Shadow drawing

When we were children we all at one time or another tried out shadow drawing. I've reflected on several issues associated with this activity a few times already, but perhaps not quite got down to the essence as to why this way of drawing is so magical.

How to create shadow creatures

There is a wonderful moment when you put your hands together and begin making shapes in front of a direct light source, a moment when the shadow formed begins to look like the creature you had in your head. Hands become a bird flying or a dog's head or a rabbit, but at the same time, the shadow belongs to you. It is an extension of yourself that stretches out into the world, the shadow is both of you and something that you are trying to represent.
Some time ago I wrote and illustrated a short story, whereby a creature tried to cut away its shadow. It is a common story often about someone who tries to escape their dark side, or their subconscious selves, usually with disastrous consequences. Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow." and 'The Fisherman and His Soul' by Oscar Wilde are typical examples.

Reattaching a Shadow, Peter Pan, Disney Studios, 1953

I first came across the idea as a boy on going to see Peter Pan; Disney's animated film enchanted me and after rewatching after many years, it still does.

The shadow has always fascinated me as someone who draws, because it is mythically part of drawing's history, as well as giving us physical information, such as where light is coming from, shadows can be used to construct a psychological context. Whenever we see shadows we “read” them and their very ambiguity can add drama or existential weight to the situation.

Rembrandt: Self portrait

By casting most of his face in shadow, Rembrandt suggests that he possesses a deeply complex personality, one that is hard to read, but powerful in its very ambiguity.

William Collins "Rustic Civility"

William Collins' painting "Rustic Civility", portrays the landowner only by the shadow he casts, suggesting that land ownership, casts a shadow over all who live on lands that are owned by others.

The cast shadows of tall buildings

When walking in the street we are very aware of the shadows cast by tall buildings, and feel cold as the sun is blocked from our view. If something is large enough to cast its shadow over us we can feel dominated or dwarfed by the presence of something so much bigger than ourselves. Conversely Lin Yutang stated, "When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set"; an aphorism that seems very apt at the moment. In fact the dictionary definition of to cast a shadow over something is "to spoil a good situation with something unpleasant".

I pointed out earlier that shadows are interwoven with the mythic history of drawing itself. Image making according to Pliny, began with tracing an outline around a man’s shadow. This act was to lead eventually to the art of painting. He goes on to then describe how three dimensional modelling began and he states that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter. Pliny states that Butades invented this new art so that his daughter could remember the face of her lover, who was about to set off on a long journey. He drew in outline on the wall next to him the shadow of his daughter's lover. Then he carefully pressed clay around the interior of this outline and made it into a relief.  The emotive nature of the situation is embedded in that first shadow drawing, the painful moment of a lover’s departure is located in an image that sits between love and loss. Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts, attached to the shadow from its very inception as an aid to drawing.   

Victor Stoichita in 'A Short History of the Shadow', points out the symbolic connection between “shadow, soul and a person’s double.” and goes on to state that ”this would indicate that the result of the collaboration between the potter and his daughter was the symbolic creation of a ‘living’ double, a surrogate figure difficult to understand without visualising the ritual actions we exert over it.” (The portrait was eventually taken to a temple and put on display there.)

Joseph-Benoît Suvée would make a painting of Pliny's thoughts about the invention of painting, this time though it is Butades' daughter tracing around the shadow of her loved one.

Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Butades or the Origin of Painting, 1791.

What this tracing around shadows is doing though is to create surrogates of real things and this creates a particular situation, whereby copies of reality start to become more substantial than reality itself. Butades' daughter's lover may be lost at sea, but his portrait could be seen for many years afterwards hanging in the temple. This situation is further complicated when we look at Plato's shadow metaphor. In his metaphor of the cave, he points out that we never actually see reality, only shadows of it. We are therefore forgetful of what reality is, and can confuse the real with the virtual, and in doing so we lead shadow lives of illusion. 

The image of how to create shadow creatures that I used to open this post, reminded me of how ancient and deep rooted is our relationship with other animals. Shamanic traditions include the harnessing of animal spirits as guides or messengers, and the shadow forms of animals, cast by humans are easily made by the light of a fire at night in a cave. Moving human shadows when seen alongside and cast over the top of some of the earliest painted images of animals, must have seemed as if they were interacting with those images, as well it seeming that forms were morphing from human to animal. I can still remember when I was a small child my grandfather making shadow creatures, and how magical the transformation of hands into animals seemed. I suspect there were artist shadow makers in neolithic times, who were very adept at casting the shadow forms of various animals and humans in iconic poses, onto the walls of caves. If only I could have been a fly on the wall and could watch, as they acted out ancient mythic scenarios in their shadow play.

As I weave these various threads together, it becomes clear that shadows are deeply significant and in their very insubstantiality in comparison to the things that they are cast from, they become like ghosts or spirits. Perhaps they gave to human beings their first way of visualising such things, after all, the dead can still cast a shadow and as the earth moves around the sun, that shadow will continue to move, even though the body will lie still. 

Sometimes shadows don't look like what casts them. The drawing above being a playful account of what was at one time a grudge match. 

Sometimes an image is itself meant to exist as a  shadow or ghost, the one below of my father mowing, was made in response to him dying of a stroke as he cut the lawn. He has always been able to cast a shadow in the form of a presence often felt in times of stress or difficulty, his critical gaze still falling on me as a long dark shadow, even as I type these words. 

Ghost mower

Shadows and related phenomena remind us of the uncanny and a world of 'the other', but being so 'everyday', they also remind us of the fact that these things are always with us. 

Reference:

Victor Stoichita (1997) A Short History of the Shadow London: Reaktion Books

See also:

Arvak  A short story

Shadows and the magic of transformation

Articulated collage and shadow play

Tone and emotional value

The vignette

Images as ghosts

Katja Heitmann and Embodied Memory

Notebook page: The movement archivist trying to retrieve someone.

I recently went to a workshop at Yorkshire Dance led by the choreographer Katja Heitmann. Since 2019, she has been building an archive for human movement: Motus Mori. Working with what she calls movement-archivists, people that I would call observational dancers, (similar to observational drawers), she collects and preserves movements from people of all ages, bodies and backgrounds. From these observations Katja creates new artworks.    

For instance in her work COMMUNITAS, she states, '16 performers aged between 20 and 75 exchange their personal movements amid everyday reality. They support and follow each other’s movements until a collective body emerges. COMMUNITAS brings together 6 self-taught movers and 10 academic dance students from Fontys Academy of Arts, in a moving theatrical ritual. Accompanied by bubbles of spatial sound, they form ritual islands of focus and devotion'.

I was very impressed with her work on embodied memory, and in the workshop I became very aware of how each and every body is a record of its own history; the way we walk, sit, stand etc. each movement of our bodies telling stories, as well as expressing emotion. The workshop also focused on how memories are triggered by physical movement and during the lecture/performance, Katja Heitmann worked with a German dancer who had been operating as a body archivist. As she shared findings from her research around body memory and dementia, she asked this dancer to illustrate what she was referring to.

The dancer sits in the style of a remembered person

I had taken a sketchbook, so was able to do a little drawing between the sessions where the audience was invited to perform. The drawings didn't amount to much, but the work done with our bodies did. We were for instance introduced to the different ways that certain people walk. The professional archival dancer, was asked by Heitmann to remember particular individuals and then to concentrate on how they walked. He would then physically seem to reshape himself and go into the body form of each remembered person, which was an amazing thing to watch, as his neck lowered or straightened, his torso twisted or lent over and his whole body changed. But then he would walk. We would watch and follow. Some people stride heel first, some are flat footed, others raise their knees, some make short chopped movements, others almost skip, some feet splay outwards, some knees touch, some legs bow, whilst some walkers have toes that point to an invisible line passing underfoot. We also explored how each person sits, how we hold our hands when at rest, and how we rise as we stand. We have all developed unique, bespoke body movements and these movements are the language of our embodied being. 

I was gripped by the workshop and wanted it to go on and on, and once it had finished began to ruminate on how all this new information could be processed and brought into the work I have been doing in relation to interoception and the visualisation of embodied thinking. What was so refreshing about Heitmann's work was that it eliminated poor translation technologies. She didn't trust photographs as a body archive technology as they were flat static things, she similarly didn't trust video footage as it was also disembodied and written descriptions were similarly faint echoes of the body's reality. Drawing I felt at least captured traces of a moving hand, but I could see what she was getting at, only another body could truthfully and accurately archive the embodied reality of human beings.  

Notebook pages

I felt I was being taught a lesson. She was right in stressing the limitations of other media as body archive technologies, and it made me think about what I was doing. I am I hope still doing something useful, but it is not archiving how we think and experience our lived reality. My work is to open out the imaginative and poetic potential of experience and its visualisation, rather than to capture the outward visual experience of it. I am not an observational documenter of the world, I am a visual explorer who seeks to tap into the possibilities that sit underneath observations of perceived reality. 

The imagined interior begins to bleed into an external reality

See also:

On horizontality, the body and other things

Drawing and dance

Is drawing a language?

Drawing as translation

Documentation and drawing practices

Category theory and drawing

Every now and again I go back to mathematics as a visual discipline. It is fundamental to our understanding of the world and its visualisation processes can be used across all disciplines. It is usually geometry that people like myself begin with when working with mathematical ideas and in the visual arts geometry is often linked with perspective and technical drawing systems, especially as a measuring tool. For instance we use right angled verticals to assess other angles, we assess the rotation of our looking through angles of degrees, find heights of buildings by using trigonometric relationships; the rise of computer aided design cementing these relationships. However there are other aspects of visual thinking that come directly out of thinking with numbers and the one I've recently begun to appreciate is 'category theory'. Like so many things in this world, my interest began from something said to me in conversation. I was having a coffee with an ex-student of fine art, who is also a university lecturer in computing and he was helping me think though some ideas about how one thing represents another, or is like something but is not the same as something. I was trying to think around some of the work I had done representing things we don't see but can feel, such as loneliness or pain. In trying to make an equivalence I was worried that in translation I was losing particular associations that only worked in verbal languages. My associate began drawing and asked me if I had ever heard of Category Theory*, an area of mathematics that I was soon to realise had all sorts of resonance in relation to my own thought processes, especially when I found out that as a theory it could be used to get over the idea of one thing being equal to another. The escape from equality being something I decided was similar to my own worries about whether or not what I was doing represented 'reality' in the way I needed it to; I needed to escape from the problem of the noumenon or the thing-in-itself.
But what is category theory? It seems to me that it's to do with how you group things together. For instance, is there a set with 2.5 elements? As sets of things are collections of equal units, the answer would be no. But there's a "groupoid" with 2.5 elements. To get it, just take a set with 5 elements and fold it in half. The point in the middle gets folded over, and becomes half a point.

The physical and visual image here is a powerful drawing thought idea and it allows us to think in 'groupoids' as well as 'sets'. This 'trick' allows us to see that there are other possibilities of arraigning things, and in that thought lies the possibility of creating an interesting metaphor, one that suggests that things are not always as they appear to be. For instance 1 + 2 = 3 could be questioned. Only 3 can equal 3 in the sense of being exactly the same as 3. 1 + 2 being something else, it is a single thing that is being added to a double thing, not a treble thing that has always been a treble thing. In it's history a treble thing might point to a time when it was a double thing that was added to a single thing, but that is a very different history to that of a treble thing that has always been a treble thing. This is of course opening another door, because there will also be things that were first of all double and then they were added to a single, thus forming a treble thing. 

Category theory is all about possibilities and it is driven by diagrams. So if we look at the three dots in set 'G', at first sight it looks as if these could be equal to the three dots of set 'H', but then we realise that the dots could be matched up in several ways.  

Category theory diagrams

In category theory the dots are objects. The arrows as seen in the top diagram are also important because they don't just indicate possible movement or connection, they indicate a real change in the identity of the object. What has gone on before is an object's history and this history will change its nature. A thousand pounds saved up by a poor person over a lifetime might look the same as a thousand pounds used by a millionaire to pay for a night's stay in a hotel, but in reality they are totally different sums of money. 

Category theory questions the use of the equal sign, which states that things are exactly the same. There are important complexities in the way quantities are related which suggest that  there is a need to reformulate mathematics in the looser language of equivalence and into this looser language we might be able to slip in the language of art, in that it is constantly been used to find equivalences for other things. 

It is interesting to look at the relationships set out in the diagram below. The slippage between individual instances of diverse forms and universal principles is one whereby it is impossible to define where the dividing line is. In particular it is impossible to determine the exact edge between the microscopic and the macro world, all the scales from Angstroms to meters are found in a biological entity like myself, and the complex hierarchical assemblies of various building blocks that we are made of seem to follow principles of form that can be found in other systems as well. In this way we can begin to discover new metaphors, ones that rely on deep structural echoing and that Giesa, Wood, Spivak and Buehler (2011) have termed “concept webs” or “semantic networks”. 

A concept web

This diagram shows how you can think about the ways that the building blocks of protein can be connected and where possible weaknesses might be. 

Giesa et al. describe how category theory can be used to link the fundamental structural principles behind biological protein materials with entities such as social networks, by comparing both of their underlying structural principles. To do this they have constructed the term 'ologs'. An olog follows a rigorous mathematical formulation based on category theory, therefore it is suitable for sharing concepts with other ologs. They show that an olog for the protein and an olog for a certain social network feature have identical category-theoretic representations and that there is an isomorphism between them; thus demonstrating that the relationship between structure and function at different hierarchical levels, can be effectively represented by ologs. Because metaphors have always been developed by artists looking for similarities between things, I also think that although Giesa et al. indicate that this type of thinking could help engineering, life sciences, and medicine, I see no reason to not add art into the mix. It would seem to me that if biological materials evolved to perform specific biological functions, then the higher-level structures that biological entities like ourselves also evolved such as societies, may well have deep down core similarities, as certain mathematical patterns are no doubt more useful than others in the creation of structures that can survive in a hostile world. It would seem therefore that in order to reflect upon the workings of a natural system, we do not need to understand everything about it, only the principles out of which we believe the functions arise. Therefore a drawing can represent an equivalence by showing how patterns from different models of thinking can find themselves grouped together. In doing so it can also be a tool that refers to and evaluates differences in historical backgrounds, so that when rendering two similar images of a hundred pesos it does not simply make them the same, but renders them different by nature. The problem of the noumenon or the thing-in-itself is also overcome because of the concept of representing an equivalence, in this way there is never any need to reproduce the thing in itself, only equivalences and they can be many and varied and always subject to interpretation. 

Two examples of 100 peso notes

In the case of the 100 peso notes, in some ways you could think of them as being exactly the same, in the sense that in their original function as money exchange you could get goods to the value of100 pesos for either of them. In mathematical terms this would mean that note one =  note two. However if regarded as an equivalent, note one still performs the same monetary function as note two but it has other meanings as well, because its history is different. You could think of Duchamp's 'Bottle Rack' as being another type of example. 

*Category theory formalises mathematical structure and its concepts in terms of a labeled directed graph called a category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called arrows.

References

Giesa, T., Wood, E., Spivak, D.I. and Buehler, M.J., 2011. Category Theoretic Analysis of Hierarchical Protein Materials and Social Networks. Accessed from: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0023911

Hartnett, K (2019) With Category Theory, Mathematics Escapes From Equality

Accessed from: https://www.quantamagazine.org/with-category-theory-mathematics-escapes-from-equality-20191010/

See also:

Drawing on money

Between art, geometry and science

Resemblance, mimesis and communication

Abstraction, mathematics and metaphor

Developing surfaces in an age of CGI

Using Viewfinders

I know that some of the artists I am aware of like to use viewfinders to help them think about composition and selection. Some of them use these with a full and deep understanding of the implications of doing this, but others don't, so I thought I'd as normal ramble around the subject and see if I can pick out some issues that might help you decide to make use of them or not. 

A typical bought viewfinder 

The advantages of working with a viewfinder when making objective drawings is that you can use them to isolate your subject matter by limiting your field of vision and cutting away your need to scan and look at areas of visual information that could otherwise distract you. They also allow you to think about aspect ratio and how that might effect the compositional needs of your selection. All useful things, but they do come with certain implications. The first one of course is the impact of the rectangle itself. We don't see in rectangles but have become used to seeing compositions within them because cameras produce rectangular images and we look through a lot of rectangular windows, paper is cut into rectangles  and our paintings are usually displayed in rectangular frames; but just because these things are familiar doesn't mean they are right or the only way to do things. 

Looking within a rectangle also changes the way we see things. Our peripheral vision is cut off, our visual scanning processes are restricted and the situation we are looking at is made far less dynamic. We have in effect captured the view in a cage or trap. 

However they can be useful, for instance the one shown above, the 'Artist’s View Catcher', is 3 1/2 inches square, with a window opening that you can adjust by using a sliding panel. Markings along the side help you set common aspect ratios linked to sizes such as 8 by 12 inches or 11 by 14 inches. The sliding panel has a small hole that you can use to judge local colour or tonal value and as the viewfinder is a neutral grey, this gives it more use value. I must admit it's much better than the ones I have used in the past made from 4 strips of paper and 4 paper clips, or old 35mm projector slide mounts but it will often cost you over £10. The cheapest I could find was Jacksons. 

35mm slide mount

There are other viewfinders that also allow you to identify local colour, and make comparisons with set tonal values, such as the Guerrilla painter composition finder. 

You match up the colour strip on the left with a local or 'seen' colour and do the same with the tonal value scale on the right. The Pixiss Grey Scale Value Finder below then takes things to extremes, you get three cards to hang round your neck. One a squared off viewfinder, another a colour wheel and the third a tonal value finder. 

Pixiss Grey Scale Value Finder

If you want to make a small drawing so that you don't have to even think about transferring what you are seeing to a sheet of separate paper, the Tom Lynch 'Secret Composition Tool' allows you to draw directly over your gridded up view, so that you can see what you are picking out. I'm not sure how it really works and it seems overly complicated to me but you never know some people must find it useful. 

The Tom Lynch 'Secret Composition Tool' 

Jackson's viewfinder is a much easier compositional tool to use. You draw directly on it with a wipe away blue marker

Jackson's viewfinder

Artists have used viewfinders for hundreds of years and they are the basis of all image transfer techniques before photography and chemical image capture. 

Van Gogh's viewfinder consisted of three wires stretched across a frame to intersect in the middle, as shown in the sketch below that he put in a letter to his brother Theo to show how he planned to use it out on the dunes.

Van Gogh

Van Gogh would copy the viewfinder grid lines onto his canvases, and they can be seen with the naked eye if you get a chance to look at an actual painting in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, where if you search long enough you can sometimes see traces of his drawn grids between brush strokes. As he said in a letter to Theo; 

"You will have seen in my last letter the drawing grid that I told you about.  I’ve just got back from the blacksmith’s, who made iron tips to go on the stakes and corners for the grid itself. It has two long stakes, and you can attach the grid either vertically or horizontally with solid wooden pegs".

The viewfinder as Van Gogh drew it in his letter to Theo, 5th or 6th August 1882

The Gridvu viewable grid system is one of the latest and has the advantage of also having diagonal lines printed onto the viewing surface. This does make it easier to use when using a viewfinder to draw portraits.

The Gridvu

Looking at a face through the Gridvu

Of course the mobile phone has replaced a whole range of tools, we use it to record sounds, take photographs, communicate and more recently to be a drawing grid maker. 

Drawing Grid Maker app

You have probably seen the Drawing Grid Maker app used on Portrait Artist of the Year, it is a grid drawing utility program which draws a grid on top of an image which you can then use to guide you when you want to translate the image onto a canvas or onto paper. It has a very simple 5 step to use set of processes. Load a picture from your device or web browser (press and hold picture to share with Drawing Grid Maker from web browser). Set number of rows and columns. Set colour of grid. Set line width. Save the image and print it out, or display it on your monitor/tablet/phone while you draw. (It also has diagonal line settings so you can use it like the Gridvu).

Another related device sold to help artists is the perspective viewer. It is similar to the viewfinder as it is transparent, but it also comes with perspective lines already in place, so that you can link a gradually growing knowledge of perspective with what you can actually see out in the world. 

Perspective viewer.

Landscape seen through a perspective viewer 

Again I have all sorts of problems with these perspective viewers as we don't actually see in perspective. These are usually about 8 by 4 or 5 inches in size, allowing you to move between your images and your views. However I have also seen students use these very effectively, so perhaps my personal views on the matter don't really mean anything, the reality is, if it helps use it, especially if what you are trying to do is to unravel the complexities that surround how we look and how and why certain visual conventions such as perspective work. 

Most people first come across the grid system in the art room as a device for copying pictures. This video is a typical school teaching aid. 

How to copy a photograph

I still find it interesting to think about grids and so do other artists. Betty Tompkins made the drawing 'Fxxk Grid #20' in 2005.

Betty Tompkins: 'Fxxk Grid #20'

Tomkins' drawing tells us a lot about copying from photographs using a grid system. It is as an image very flat, the angle of pencil stroke has little variation because the information does not come from surfaces that change direction as they move over a three dimensional form, the tonal values sit in a very narrow range and texture is diminished because there is no direct experience of a textured surface from which to draw from. It is in fact a very 'dead' image. Although this is not Tomkins' main point, this is not the image is of a dead person, it comes from a series of images about how women are used in pornography, but the way it is made in effect 'deadens' or 'kills' the image and for myself, gives this image an added poignancy. The grid becomes a trap or cage and the very flat copying of a photograph signifies that the images of women for pornographic uses, are in effect 'flattening' or 'killing' them. The dead hand of the pornographer squeezing the life out of the image, the women 'trapped' in their situation. 

Composition using rectangular frames is about selection. You can use 4 strips of paper to find new compositions within existing images, or to focus on one area with a view to changing it so that it pops out of the rest of the image. But selection can be done by making lots of small drawings from either existing work, photographs or reality.

Torn paper strips

Sometimes torn paper is a better solution, tiny drawings on awkward shapes can be a road to invention because you are forced to reconsider the frame as an organic rather than geometric form. You can of course make your viewfinder from a torn hole.

Torn hole viewfinder

Hundreds of years have elapsed since Durer made those images about drawings using frames and grids. At the time he was reporting on things he found on his journey to Italy, devices that he regarded as important new ideas as artists struggled to draw the world more and more accurately. 

Durer

19th century Table de L'Aquarelliste (Watercolourist Table with sighting grid)

However these devices have now entered the lexicon of art itself and can become integral to the making of images. 

Using a sighting glass: Ludovico Cigoli: 1610

Cigoli's image of an artist using a sighting glass could be a drawing for a performance, I like the fact that in this case the artist is the nude subject of the image, especially as it was made at a time when it was usually naked women that were subject to the male gaze. Cigoli was fascinated by drawing devices. 

Cigoli : Two men operating an enlargement device; one man using an optical instrument, while the other draws a projection on a wall 

On the other side of this drawing which is is the British Museum collection, is another drawing explaining how the enlargement device works. This fascination with optical capture continues and contemporary artists have returned to the subject many times. 

Pia Linz 

The artist Pia Linz has taken the idea of the drawing viewfinder and decided to build one that she can work inside. The small transparent room above is in effect a three-dimensional tracing frame. She sets these transparent acrylic objects up in places where she wants to draw and she marks her drawings onto the surface from the inside where she sits working. Afterwards the drawings are sharpened up and the objects exhibited as sculpture. The process now turning full circle, the capture device becoming far more important than the process of capturing the image. 

See also:

The preparatory sketch

Composition drawing for landscape

Drawing devices

More drawing devices

The grid as a cage or trap

Point of view

Drawing as testimony 

Drawing from photographs

Notes from a drawing conference (see notes on the work of Catherine Anyango, who was making drawn images of 'last seen' surveillance footage of people that were either found dead or went missing. 

An archive of drawing machines 

George Condo and Glenn Brown: From parody to pastiche / transcriptions and impersonations

George Condo

I have been away and while in Athens saw a George Condo exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art. It was interesting to see contemporary art alongside a wonderful collection of Ancient Greek figurines and pottery, and Condo's work I thought stood up surprisingly well in such august company. Below are a few photographs of his drawings, of which there were quite a few on display, as well as sculpture and of course paintings.

The exhibition was housed in a particularly hard to exhibit in environment, (see paintings reflected in a mirror) but the strange personages that Condo constructs were somehow able to inhabit the spaces very appropriately. 
I have posted before on the continuing relevance of old masters. However in a post-modern world cartoonists are as important as classical painters. George Condo's drawings are typical of an artist that moves freely between influences as he searches for his own kind of truth. Therefore I thought it worth a more detailed look at how his work sits alongside images that I feel bear direct relationship/comparison to him. If you look at the drawings above it is easy to see a relationship between Condo and Picasso.

Picasso



Condo sort of riffs with elements of Picasso's way of working but adds into the mix other ways of image making that have influenced him. Don Martin was an artist I was fascinated by when I used to read MAD magazine as a teenager and I suspect Condo was too.

Don Martin

Look at the ears of Condo's 'cubist' heads and compare them to Martin's. Martin's head shapes are always elongated and his mouths are usually open too.

George Condo

The way the ear is stuck onto the side of the head in Condo's drawing above is I believe an echo of Don Martin, and when we come to look at the mouth I think Martin's cartoon work is referenced again. Not necessarily consciously but I know myself that after years of reading the Beano and the Topper as a very young boy and then being fascinated by the drawings of Jack Kirby as I grew into being a teenager, certain ways of making an image are inbuilt into my own sensibility, and I'm sure this is the case with other artists. (See my post on Hardeep Pandhal) 



Don Martin

George Condo

I can also sense the influence of other artists such as Wilfredo Lam and Gorky. If you look at the drawing above I think it shows a certain familiarity with some of Lam's early images and Gorky's drawings.

Wilfredo Lam

Gorky

It is also interesting to compare one of Lam's portrait heads with Condo's. A similar orchestration of elements is going on and the way Lam uses line to break up the image bears a direct comparison.

Wilfredo Lam

Not that this is anything new, you can go right back through the history of art and see how artists have improvised on and with the work of other artists. Even Picasso will at times go back and look at how other artists' work can be reinterpreted.

Velazquez and Picasso

Glenn Brown is a contemporary artist who has been looking at how a dialogue with older art traditions continues to be a rich vein to tap into. In a recent British Museum display Brown's work was presented alongside the Rembrandt etchings that Brown was responding to.

Brown

Brown

Brown

Rembrandt

Rembrandt

Rembrandt

Freud

Freud

Glenn Brown: After Freud

Brown

Some of the images above were photographed by myself and they were behind glass, this brings in an added issue. No matter how hard I try there will be some reflection. Frances Bacon insisted that his work was shown behind glass. In the 'All Too Human' exhibition recently at Tate Britain, I was forced to keep moving in front of Bacon's images to avoid only seeing myself reflected in them. The same of course was happening when I was trying to look at Brown's work. Is this therefore an example of the continuing ongoing process of a work's becoming? Once the artist has finished making something, it continues on into the world and changes and becomes something else with each showing. Just as the artists making these images are responding to seeing other artists' work, the works themselves are responding to changing exhibition spaces and the changes in attitude that each new generation of visitors brings to looking at the work. Brown was responding to Lucien Freud's work, I was responding to my experience of looking at Brown's responses to Freud. I thought the reflections added another layer to Brown's layers of etching overlays and made the idea more about the impossibility of ever 'seeing' what an earlier artist was getting at. As you look at the images on this blog, you will be responding to them in your own way and will bring to the responses different experiences and associations. And so it goes, one thing rubs off against another, things are in constant flux and whether these images are parodies or transcriptions, impersonations or appropriations, in the long run they will all become part of a past that is constantly receding from a future, a future that will become more and more distant and therefore will read its past with further diverging narratives, narratives that will be needed by future peoples to understand themselves but which will often draw inspiration from what happened earlier. 

One narrative will draw upon another, one story will influence another and the stories of art are very potent in a world that values art as a type of narrative trope for certain aspirations for the human condition. Condo and Brown riff off narratives that have already been retold many times and will be so again. In your own work you will already be deciding on a narrative that seems to be giving your practice meaning, as a story this can be something you shape and the more you are aware of it as a story, the more you will be able to shape it. 

See also: Drawing reflecting on art