Drawing

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.

Saturday, 2 November 2019

Training the eyes

During the build up to the World Cup rugby final the Guardian sports section had an article on the work of Dr Sherylle Calder. She was reported on as being the most successful coach in the modern rugby era and she works as a 'vision specialist'. She works with the players developing regular eye exercises and tries to get them to avoid too much time on mobile phones and other similar devices because they don't exercise eye muscles and the attention awareness sections of the brain associated with peripheral vision, spatial awareness and rapid and flexible eye movement. Her training methods reminded me of the work we used to do in teaching drawing during the mid 1970s and early 1980s, especially when we were trying to highlight how kinetic awareness was tightly connected to spatial awareness. We would set up drawing situations designed specifically to test spatial awareness and as part of the process throw into the situation balls of crumpled up paper that would be deliberately thrown in from behind the students' backs, therefore entering their fields of vision at random unexpected moments. This on the one hand kept attention high and on the other forced them to be inventive in how they dealt with these spatial 'explosions'.
Dr Sherylle Calder has an on line eye gym and if you go there you can test out your own ability to see and recognise situations quickly. It is very revealing and makes you aware of how little time we spend exercising our eye/brain responses, particularly when we spend so much of our time handling dangerous machinery such as cars and other mechanical constructs that demand that we stay in a state of controlled awareness for long periods of time.
The speed of reaction of ball players used to be a constant topic of conversation in those long ago days of teaching drawing. Visual and spatial awareness was at the core of so much of what we did, the making of images being subordinate to the construction of visual fields of engagement.

Hans Hofmann notes on approaching a drawing

One of the most important influences on teaching drawing at that time was Hans Hofmann. His drawn notes above being typical of what was being discussed in a drawing studio when I began teaching. What were your eyes picking up first, where did attention then move to? In what direction and in what rhythmic form did the eyes move as they sought out both space and formal relationships? Did an awareness of the space begin at the bottom edge of the drawing? If not why not and where did it begin? I would suggest that this type of approach to drawing lasted from the late 1940s until the 1980s and it was central to a whole generation of artist / teachers that had been influenced by abstract expressionism. In England my own awareness of this approach to drawing came via Peter Lanyon, who had taught the artist Patrick Oliver who had been apprenticed to him because of the influence of Patrick's father the art critic W. T. Oliver. When I began teaching drawing on the foundation course at Leeds the staff were very post-Harry Thubron in their understanding of visual language and Patrick Oliver was the most vociferous exponent of both Thubron and Lanyon's teaching methods. Oliver had worked alongside Lanyon in his studio in the 1950s and Lanyon had when he had time, given Oliver things to think about when making paintings. For instance one day Lanyon put a house brick down on one of Oliver's paintings and said to him, "When I decide to pick that brick up, you need to be able to paint the space it was in". Lanyon encouraged 'fast' seeing and Oliver used to ride motor bikes through the Yorkshire landscape and explore his perceptual memories of this experience in his paintings. Lanyon pushed these experiences even further and took up gliding as a way of heightening his spatial awareness of the Cornish landscape, an approach that would lead to his death in a gliding accident in 1964.

Hans Hofmann drawing of a landscape view

The drawing above by Hofmann shows how this type of awareness often began to be transcribed into drawings. The placement of forms such as triangles and lines, is composed in such a way that they combine to make rhythmic shapes that keep the eye moving through the drawing. I well remember Oliver looking in students' drawings for 'enclosed' or 'trapped' forms, i. e. these would be shapes that locked the eye movement into them and so held the looking in one spot. These would have to be broken, so that the eye movement could continue to revolve around the image. He was very critical of what he called the centralised image, something I am now very interested in, but which in those days would have been criticised because it did not generate action for the eyes. The central image it was argued, prioritised the verbal language element of thinking, therefore removed the eye/brain from experiencing the space / form of the image as the brain moved into thinking about the semiotics of the image rather than the experience of the moment.
Looking back to that time I'm now more aware of a political stance that related to this position. Fixed images could be seen as commodities that could then be sold. The flux of experience was much harder to sell.

Peter Lanyon

In the drawing above by Lanyon you can see lines following the movement of the searching eyes as they look from foreground to background. You are supposed to look through the space, not at the objects you encounter. Patrick Oliver used to say that you need to make drawings in a similar way to how a bird flies through a thick set hedge. If the bird was looking at all the various small branches and twigs as it moved it would very quickly become entangled in the complexity of thinking about the thingness of the various experiences, however if the bird simply flew through the space, the things that could have impeded its way just disappeared. The space was the path that needed to be taken, the objects in this world were simply irrelevancies, only made relevant because we have a verbal language that needs to identify nouns with things and prioritises thingness over action.

Patrick Oliver Irish Painting

The painting above was made by Oliver in the early 1980s and is typical of his approach. You are meant to re-experience a ride through the Irish landscape, the colour being as much about treading in a cowpat when you dismounted from your motorbike, as looking up at a blue sky or seeing hills in the distance. The totality of the experience was something Oliver believed he could re-create in paint.

At the time I loved the epic romanticism of the man, his firm belief in the power of painting to re-create experience and to provide an arena for the eyes to exercise themselves within. It was always 'eyes', the old principal of the art college Frank Lisle had lost one eye during the second world war and Patrick would accuse him of no longer being able to paint properly because of this. The spaces in these paintings were designed for bi-focal vision, angle of line and form as well as surface adjustment being designed to trigger mental spaces as the two eyes attempted to focus. Oliver would demonstrate this in the studio by getting students to watch him trying to pull apart two straight edges, such as two lengths of 2 x 1 timber. He would say that they were stuck together by a very sticky invisible substance, but if he pulled hard enough he could separate the edges, but this would leave between them a plane composed of a very taut surface of infinitely thin invisible glue. He would then mime a struggle to separate the two lengths of timber, finally shaking with the effort he would not just separate them but would then twist them in relation to each other. "Now", he would say "how do you see the space between these two timbers?"

There is still a memory of those times in the back of my head every time I draw. I'm now once again attracted to the issues associated with a word bound experience and how to go beyond them, but am looking at the resolution from a more 'vibrant materialist' perspective. Those times had a very interesting approach to the problem and I think it has reemerged as an aspect of speculative realism and other approaches to materialist thinking. I am also putting up this post as a reminder that old experiences are never 'wrong' just simply other worlds waiting to reemerge as fresh made for another time.

See also:

Eye tracking technology
The hard won image

Other posts about teaching during the 1970s and 80s.

More on pulling space apart in a flat drawing
How to address the paper surface

Monday, 28 October 2019

Rubbings and frottage emerge from the graveyard

Michael Rakowitz: Rubbings of architectural details

It used to be that the only rubbings taken seriously outside of those made by children were brass rubbings made of tombstones. I well remember the activity in the 1960s, several people I came across in those days spending their weekends travelling round looking for the perfect tombstone to take rubbings from. They also had specific tools for the work, certain types of papers and special wax blocks. But with the recent exhibition of Michael Rakowitz at the Whitechapel and Simon Woolham's exploration of the Kennet & Avon Canal at the drawing centre in Trowbridge, you can see that there is a growing awareness that a direct touch with a surface has far more possibilities than might at first be apparent. Rakowitz has used rubbings in more than one exhibition to transfer information from one context to another. The decorative details that exist across many threatened architectural monuments, can be re-presented by a rubbing far more intimately than by a photograph. For one thing you know they are size for size and you also realise that someone had to climb up onto the architecture, place the paper over the surface details and make the rubbing. This much more physical record is emotionally much more highly charged than a photograph which by its very nature implies a distancing from the subject.

Michael Rakowitz: Casts of architectural details

Rubbings can be thought of as very shallow casts. Rakowitz using both processes to capture his experiences of the way conflict is destroying the architectural heritage of the Middle East.

Simon Woolham's exploration of the Kennet & Avon Canal uses the process of making rubbings differently, he recreates the various experiences of surface that he comes across on his walks, by building complex reconstructions or compositions out of the huge number of collected surfaces that he brings back with him. Not only composing the rubbings by finding new juxtapositions for them, he will cut out sections so that he can use geometry to give order to what could be a chaotic mess and work into the compositions other types of drawings that are more observational. As these constructions are built they can also take on an environmental aspect, especially as they reach floors and ceilings and spill out into the spaces of a room. Because Woolham is also a performer, these adjusted spaces can then also become settings for other things to take place such as musical or spoken performance.

Simon Woolham

An animation made by school children working with Simon Woolham

The great thing about working with rubbings is that people don't get worried about their drawing ability. Simon Woolham's work with school children proving that very sophisticated results can emerge from collaborative ventures.

Do Ho Suh uses rubbing to capture the essence of a lived in space. He can then transport that space elsewhere and exhibit it. Sometimes using sewn fabric to do the same thing, he presents ghost like recreations of spaces he has known.

Do Ho Suh

The use of rubbings as an art form is often regarded as something originating in the work of Max Ernst. Using the wooden floor in his room, he began to take pencil rubbings and as he did so realised that these rubbings suggested ideas to him. This was an ideal Surrealist technique, which he first called grattage and subsequently frottage. It was of course a very old idea, Shakespeare had this to say about it;

Sometime we see a Cloud that's dragonish,
A Vapour sometime like a Bear, or Lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendant Rock,
A forked Mountain, or Promontory,
With Trees upon't, that nod unto the World
And mock our Eyes with Air.--Anthony and Cleopatra (Act IV Scene II)

Max Ernst: Le Start du Châtaignier

What was also interesting about these Surrealist inventions was the use of titles to further reinforce the feeling of unreality. In this case 'Le Start du Châtaignier', in English, 'the Chestnut tree start', continuing to not provide an answer as to what the image is all about. I do think we could spend more time thinking about how to use titles. From Turner writing long poems for his titles, to abstract artists giving their work titles reflecting those of musical terms, such as 'composition 23', there have been many attempts to include the title itself into the meaning of the work. If you visit an exhibition, it is interesting to see how much time visitors will spend reading titles and other associated information, so for an art form that prides itself on not having to use words and a 'what you see is what you get' attitude, this suggests that audiences are not so sure and they want a belt and braces approach to finding meaning.

Not that the old traditional skills of brass rubbing should be discounted. Some brass rubbings I have seen were very powerful images in their own right. The dense black of a wax 'heelball' pushed into the surface of 'butcher's paper' (a 22–30-inch-wide roll of white paper) can be used to produce a beautiful negative.

Brass rubbing from a church in Otley, West Yorkshire

Astral wax used to be the wax of choice for making brass rubbings.

I have been unable to find any lately except on E Bay and people want astronomical prices for it. The nearest substitute I have found are some shoe polishes, (which of course was what Astral Wax was originally made for), especially if you take the wax polish block out of the tin and leave it out in the air for a few weeks, this seems to harden it up and make it more suitable for making a rubbing. Butcher's paper was used for wrapping meat and there are still butcher's papers being made. Some are wax coated but you can also get them uncoated. Rolls of butcher's paper can come in beautiful colours as well as white, one colour that is specific to butcher's paper being a pink peach. It is of course a very interesting paper to draw on and because it comes in rolls can be an ideal paper to use when trying to develop a different 'feel' to large images.

I'm drifting off tack again. The important issue about rubbings is that they bring the sense of touch back into the way we think about collecting information about the world and communicating this to others. Touch in many ways comes before sight, as a baby, you need to touch the world to decide it is there, your eyesight is yet to be trusted. Therefore rubbing could be seen as a more essential or authentic record of a certain type of encounter with the world. But it is hard to get away from the fact that frottage is also “the act of rubbing against the body of another person, as in a crowd, to attain sexual gratification.” Which reminds us that rubbing is when you think about it, quite sexual as well.

Jane Eaton follows the logic of two dimensions moving back into three dimensions in her frottage work. If we think of a rubbing as shallow sculpture, or a type of low relief, then it is no surprise to find frottage as an entry into more sculptural thinking.

Jane Eaton: Frottages

The transfer of texture onto a flat surface from a three dimensional experience is after simply being rolled into a cylinder, a new object, column like, its texture suggestive of marble. Treating one surface as a dense black and the other much more lightly creates a basic dark/light opposition, which is very effective as a structural device.

A Banalinga stone

As I let these various thoughts spill out, for one reason or another I am reminded of Banalinga stones. These are used for Hindu worship in India. Found on the beds of rivers they are smooth ellipsoid stones that feel as if they were made to be held in the hand. Also called the Svayambhu Linga: a Sanskrit term for a “Self-existent mark or sign of God”, because they are discovered in nature and not carved or crafted by human hands. Their forms are often a simple roller shape that is roughly cylindrical. These forms are also about touch. In their case it is the action of water on stones being rolled along the river bed that makes their unique forms, the touch of water on stone, coupled with some abrasive grit, making something of beauty. Another case of non human action resulting in objects that can appear at first sight to be manufactured by hand. This 'sign of God' perhaps now read as a 'sign of nature' a reminder that we are no different to animals and minerals and other things, simply events linked to other events as we process our way through a mass of interconnected entanglements.

Hanna Barriball

Hanna Barriball has long been interested in the indexical; i. e. the one to one relationship a rubbing has with the thing that is rubbed. By pushing hard on the materials she makes her rubbings with she also engages with the sculptural qualities of the various papers she uses. She makes her images by rubbing so hard she pushes her paper into the indentations that are part of the surfaces being rubbed, thus making in effect shallow casts of the surfaces she is exploring.

Paper casts sit in that space between relief sculpture and drawing on paper, made from one sheet of paper, they carry an impression of the surface they were moulded over, but they are still a single sheet of paper thick. Paper moulds can be used to make a negative impression of a building or object, from which a positive could be cast. Paper moulds were used by archaeologists in the mid-nineteenth century to copy the façades of monuments such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Palenque in Mexico or the Alhambra in Spain. Described as ‘facsimiles’ by the inventor of the technique, Lottin de Laval (1810-1903), paper moulds allowed explorers to transport a version of a building or sculpture with all its details back to the museum. As a cheap and extremely light method of reproduction, they allowed the explorer to travel further, into previously uncopied territories, into the Mexican and Cambodian jungles for example, where the huge weight and fragile nature of plaster would have proved prohibitive. For instance Alfred Maudsley made paper moulds of Mayan Temples.

Rachel Whiteread

In 2017 Rachel Whiteread shredded a plan chest of drawings to make paper mâché, which she cast on sheets of corrugated iron. In effect she was repeating the Lottin de Laval process, and like Michael Rakowitz casting off architectural fragments. The dialogue between people and objects being linked in this case by touch.

See also these other posts that reflect on touch

Touch and stains and traces

The imprint and the trace

Cross contour drawing

Coda:

I'm reminded by Patrick Ford of a project he was engaged with back in 2017. He was already engaged with a dialogue with rubbings, rocks and the implications of object orientated ontology. See his blog where he explores work in process.

Patrick Ford at work

Wednesday, 23 October 2019

Philip Guston and alien phenomenology

Steve Bell: Boris Johnson

In times of political turmoil artists often turn to the absurd to communicate their obvious dismay as to what is happening around them. Steve Bell has seen Boris Johnson as an arse, and back in the 1970s Philip Guston saw Richard Nixon as a prick and ballsack. For Guston in particular his use of caricature was part of an ongoing transformation of his work as he moved from being an abstract expressionist to being an artist that dealt with harsh uncompromising imagery, imagery that was as much a reflection of popular culture, as an awareness that if as an artist you had to match up to one of the greats of the past, Goya was as powerful as Velasquez.

Untitled (1971), Philip Guston

Untitled (Poor Richard) (1971), Philip Guston.

Philip Guston: Richard Nixon

From the Richard Nixon series 1971-74

The Richard Nixon drawings helped Guston to develop an approach to drawing that highlighted the raw absurd nature of life. He was also able to use the processes of caricature that he used to reinvent Nixon as an image, on other not always human objects, such as sticking plasters, shoes and coats. A severe distortion of human forms, could also be applied to non-human forms, giving to each subject a new 'reality' or 'attention' that ensured that these objects were no longer just 'background' details to a human drama but significant 'players' in their own right.

Philip Guston 1980

The smoke from the cigarette is just as powerful as the fingers, which are as weighty in this image as sticking plasters or an ear or an eye. A coat and some shoes stand for an absent human and in doing so they are just as important in terms of image hierarchy as a human subject. This is where Guston's importance lies. He is able to transcend the human centred preoccupation of the cartoonist's imagery and in applying these conventions to non-human forms, is able to show us our own closed circuit of anthropomorphism, to be what it is, a problematic navel gazing, that has led to the dangers of climate change and species destruction.

Philip Guston

A dismembered head, a green bottle, a light bulb, all inhabit the same space and all have a presence in this image that suggests that as actants (Bruno Latour's term) they all have equal possibilities, each one open to speculative narratives that may or may not entangle the others in their narrative gravity. These images of Guston's are perfect illustrations of what Ian Bogost calls Alien Phenomenology, a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. A position that has at times been called a flat ontology.

This post is one of a series that begins to collect together ideas related to object orientated ontology, agential realism, speculative materialism, and other ways to give more weight to things that sit outside human centred disciplines. Gradually these posts will be used to put together a hopefully coherent philosophy of drawing as material thinking.

In essence, other things have as much impact about what goes on as we do. We cannot but be entangled in the influence fields of other things in order to be part of the events that happen in our local timeframe. We have though in the past tended to not recognise the role that all these other actants have and we have instead prioritised the human (and often just one sort of human; white, male, middle class European) to the exclusion of everything else.