now associated with these processes has evolved over millions of years and this evolution has determined that cells work in amazingly sophisticated ways within our bodies. Indeed there are what are called somatic-junctions, where cellular quality control is developed, as signals are passed between cells in order to develop bodily responses to the changes that it experiences as it passes through life.

A somatic junction that is sending operating signals to the muscles

These invisible processes are vital to our existence and in many ways they mirror the way that life can be led on a day to day basis. Cooperation is vital, a symbiotic understanding of the totality of life is essential if we are to survive. Therefore I am trying to develop more and more cooperative aspects to the way that I try to operate as an artist and human being. 

I value the input of other people much more now than I used to as a young man. But not just other people; 'others', is a term that can include all animal, vegetable or mineral existences. 

Landscape with interoceptually aware body beneath

As I continue to make images, the more that I can give form to the various stories that weave themselves in and out of bodies, landscapes, inner visions, outer limits and the psychic manifold that seems to envelop everything, the more I feel that there is some use in this business of making art and perhaps it's now time to return to printmaking, (I'm currently working on the image directly above as a silkscreen print). Print was my first discipline and composed the craft element of my DipAD and it was the technical area I was responsible for during the early years of my teaching career on the Foundation Course at the then Jacob Kramer College in Leeds. Printmaking and its processes are deeply embedded into metaphor, the notion of the copy in particular is central to the process, as well as concepts such as type and token, reproduction and impression. I was always fascinated by the myths surrounding the story of Alois Senefelder's discovery of lithography. The capturing of an image in stone and the use of grease to hold that image and then its release from the stone by a process that relied on a layer of water that sat on the unmarked, un-greasy surface, was as much a story of fossilisation as printmaking. There was something deeply meaningful about stones being able to both absorb images and then be used to reproduce them.

The dead horse arum lily is an amazing mimic. It copies the attributes of dead meat, so that carrion seeking blow flies are attracted to it. Not only does it produce an offensive odour of rotting flesh, it can raise its temperature, so that a fly will think it is landing on a recently dead animal. The odour it produces is a strong, putrid smell, very like a real carcass, this coupled with its flesh-coloured hairy flowerhead, make the plant irresistible to the flies.

Dead horse arum lily

This 'non-thinking' creature has developed a copy of the 'real-world' far more realistic than most of our human efforts at copying nature. The drawing above, pales in significance as an imitative idea in comparison to this lily's mimicking ability. As a communicative sign that works as a cross species example of bio-semiotics, it is wonderful, and it does, I think, ask questions as to how clever we are as a sign making species.

Of course we can manufacture artificial scents, sounds and tastes as well as make visual objects that act as copies of other things, and we have stories about how good great artists are as copyists, the artist Parrhasius was supposed to have painted a curtain that looked so real that his rival Zeuxis tried to pull it back. However who or what determines the need for copying in the first place. Is it a conscious decision made by humans, or is it a natural evolutionary process, as much organised by bacterial necessity as by conscious thought? 

A ceramic flower based on a dead horse arum lily

Mimesis is the academic term for copying, but it suggests a more reflective understanding, and it is not just about copying. It is a concept that suggests that we model our understanding of what is, on perceptions or experiences of what we think of as the real world, i. e. we need to make models of experience, in order to grasp the essence of what we are experiencing. These models are in effect 'copies'. When we try to communicate our understandings we have of experiences, we use the models as some form of shorthand and this, not only helps us communicate with others, the models also allow us to reflect back on the way we have in turn shaped communications. The concept of mimesis therefore operates in the gaps between the experience of reality, its communication through copying or modelling and reflection upon the process. In making a drawing or object that ‘looks like something else’, we are therefore operating at a deep level of meaning making.

References:

Latorre, A.; Durban, A.; Moya, A.; Pereto, J. (2011). The role of symbiosis in eukaryotic evolution In Gargaud, M.; López-Garcìa, P.; Martin, H. (eds.). Origins and Evolution of Life: An astrobiological perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 326–339

Schwartz, H., (1996) The culture of the copy: Striking likenesses, unreasonable facsimiles. Princeton University Press

See also:

Collaborative drawing

Drawing dialogue symposium talk

Drawing as entanglements of life

Hybridity and permeability 

Quantum entanglement

Printmaking

Mimesis

William Blake at the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge

Casper David Friedrich: Sea at sunrise

William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge is a wonderful exhibition, so good that I had to spend two days in Cambridge, so that I could go back and look twice. The quality and range of the images is extraordinary and it is not just Blake's work that you need to see. For instance there are images by Casper David Friedrich, that reminded me that it is possible to create landscapes that glow with mystic spirituality, such as 'Sea at sunrise', images that need to be seen in the flesh if you really want to get an idea of their intensity. The issue about 'Sea at sunrise' being that the image is stripped down to almost nothing, except the play of light as it vibrates through the air and dances on water. Light of course in Friedrich's case, being a metaphor for the constant presence of God, but for myself a reminder that the Sun is the shaper of all life on Earth, and that life originated in the sun energy charged chemical soup that we call the sea.

I was also fascinated by the diagrammatic work of Jakob Böhme. Some of the plates illustrating his ideas were printed onto layers, so that flaps could be lifted and you could see underneath. 

The Third Table

As soon as I began researching Böhme, I found a theosophical hermetic illustration of the fiery soul. The soul is, according to Böhme, in 'its natural condition' when burning. When the heart is represented upside down, it is immersed in the fire of anger. However, through the sacrament of baptism, the soul receives the fire of love and anger is transformed into love. I was very interested in this, as I'm working on how to visualise emotions, and it seems to me that they can migrate, and as they do, I begin to see affinities between them, anger being very close to love, the one often being triggered by feelings instigated by the other. His diagrams reminded me that we haven't really moved on that much further since then, an article from the Dark Energy Institute about how the Quantum of the Void compares to the Quantum of the Physical Universe, when diagrammed, would I suspect look very like one of Böhme's ideas. 

The fiery soul 

As well as being introduced to some things I hadn't come across before, perhaps it was the 'intensity' of people's visions that I was most impressed with in this exhibition, all of the works and artists represented, managed to communicate a total commitment to some sort of psychic command of visual language. Blake is of course the most well known of the artists in England and his influence on Samuel Palmer, who is also represented in this exhibition, was clear to see, but it is the chance to see a collection of Blake's images, exhibited in sequences that has the most powerful effect. I was soon wondering, because of the sequential nature of his art, how he would have responded to the comic book tradition, would he have been a sort of mystic Robert Crumb?

Robert Crumb: Genesis

Thoughts of this type still emerge from my brain, as it was shaped like so many children of the 1950s by having to go to Sunday School for most of our formative years. Therefore the Bible, whether or not we eventually decided to be atheists, would loom large in our creative imaginations. No matter how hard I try to intellectually move beyond notions such as 'good' and 'evil', an all seeing God and a Saviour who died for us all, my neurological wiring from those experiences, is still in place. 

William Blake: America

I had not seen all of Blake's work in the flesh and in particular had not seen a collection of prints from his 'America' plates before. After looking at them and thinking about how intense the images were and how much could be achieved within such a small surface area, I was fired up to get back to making some prints of my own, this time to perhaps use the new Risographic machine that has just been installed in the university. Good exhibitions always excite me to make more work of my own, they remind me of how wonderful art can be and of how it doesn't seem to go out of date. What Blake was trying to communicate, seemed to me to be as powerful as anything done today and it hit home, right to the heart; but not only Blake, other artists from the same era who had also been selected for this exhibition such as Philipp Otto Runge, all of whom were trying to find visual metaphors for a difficult time of revolution and changing social order. 

Philipp Otto Runge

Philipp Otto Runge

I thought Blake stood up very well in comparison to his European counterparts, in particular I thought his visual language was more expressive, especially in the way he pushed the human body into dramatic shapes and positions designed to heighten the body's expressive potential. The exhibition also includes some of Blake's classic images, as well as others I was not so familiar with, such as his satirical portrait of the Pope.

William Blake: Albion’s Angel Rose from Europe: A Prophecy

Blake: The Dance of Albion

The exhibition is open until the 19th of May 2024, so if at all interested do find time to get down and see it before it closes. 

See also:

Crosshatching as energy carrier

Diagrams from Dante

The Quantum of the Void compared to the Quantum of the Physical Universe

Fuseli and the modern woman