Magicians of the Earth: Part 2

I put up a post a while ago about the exhibition 'Magicians of the Earth' and although reflecting on the fact that non Western artists from that show had had very different careers since then, didn't really look at what those artists are doing now. Some of the artists in that show have continued to produce very interesting work, and because their influences stem from cultures outside Western traditions their imagery is perhaps more surprising or feels more engaged with mythic traditions outside our own. I think these artists are well worth looking at and they can perhaps help revitalise your own practice, never forget that Picasso could not have produced 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' if he had not been introduced to the ethnological museum in Paris.

José Bedia

The Peruvian artist José Bedia’s work reflects the transcultural journeys he has made. He has worked with the Afro-Cuban religion Palo Monte, Mexican shamens, Peruvian Amazonian people as well as making work done pilgrimages to Zambia where he worked with diviners. I am particularly interested in how he is now working on a very large scale and using objects in relation to his drawings, thus opening out his work into a more environmental space. He is trying to respond to the myths and ritualistic nature of cultures that he feels are more in touch with the spiritual nature of life. Now that travel is so accessible this type of work is becoming more possible, however there is a Postmodern issue here which raises ethical questions, whether or not he is immersed in these cultures or simply appropriating them? One argument would be that this is a normal and proper response to a globalism, which celebrates diverse cultures, another would be that this is just another version of cultural imperialism. It feels to me that as a Peruvian he sees himself as an 'outsider' and therefore my guess is that his response is authentic but you will have to make your own minds up. 

All images above by José Bedia

Twins Seven Seven

Prince Twins Seven Seven, was born Prince Taiwo Olaniyi Oyewale-Toyeje Oyelale Osuntoki  in Ogidi, Nigeria. His work reflects a personal cosmology drawn from Yoruba myths and stories. He saw the materials of his work as the physical manifestation of a universe of potent forces in a state of constant transformation, his personal language is shaped into creatures and people that reveal a mythopoetic world. 

TWIN SEVEN SEVEN, BEAST IN SPIDER BUSH 1984 PEN & INK ON PAPER 12.5 X17.5in

TWIN SEVEN SEVEN: Sea Ghosts 3: Ink on Plywood

Twin Seven Seven comes from a similar culture to the Leeds based artist Oluseyi Ogunjobi. Oluseyi is a storyteller, musician, painter and textile artist. Seyi’s work reflects a philosophical journey striving to capture the universal essence of spirituality and its relevance to the needs of our contemporary commodity driven society. He believes that some answers can be found within the traditional life and stories found in Yoruba culture. 

The Dance of the Moody Breeze (below) is a figurative image of a dancing masquerade which was created because of Seyi’s interest in the philosophies that govern the evocations of mask performances from different parts of Africa. Depending on the origin of the masquerade and the philosophies associated with his appearance, the costume a man wears may cover his whole body or part of his body. For instance, it is an abomination for the body of the Yoruba Egungun masquerades from Nigeria to be seen, hence, the type of costumes they wear must cover their whole body because they are supposed to be inhabitants of heaven, visiting the community of their living relatives. But this particular image represents another type of mask performance from the South Eastern part of Nigeria, where the costume does not cover all the body. The wavelike mark making strokes surrounding the masked figure and the atmosphere depicts the mood of the occasion and the reverence associated with the transformation and the ritual in progress. Although Oluseyi wasn't in the Magicians of the Earth exhibition his work comes from a tradition that that exhibition sought to celebrate and the fact that he works in Leeds again illustrates the global nature of cultural communities. 

Oluseyi Ogunjobi:

  

Oluseyi Ogunjobi: Dance of the Moody Breeze: Batik

Fréderic Bruly Bouabré

Fréderic Bruly Bouabré was an Ivorian artist. He produced thousands of small cards using ballpoint pens and crayons, with symbolic imagery surrounded by text, each card carried a unique divinatory message and comments on life and history. 

Fréderic Bruly Bouabré drawings on show. It's a lot of work to hang drawings like this but for small drawings which are all the same format it works really well. 

Fréderic Bruly Bouabré

Norval Morrisseau

Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau created works depicting the legends of his people, the cultural and political tensions between native Canadian and European traditions, his existential struggles, and his deep spirituality and interest in mysticism. His images are clearly part of the North American Indian mythos but their stylisation also echoes an awareness of modernism and some forms of illustration. The depiction of both insides and outsides is in particular very interesting and reminded me of some Australian aboriginal images. 

Norval Morrisseau

Marcel Dzama

Marcel Dzama is another canadian artist but much younger. His name simply popped into my mind when I was thinking about Morrisseau. His quirky cartoon-like drawings extend the trend in contemporary drawing of examining the awkward nature of social narratives, a trend exemplified by artists such as Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon and Martin Kippenberger. I'll post about that too but not today. So I'll simply leave you with an image of Dzama's and a thought about how the traditions of ethic Canadian art have obviously found some space in Dzama's visual imagination, even though he is obviously a sophisticated post-modern Western image maker. Perhaps all cultures both past and present are now part of our visual vocabulary, the advent of the internet bringing them together under one electronic roof, and what matters now is how we as artists respond to that and make meaning from this vast multiplicity of possibilities. 

Marcel Dzama

See also:

Drawing elephants and other animals

Indian Aesthetics

Nalini Malani

Hardeep Pandhal 

Barthélémy Toguo

Why draw animals

Emakimono and other scroll images

Magicians of the earth

Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor

Venice and politics in a post-colonial world

Non western aesthetics: Japan

Japan 2

Robert Morris: Blind Time Drawings

Exhibition view of Blind Time Drawings (Grief) 2009

Robert Morris is a very important figure in relation to how we now think about drawing.  His Blind Time Drawings, were done over a long period between 1973 and the year 2009. The fourth series, was a group of works inspired by the writings of the philosopher Donald Davidson and because of this fact this series is often looked at more closely than the rest because it is easier to unpack in relation to the driving force behind the process. As the title of these drawings implies, they were made by the artist with his eyes covered. However the drawings are anything but haphazard, he followed a strict plan when making them, and his writings, which describe the process, are vital to an understanding of how and why he set about making them.

Morris used predetermined sets of guidelines and usually covered his hands with graphite, often mixed with oil or ink in order to have a very hands on approach to the mark-making. He would spread, smear, press and rub the marks into the paper, often whilst inside a specially constructed environment, so that it was impossible for him to see what he was doing.

Both these drawings from (Grief) 2009

You can just about see the notations at the bottom of this drawing. He would have set a time for how long this drawing would take and a set of directions, such as, '‘With eyes closed, graphite on the hands and estimating a lapsed time of 3 minutes, both hands attempt to descend the page with identical touching motions in an effort to keep to an even vertical column of touches. Time estimation error: +8 seconds.’ Which was the task of one of the first drawings of the Blind Time I works from 1973. 

In series II (1976), the artist gave verbal instructions to a thirty-year old blind-from-birth woman, known only to us by the initials A.A., who followed a similar procedure to how Morris was working. Texts near the drawings’ lower edge or on adjacent panels record the method of their making as well as the difference between the estimated and actual amount of time used. For example, “With the eyes closed the ten fingers move outward from the center making counting strokes,” is the text to accompany Blind Time I (1973), which consists of a densely layered field of short vertical marks. He added to the text a note about time, “Two thousand strokes are made in an estimated two minutes. Time estimation error: +45 seconds.”

These drawings of atmospheric graphite marks, are about process as well as product. If you look at his early work such as ‘A Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961), you can get an idea of how he was thinking. These drawings are self-referential and are attempts to make drawings about the way drawings are made. These "Blind Time" drawings point to a disjunction between estimated and actual times, a disjunction also foregrounded through the juxtaposition of intention (as described by the texts) and result (as manifest in the drawings). This disjunction is something we all experience when involved in making drawings. Time always seems to flow more quickly when I’m lost in drawing, but I know for others it goes more slowly. The point being, that our experience of time is subjective.

From (Grief) 2009

 Morris would sometime define areas to work within, but of course he could only guess if he was able to get the marks where he had directed, his closeness or distance from the indicated areas is very easy to see as he has indicated the areas with geometric precision, thus highlighting the nature of the hand made marks. He takes us back to first principles, some of our earliest drawings are the imprints of people's hands left on cave walls and therefore often done in the dark. 

These drawings also act as records of performances, his work holding a line so to speak, between performance art and drawing. 

From: Blind Time I, 1973

From: Blind time IV (Drawing with Davidson) 

From: Blind time V (Melancholia), 1999

From: Blind time III 1985

Because of the central position that these drawings take within recent drawing theory there is a fair amount of writing available in support of the theoretical issues surrounding these drawings. Therefore they could make a useful COP3 subject. For example see

Drawing as a blind performance was just one opening into the wider world of art as theatre, another artist dealing with time in a very different way but just as influential was Laurie Anderson.

'This is the time. And this is the record of the time'. 

Laurie Anderson 'From the Air' 

From Big Science 1982

References

Morris, M (2005) Robert Morris: Blind Time Drawings, 1973-2000 Steidl Dap

Tate interview

Bodyspacemotionthings

Moving Imagination: Explorations of gesture and inner movement by Helena De Preester

See also:

More on performance drawing
Richard McGuire's 'Here'  Using cartoon languages to articulate complex layers of time. 

Drawing and time in comparison to verbal language 
The imprint and the trace 

More thoughts on drawing time

New Contemporaries

Don't forget it's nearly deadline time for the New Contemporaries. Link here
This is open to all third year art students.

Barbara Hepworth's drawings

Barbara Hepworth is an ex Leeds College of Art student, but she has often been in the shadow of Henry Moore. She is though really worth looking at closely, especially when she is drawing. I have always felt that these drawings of surgeons operating are wonderful examples of an artist being able to focus on the essentials of a moment. They take key elements that are central to an understanding of an activity and almost carve them in stone. 

The drawings are done on gessoed panels. This allows her to scrape and scratch into the surface. The gesso also gives a surface texture for her pencil marks to 'bite' into. The gesso layer can also be stained and colour either wiped away or sanded off. The brushstrokes left from applying the white gesso, also make a texture for colour to hold onto, in this case adding an almost stone like quality to the drawings. 

As she sands away the colour she begins to draw with light. The heads being modelled with an almost Renaissance simplicity of form, the surgeons' masks allowing us to concentrate on the eyes, the lower part of the faces often being modelled almost as direct extensions of the figures'  bodies.  When people work, the relationship between their eyes and their hands is of course essential, and Hepworth provides us with a wonderful example of how when drawing we can select out those elements which are most important to the event. This is something only hand made images can do, a photograph would simply record everything. 

Fenestration of the Ear (The Hammer) 1948

Tibia Graft. See the original in the Hepworth, Wakefield

Barbara Hepworth: Studies of surgeons' hands

These drawings of hands holding medical instruments were done as part of Hepworth's visual research for the compositional drawings further above. Notice how in the finished drawings she uses a lot of the hand shapes she has identified in her studies, however the hands were slightly simplified but not enough to lose sight of the delicate way that the surgeons were handling their instruments. Again Hepworth teaches us a useful lesson, detailed studies need to be integrated into larger compositions very carefully, not just 'copied' in. 

You can use Hepworth's example yourself. Try looking at any situation, and then see if you can picture it in your mind. Think about how your mental picture starts to simplify reality and then try and record this through drawing. As you build the drawing try and emphasise those elements that are most important and de-emphasise inessentials. 

See also:

Drawing hands

Walking and drawing

I spend a lot of time walking and drawing. My own practice is quite traditional, I walk through Leeds and when I see something that chimes with what I'm trying to do in the studio, I draw it. Other artists are much more focused on the activity of walking and its potential as a way of marking the landscape itself. 

It was Richard Long that first alerted me to the potential of drawing by walking. I first saw his black and white photograph of 'a line made by walking' in an exhibition when I was at college. I realised at the time how liberating this was, you could could just do artworks anywhere and with no specialist equipment. Between hitchhiking lifts, he had stopped in a field in Wiltshire, once there he walked a straight line backwards and forwards until the flattened turf became a visible line. He then photographed what he had done. 

Richard Long: A line made by walking

I was occasionally doing some work for Keith Arnatt at the time and he was also making interventions into the world and photographing them. I helped him get his shadow drawn round and filled in when I was a student. He died a few years ago and this work now has an emotional resonance for me, his shadow still standing, frozen, like a soul trapped in the walls of the old sculpture annex in Bolt Street, Newport, which like Keith is now long gone. 

Keith Arnatt: Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self 1969–72

Arnatt did some very interesting work using snow back in the 1960s. He laid coloured neons in lines over the moors, locating them in shallow trenches and then when it snowed he turned the electricity on, the snow would then glow in coloured lines. I thought this the most beautiful drawing I had ever seen at the time. He showed it to us during a seminar in 1970. 
The images below are of Arnatt doing his self-burial piece, another seminal work from about 1969. 

Simon Beck is another artist who has grasped the potential of snow as a blank canvas and his complex patterns of footsteps have been trod all over the snow spots of Europe. 

Simon Beck

Beck will walk patterns into sand as well, I'm pretty sure he also does crop circles, because they all have similar patterns. The point being as long as you can make a mark and photograph it, you can be as ambitious as you want.  

Earth art began in the 1960s and Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' is a classic example of making a drawing using the materials of the landscape itself. Earth moving equipment being his drawing tools, rather than pencil or charcoal. 

Nothing is new of course and the Nazca lines below were made thousands of years ago in Peru and are sometimes over 600 feet long. They are shallow lines made by removing surface pebbles and uncovering the light coloured ground beneath. Some are simple lines or geometric shapes; others are animals such as birds, fish, llamas, jaguars, monkeys, or human figures. If you have never come across them before they are worth a close study. 

Aerial view of a Nazca humming bird drawing

Yellow lines

George Musgrave came up with the idea of the yellow line. (Another character worth exploring; he had his own museum) The sign of the yellow line has been put to use all over the world,  it takes the idea of line as boundary and adds yet another layer of meaning. Line becomes a sign of forbidden territory or transgression. If these lines were discovered by another civilisation in a thousand years time, how would they be read? We realise they are to help keep traffic flowing, but another culture might look at our society and point out that these lines celebrate the power and status of the car within our society. They may mistakenly think this was abstract art. The Nazca lines would have had a clear use and understanding within their society, but we are so distant and so culturally different from them that it is virtually impossible to understand how the drawings were used and what they meant. 

The drawing of lines outdoors on roads or across grass is associated with particular sets of tools. 

Some professions are centred around the daily reality of walking and drawing, their lines although signifying important things are never thought of as art. 

Drawing in the street is always culturally very interesting. Our own culture seems preoccupied with direct messages about where you can and can't go, but if you compare this to Kolam drawings which are made by south Indian women with rice or chalk directly onto the street that is outside their homes, these geometric shapes, (again lines and dots) are thought to bring prosperity to homes. Every morning in Tamil Nadu women draw kolams on the ground with white rice flour. These drawings of course get walked on and disturbed by all the activities of a busy day but new ones are made the next morning. 

In the kolam patterns, many designs are derived from magical motifs and abstract designs blended with philosophic and religious motifs which have been mingled together. Motifs may include fish, birds, and other animal images to symbolize the unity of man and beast. Also used are designs for the sun, moon and other zodiac symbols. The way these drawings are used is possibly similar to how the Nazca used drawings. The ritual kolam patterns created for special occasions such as weddings often stretch all the way down the street, in a similar fashion, the Nazca may have created their huge drawings to celebrate special occasions. These patterns have been passed on from generation to generation, from mothers to daughters to granddaughters and their communal production is vital to the coherence of the community. 

We do tend to forget that when we were children we were allowed to make our own drawings on the street, who has never played hop-scotch?

Children drawing on a city street in the 1950s. 

We mark territory, draw maps to help ourselves navigate through the city, draw things and people, all these different approaches will be encountered as we walk the streets, then as artists we begin to draw and whatever we do becomes part of and in dialogue with all the other ways that people are using drawing to navigate their own path through life. 

Nobutaka Aozaki, Here to There, Hand Drawn Maps of New York

Nobutaka Aozaki makes his way through the city drawing small maps on whatever is available as he goes. Gradually these build up into larger maps, similar to the way our own memory map of a city grows as we become more familiar with where we are. Think of your mental map of Leeds when you first arrived. For many students it is a line drawn between the rail or coach station and the university sector, with an off-shoot that links in wherever student accommodation is. However by your second and third year that map has grown and expanded. 

From 'THIS WAY BROUWN'

In the 1960s Stanley Brouwn used to walk the city asking to be directed to where he wanted to go, when he stopped people he would give them paper and something to draw with and ask them to make small maps for him. These he stamped with 'THIS WAY BROUWN'. He is a very interesting artist to research, as much for his attitude to art making as for the works he produced. He was a rarity in that he would not allow biographical information to be given out at exhibitions, wanting the work to speak for itself. 

From 'THIS WAY BROUWN'

Sharyn O’Mara makes 'Walking Drawings'. These drawings explore the nature of the spaces in between places. Made while walking from one place to another, the only structure to the drawings is the movement of the pen from left to right on the page, a reference to western language. She states, "I draw without looking at the page, simply holding pen to paper and allowing line to document the movement of my body through space. Lines jump and meander, dots indicate moments of pause or shift." See 

Sharyn O’Mara: Walking Book

There is a Lancaster University research project looking at how drawing can be taken out into other spaces. See Walking the Line is a research project that "investigates artists and creative practices that transport drawing into unusual, and challenging situations, both conceptual and actual." 

I have already looked at how Francis Alys walked the boundary line between Israel and Palestine with a green tin of paint in his hand, which steadily dripped out as he walked. See.

The Green line is a military term that is used to describe a "temporary" buffer zone between two fighting sides. Walking can be a very political act. Where you walk may transgress someone else's idea of property, or you may trespass or go into areas 'not for you'. The city of Leeds now has many areas deemed 'private property' which I used to think of as places for free public access when I first came to the city. For instance 'the Light' was an open street but  when we tried to draw in there last year the students were turned away because it wasn't allowed by the centre's management. 

Whatever you may get from this post, the central concern is to make sure you go out into the world and think about how your work can benefit from a bit of fresh air. If stuck for something to do, go for a walk. 

Patrick Ford (an ex LCA student) has been making some really interesting map work in response to walking around the city of Saigon. You can find an article on his work in the Interdisciplinary journal of critical cartography. Find the full text here.

See also:

Drawing maps

Drawing maps part two

Mapping as thinking

Mapping as translation

Material thinking and walking

Desire paths

Lines in the road