Drawing : 3D drawing

Showing posts with label 3D drawing. Show all posts

Saturday, 2 May 2020

Knots

Wendy Chien: detail of exhibition presentation

Wendy Chien decided to make a different knot every day for a year. In doing so she was able to explore the knot sub-group of formal possibilities; however if you were to look through the 'Ashley Book of Knots' you would soon become aware that as yet she had only just begun exploring them. Ashley took eleven years to compile the book and was able to document 3,900 different ones. For Chien tying knots became part of a meditative daily practice and their presentation format became an important aspect of the work.

Wendy Chien: knots in a typical exhibition configuration

Over the years I have seen knots used in a variety of ways by various art practitioners; performance artists, conceptual artists, sculptors and artists that draw have all found the humble knot at one time or another central to their practice.

The thing about knots is that they are really practical and can be used to tie lots of different things together in many different ways and for a wide variety of purposes. However because both humans and other creatures have been using them for so long, they have a complex body of mythology surrounding their use and therefore if you begin to use knots in your practice you will find that they bring with them a rich story telling heritage.

How to knot things together

More useful knots

These drawings of knots are themselves interesting, because the artist making the drawings would have to convert an idea of a three dimensional knot into two dimensions; and you can't tie a knot in a string in two dimensions. The issue about dimensions is about topology and as someone that works between two and three dimensions I'm immediately interested. This is where knot theory comes in and more than six billion knots and links have been tabulated since the beginnings of knot theory in the 19th century. Chien's 365 knots, now seeming totally insignificant when matched against the total number of possible knots that have been identified in the field of topological form.

Salvatore Ferragamo shoes: Marko Metzinger

Credit...

As soon as you begin thinking about them you find knots everywhere, from braided hair to shoelaces, from heraldic knots on family crests to the knots in the illuminations decorating “The Book of Kells.” There are knots of legend, like the Gordian knot that Alexander the Great sliced open with a swing of his sword. There are knots reputed to have magical properties, such as the knots tied by Laplander shamans in handkerchiefs, which, when loosed, could raise a powerful wind. In the Inca Empire, bureaucratic information, such as tax registers, calendars and military records, was stored using knots, on devices called quipu.

A quipu

A quipu is a particularly fascinating thing. On the one hand it operates as a positional ten-based numeric system that, instead of using written symbols, uses knots. On the other hand quipus could record a story in a similar way to a Vanuatu sand drawing or contemporary musical notation. The positioning of the knots representing important elements of a narrative that a performer would then bring to life. Echoes of similar practices are still evident locally in Yorkshire where each fishing village on the East coast would have its own 'Gansey' pullover design. Different combinations of motifs of nets, fish, ropes, herringbones, ladders, rope twists etc. were knitted into these fisherman's clothes, so that if drowned and picked up on the coast somewhere, you could identify where a man came from and elements of his life story could be extrapolated from the jumper he wore.

I really like the idea of a book chapter on lashings and slings

The sculptor Terry Hammill exhibited a very interesting piece using an old sling last year at the West Yorkshire Printmakers Gallery. The sling, which would have been given to soldiers, comes with various illustrations that demonstrate ways of using and tying it.

Terry Hammill: Sling

The two pages from the 'Ashley Book of Knots', show how sculptural knots are. They are the perfect synthesis between 2D and 3D, being two dimensionally linear, (most early perspective drawings were made by snapping taut chalked string lines on floors) and in three dimensions used to contain a mass, such as the elephant above, the ropes encasing of the form, also being a three dimensional representation of it, as in a cross contour drawing.

Christo: Wrapped jerry can

Artist's as diverse as Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Tehching Hsieh have all used ropes as important signifiers in their work. Hsieh for instance tied himself to fellow artist Linda Montano with a rope for an entire year, the rope suggesting in this case, what its like being tied to someone for life, a form of stoical endurance. Whilst in Christo and Jeanne-Claude's case familiar objects and landmarks acquire a new significance as they are covered and tied down.

Ope Lori: Alpha and Beta (2015)

Ope Lori uses the 'tug of war' metaphor to explore limits of gender and sexual difference, the rope both tying people together and operating as a way to test out dominance, every 'tug of war' enactment being in effect a theatrical power-play, whilst Dutch artist sandra de groot makes knotted, wearable macramé sculptures that reference armour and African headpieces.

sandra de groot

We can forget that crafts such as hair braiding, macramé and knitting are all part of the extended knot tradition. Shani Crowe straddling the worlds of hair braiding and fine art.

Shani Crowe

Knots are so ubiquitous that we forget they are there, but every time you tie your shoelaces first thing in the morning, you are engaging with their potency. Your own life line continues to wind its way out into the world and as it does so it weaves its way around people and things that you encounter, tying them all to yourself in ever complicated ways.

Sheila Hicks: Life Lines

Tuesday, 5 November 2019

The fine art of computer animation

Daniel Brown: On Growth and Form

I have posted before on D' Arcy Thompson's 'On Growth and Form'. But perhaps his real legacy is that he has provided a platform for digital artists to explore the possibilities of form implied by mathematical formulae.

Daniel Brown is known for his inventive and playful interactive animations. His series 'On Growth and Form' (2000–ongoing) uses mathematical formulas to generate various possibilities for the creation of blossoms that are inventions relying on mathematical ideas, rather than being abstractions from natural forms. These digital blossoms extend an idea of beauty into virtual reality. Brown is paralysed from the upper chest down and uses adaptive technologies to continue working, now in lines of code rather than with his hands. This animation uses real-time 3D (OpenGL / DirectX) flowers engine. If you go to Dundee you can see a D'Arcy Thompson museum and Brown's work is also shown there.

Geometry was usually an artist's entry into the world of mathematics, Uccello and Piero Della Francesca, being the early Renaissance artists normally referred to as being fascinated by geometric as much as by observed form and of course Leonardo had plenty to say on the subject.

Uccello: Perspective Study of Mazzocchio

Leonardo: Study of Mazzocchio

So as a student where would you begin? There are several entry level 3D programs, especially now that 3D printing is becoming more available. A good starting point is to see what's recommended as being the best option. This link won't work for long but there will always be some company wanting to get you started so just search for what's out there.

The problem comes when you want to move on and enter the world of animation. If you look at a CGI film you quickly realise how many different people have been involved. The ‘animation pipeline’, whereby concept, designs, storyboard, layouts, music, poses, and outline etc. have all been looked at as to how they fit together, is vital. Think of a factory, with various steps, often employing different people along the way, all having to be integrated if you are to make a product. Remember just one piece of software, such as Maya, has a huge learning curve and this is why so much animation is done in teams.

Again there are lots of 3D animation software recommendations out there as well as recommendations for stop motion software.

3dsMax

If you look at the screen for 3dsMax, its pretty obvious that 3D computer programmes still use the basic wire frame structures as drawn all those years ago by Leonardo and Uccello.

An earlier post did mention other starting points and covered a brief history of this area of drawing, but as the technology moves on so quickly that earlier post looks totally antiquated now. As an introduction, here are a few artists that I think are worth looking at, but do remember I am rather like a dinosaur when it comes to exploring this area of drawing and as you discover exciting people or approaches, it would be useful to get some feedback on what is happening out there.

Escape Pod: Jonathan Monaghan Video 20 min loop

I saw Jonathan Monaghan's 'Disco Beast' a couple of years ago and realised that he is very astute at playing with our boundaries as we travel between fantasy worlds and reality. My granddaughters are into unicorns, so he was obviously on the button there.

Still from 'Disco Beast'

The use of contemporary myths, like the commodification of the unicorn, allows him to deal with the absurd situations that are encountered when something that originates in ancient Greek natural history writing, becomes central to recent fantasy film making and finds itself as a brand that can be on anything from on line gaming to soap. A unicorn is also about purity and desire, and in some ways the early disco experience was about those things too, old ideas re-emerge within new technologies.

Katie Torn

'Breath Deep' by Katie Torn is a video that is well worth looking at because of the way it combines so many of the tropes of our present over cooked world. Katie Torn's work reminds me of Rachael Maclean's, colour soaked animations are embedded into integrated video footage, as virtual environments are built from the detritus of consumer culture.

Natural Plastic: Faiyaz Jafri

Faiyaz Jafri's 'Natural plastic' creates an environment in which nature and culture are fused into one. Plastic has obtained the ability to grow just like natural life and as it does it mimics the shapes and forms of the natural world. Whether it is people or vegetation, all have been overcome by digital processing, the boundaries between organic and inorganic dissolve and categories previously seen as distinct, such an animate and inanimate life now collapse into each other. The implications of AI are such that artificial intelligence is probably going to become recognised as a life form in the very near future.

It is interesting to compare Jafri's 'Natural plastic' with Daniel Brown's 'On Growth and Form', Jafri's work is still in many ways tied to traditional ideas of artist's narrative visualisation skills, even though it uses a lot of contemporary 3D animation software, while Brown's is more reliant on his computer coding skills, he is seeking to build an implication of a formal idea rather than make a narrative point. These differences though will I'm sure soon disappear. Coding will become more available to everyday users, probably as a mix and match selection procedure, whereby you will plug together bits of coding to get done what you want. Which is to a large extent what is already happening but without the ease of use.

David McLeod

David McLeod, is in many ways a much more traditional user of 3D animation software. He uses it to explore permutations of form, his carefully orchestrated animations demonstrating how one form can become another, or how what looks like one surface can gradually become something that belongs to something else. His work sitting somewhere conceptually between the work of Brown and Jafri.

I'm always happy to see artists in the flesh, they can hide behind their video animation projections and Archangel Constantini as well as dealing with computer animations, moves between computer hacking, performance and soundscape generation. He flits between the world of computers and an analogue presence very fluidly. For me he helps humanise the sometimes 'geekish' association we can have with computer generated artwork, his awkward presence sometimes appearing funny and at other times tragic.

Archangel Constantini

Archangel Constantini first came to our attention in the late 90s with his Karaoke style songs that accompanied animated gifs of what he called ìBarbasî (Ken) dancing. 'Barba' was a socio-critical project, dealing with identity issues, but it was also very funny and the computer generated aspects were just as important as the Karaoke. Probably most well known for his 'Atari Noise' work, he has more recently been getting involved with Magnetoplankton, another artificial construct, a speculate future that as always with Constantini, was already flawed with humanity.

Sunday, 29 September 2019

The evolution of an idea

I have a piece of work in an exhibition in Halifax at the moment. The exhibition, Temporal Terrains: an exhibition on wheels - is a Yorkshire Sculptors Group exhibition at Dean Clough and it lasts from 7 Sept to 6 Oct 2019 and like (im)Material Disarray is another fringe exhibition linked to the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019 festival. The piece is a complex one and I thought it might be interesting to look at how it evolved because I rarely show anyone the scrappy little drawings I do to work my way around a problem, but in many ways without them an idea would never get to fruition.

This is the piece I have in the exhibition.

‘How to move a plant in flower’ Garry Barker: A sculpture in three parts: 2019

Ceramic with metal, textile and wooden additions.

This was the short text written for the exhibition:

Plants are supposed to be fixed to the soil, but in a post-truth age where nothing is as it was or as it ought to be, the distinction between plants and animals begins to break down. Therefore plants will move and as they do they will take on the characteristics of animals. A selection of a small group of hybrid creatures that totter on the brink of self-discovery, as they ask themselves, “are we animal, vegetable or mineral?”

I belong to the Yorkshire Sculpture Group and they often set particular challenges to group members; challenges designed to ensure we don't get too complacent in our approaches to art making. I enjoy these responses but don't engage with all of them because I also need to keep focused on the issues I'm mainly concerned with, but this particular challenge did intrigue me.

In particular I had been reading and thinking a lot about how as humans we have privileged ourselves in such a way that other things were ignored or simply seen as resources for humans to use. I had therefore set myself a task to try and make work that in different ways gave agency to non-human things. Such as allowing materials to work in dialogue with myself and trying not to force them to do my bidding, or to use recycling more (as in the (im)Material Disarray work), or to open my conversations out to include non-humans and to try and act as if my role as an artist was more like a conduit between things, or someone that revealed the interconnectedness between everything. Because sculptures had to be on wheels for this exhibition I thought this an ideal opportunity to test out some ideas related to the removing of distinctions between animal, vegetable and mineral categorisations.

These are some studio shots taken when the sculpture was nearing completion.

Flower heads develop animal tongues

A fleshy ceramic (mineral) flower emerges from a wooden branch

There is nearly always some book research that bears fruition in terms of ideas development and in this case it was an image I came across in a Medieval book of herbal remedies. The way the roots were drawn looked to me as if they were turning into bear's claws and it reinforced the concept of plants and animals being both things that moved. It is just that they have different time frames.

Nightshade from a Medieval book of herbal remedies

I had already been making ceramic plants for an exhibition in Patching in Nottingham and had devised a system of stems made from ceramic exteriors with steel rod centres. I had made lots of these as test pieces so I could continue to play with them and see if there were other possibilities.

This was where drawing came back in.

Ideas for bases

The 'flower' sculptures for Patching had rods that went straight down into the ground, a solution that would be impractical for what I needed, so I began to think about other forms and how these could perhaps sit on a flat base and be screwed into place.

Ideas for 'bone stems'

As I was thinking about the way stems fitted bases I realised that if a plant was to become an animal its stems would have to be more like bones, so I began to look at the green stems becoming white.

First animal head ideas

The stems needed flowers and the first ideas were simple animal head flowers, which as you can see were far too uninventive and a poor fit.

As always when stuck for an idea I tend to return to objective drawing and feed my ideas with what nature invents.

Plant heads drawn from life

There is something already animal like in plant heads (the fact we call them flower-heads indicates the connection).

Bird flower

The bird head idea was then morphed with the flower drawing, it was better but still not right.

I then returned to thinking about bases again.

Rabbit base

Ungainly and too much like rabbit, but it was a germ of an idea. I liked the feet if nothing else.

A badly remembered Renaissance idea

The next drawing tried to morph several ideas of animal forms together and was based on something I had seen before.

Simplified version of above

Ceramic version of the drawing above, mounted on a wooden base with wheels attached.

In a simplified form it worked much better, but was now a bit boring, so I persisted.

Slug base

The slug base

It seemed to me that the slug was a creature between animal and plant forms, (remember I'm an artist and can just decide on any form an invented life might take) I now had several ideas I could take into making and so I made about six or seven variations of these bases and began to test them out in the studio. But I soon came up with a problem and this was how to get everything moveable.

Idea for a cabinet in wheels

The first idea was to deconstruct an old piece of furniture and put all of my ceramic ideas into it, cutting holes for the plants to grow through. I went so far as to make the cabinet by reconfiguring a piece of furniture I took from my bedroom, but it just didn't work. However one of the heads I had come up with interested me and you can see its form in the final piece. I decided to use the idea of cutting holes through things in another exhibition, yet to be realised but coming up in October.

I had been out walking and brought home with me some branches from a tree that had been recently cut down. There was something about the way the branching worked that gave me a clue how to embed the interconnection into the base construction.

Thoughts about branches on wheels

I began to see in my head an idea of wheels being attached to the branches and then I could perhaps put rods into them to 'grow' the stems directly upwards as if they were simply further 'growths'.

But this was far too unstable, and I added an extra branch.

My attention begins to return to bases that can then be attached to wood

Final idea of wooden bases with wheels attached, screwed into the branches.

Eventually with lots of trial and error I made wooden bases for the ceramic bases and then attached the wheels directly to these, rather than to the branches.

However it was this sketchbook drawing below of a related idea that really helped the concept come to fruition. A ghost of a human confronts a bird and a plant, in a scene that could be from anywhere.

Animal and vegetable actors playing out a scene

I have missed out lots of other drawings of plants with tongues and other bases but hopefully you get the idea of how I use drawing to think through an idea. The textile hanging from the head of the 'Jar Jar Binks' type creature was printed by Spoonflower a company I have used for a lot of my textile designs.

Design for headscarf

I had made several drawings of men attempting to climb ladders and these were based on ideas coming from reading about Raymond Lull and the ladders of his art. In these minerals are on the bottom rung and God at the top. Humans are above plants and animals, but not quite at the level of angels. My idea was to have a human endlessly trying to climb upwards but getting nowhere. We are at a quantum scale at the same level as minerals, animals and plants and that is something to be celebrated rather than dismissed. The work was about the interconnectedness of everything and so was meant to appear complex.

So what looks like a pretty confusing mess of a sculpture, (well it does when you photograph it), does have quite a lot of thinking behind it. This is perhaps my greatest problem, I don't think through the lens. This is because I'm someone trained to draw rather than work from photographs and also I forget to try the ideas out as potential photographic images. I still spend a lot of time walking around my sculptures as we were told to do as students. As I do so I try to look for those awkward areas which just don't seem to allow the eye to move on and connect with something else. I strongly believe that the best sculptures make you want to walk around them.

References

Nightshade from a Medieval book of herbal remedies is from Plant Series, No. 1. Manuscript MS408. Portfolio 2 by Gerard E. Cheshire

The 'Jar Jar Binks' Star Wars character first appeared in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. I wasn't thinking of it, but once the head was made lots of people began remarking on how similar the creature with the textile hanging from its head was to the Star Wars character. I quite liked this, it seemed to connect me to all those other artists that have tried to invent creatures by mixing various animal and plant forms.

First version of the 'Binks' head

All those early years of reading comic books has something to do with how my imagination works too. The character 'Metamorpho' able to take on the characteristics of any mineral element being a particularly memorable well of ideas.