i went out for a little lichen reconnaissance yesterday; i had to remind myself just how diminutive these living, symbiotic organisms called lichens really are, having lost somewhat any sense of the true scale of the situation... but whilst there i discovered some particularly fascinating found drawings...
i shall try to explain why these are unlike the usual accidental, scrawled & scraped textures which may aesthetically be regarded as a found drawing (or a found painting, the matter of which may need further clarification in a future post), in the accepted meaning of physical marks visually recorded in response to something else, usually made on a surface...these are drawings made by ivy. one can clearly see the eroded traces of its prior existence, the pattern of growth, aerial roots in search of water and nutrients, the clamouring for light in every crooked twist and turn... the following four images were found in two different locations on the outside of a church and the drawings (as i perceived them to be) bore noticeable differences in their designs, which made me ponder...these first two images are close-up sections of the wall shown above. this roughly rendered facade faces east and is sheltered to the south by a brick wall and to the north by a dense boundary of trees. this very convoluted impression of the ivy's growth seems coded with some meaning, worthy of some visual analysis - wonderful whorls, contour lines, tight coils and concentric circles, a lasting (but not everlasting) imprint of nature at work...
one could easily make visual associations with topographical maps or satellite imagery of the earth, but i was also reminded of ancient inscriptions, lexicons, symbols or hieroglyphs... look unto these walls...this is another wall, from the same church; it faces due south...
here the ivy drawing seemed more fluid and calligraphic in nature, the lines stretched out more elegantly, creating a much slower, meandering path across the wall's surface, perhaps following the course of a hairline fissure in the render (or else it was one of its own making, such is the tenacity of ivy).
there must also be some relevancy, i thought at the time, to the differences in light and moisture in this south-facing location, when comparing these found drawings to the much busier drawings previously seen on the other wall... it was something to think about......a phrase that has been rattling around in my head recently is intellectual rigour... i thought that i had read it somewhere (or maybe i am just imagining it) but i actually heard it on radio 4 yesterday, serendipitously while transfering the photographs of the found drawings to my computer - so perhaps i am just 'tuned in' to it, wherever it occurs. whilst i think there is some conceptual grounding to the found art idea i do not think it has enough intellectual rigour...BUT, what if i were to create a situation where i grew stuff, such as ivy, or mould or whatever, and then either feed it or deny it light, water or nutrients, how this would control the pattern of growth and influence any resulting 'accidental' traces of their organic activity on a pre-defined surface, assuming this to be a way of forcing nature to make some art... any intellectual rigour suggests that one should be more academic and methodical and leave no hypothetical stone unturned (but what wonders i should find underneath real ones...). i did actually find a recipe for encouraging lichens to colonise on various surfaces but it would be quite a wait for any form of art to emerge from it...an artist that came to mind who intervenes with or uses nature as a means of making his own art is tim knowles. i first came across his work in a little show in the cut gallery a few years back. he is one of those more scientifically-minded artists, a little bit heath robinson, making complicated contraptions, devices or drawing machines, harnessing the powers of nature (natural phenomena such as the wind or light from the moon) to make 'his' art (is it a creative collaboration or is nature the real artist here?).
tim knowles, tree drawing (willow), 2006i realy like the concept of knowles' tree drawings and his website is well worth a look, but you don't get to see much detail of the finished drawings, more the machines that made them - this is an important part of the artist's practice, the systems or methods employed to create the work. another artist worth a mention in this context is the norfolk-based artist roger ackling, whose work i particularly admire, as it is very delicately crafted, often small in scale, combining found materials with a very intricate, controlled method of drawing using the power of sunlight...
roger ackling, voewood, sunlight on wood, 2008...so, here i am, re-creating in my spare time, but with quite unusual art materials (chalk, soot, metal powder, sand, dust or plain ol' dirt), the seemingly ephemeral traces of rust spots and encrusted striations, the pattern of lichens on stone or the subtle blooms of mould on a wall... i wonder what is lost or gained in the translation...a few years back i wrote in an email to an artist (who had first emailed me regarding my paintings) that i would like to leave my canvases out in the elements and let nature do its beautiful/ugly workings, let them go to rot, so to speak - the only problem being that rot is, in the end, rotting and rotten - there is no archival permanence to it, it makes things more fragile, fugitive, transitory, ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that...
detail of a lost painting, 2010what i wanted to do was to make permanent (for myself) these signs of impermanence as i experienced them, but simultaneously i wanted to be drawn into another world or landscape that i perceived just beyond the immediate surface, perhaps just a reflection of my altered state of mind at the time, and not just recreate the raw materiality of the object... i also wanted to conceal some of the made by human hands aspect of the process of creating a painting, to de-personalise it (again for myself, in order to rediscover or re-live the initial aesthetic experience) - thus, the use of various materials and methods to apply, layer, alter, blend, blur, cover up or reveal, slowly embedding a secret (and vital) history into the surface... as i wrote once before, it's colour applied; some of it lived and some of it died...
another detail of a lost painting, 2010i know that in the end the current lichen paintings will evolve to be something quite different from their initial source (the source being, by its very nature and location, separated from my own place of work) - formally synthesized, abstracted and distilled (a word that i probably overuse but it conveys the raw 'essence of seeing'), my own re-creations, that come to exist in themselves and won't knowingly have their contextual twins in the real environment...
faux, the love of artifice
some thoughts on the wider significance of the lichens... it seems quite simple - they signify life amongst the decay, a sign of gentle renewal, the circle of life, the quiet resilience of nature, all the more poignant when experienced within the context of a graveyard, existing on the very surface that marks and memorialises a death (as previously seen in these photographs - on looking and lichen, december 2009, and more recently the lichen drawings) - but that wouldn't fully justify making art or paintings sourced from lichens, as the photographs might convey these ideas quite adequately, in the right context... it would seem there is a challenge inherent in objectifying the powers of nature within art - and artists have been doing this for some time...it was quite difficult to focus on the quiet matter of some painting over the weekend due to the cacophony of resident noise, (i need not go into the finer details of the myriad power tools in usage, dear reader, except to say that the particular occurence of some petrol-powered hedge-trimming at 7.30am was not music to my sensitive ears)... so, my best painterly intentions went a bit awry... what did i create instead??
some alien biscuits or are they mutant cornflakes? some tentative lichen-ness experiments, which could do with being a little more crusty...
i attached one to the painting canvas...
shown here with the artist's hand, to give an idea of scale...
just looking, through the lichen-ness...this idea, of creating fragments to use in work goes back a little... in my mixed media collages of the 1990's i re-created fragments of stone, rust, metal, etc, which were then assembled into the work - many people believed i had found these fragments - i had not, they were entirely faux...here's an example of some eroded fragments from early 1997. you can see some of this older mixed media collage work on my collage art page...
...speaking of artifice, here's a small detail of a large painting on panel, edgescape: lichen/algae, a work that precedes the current encusted fascinations by a few years... but it is also relevant to mention here in that it will be included in a new art exhibition...
i am really pleased to have been invited to exhibit three of my large edgescape paintings (algae, corros and rost) with a new gallery in the fine city of norwich, art1821. they will be shown in an exhibition that has been planned in collaboration with the sainsbury centre for visual arts, focusing on japanese art and the environment. the exhibition at art1821 is called rebirth, to coincide with the sainsbury centre's unearthed exhibition... (many thanks go to BM for helping me get my paintings to the gallery)...the art1821 gallery has a charming ambience with its low ceilings and irregular, cobbled, whitewashed walls, situated in one of the city's oldest 'listed' buildings in the heart of tombland, the medieval quarter of the city... in a curious way, these historical features seem to complement the showing of modern art (i saw some margaret mellis assemblage works on the wall), in the way that the sainsbury centre's minimalist open-plan aesthetic, of the transparent, inside-outside architectural design (not much changed since the 70's), brings a fresh-eyed perspective to a substantial collection of old world artefacts... (for those that do not know, the scva building was designed by sir norman foster) ... i would really like to visit the unearthed exhibition...i had just enough time to also quickly see the norfolk contemporary art show at the forum - did i mention that i have some work in this exhibition too? whilst there i discovered that there is also a series of lunchtime artist talks (but i had just missed one) and also a series of 'artists-talking' videos on permanent playback during the exhibition - i enjoyed watching a couple of these short video talks before i had to dash back... i am not involved in this, so anybody desiring to find out a little more about my art and inspiration may find something of interest in this very blog.i have also added a couple of new webpages to this website, of which this earnest 'artist journal' is just a small (but ever-evolving and expanding) section of it... there is now a new page devoted to the recent/ongoing series of travel-inspired intaglio collagraph prints on canvas. here are four of the canvases currently on exhibition in the aforementioned norfolk contemporary art...
norfolk contemporary art 2010my four iCon works, fjord, tuscany, havana & sushi, are displayed between an intriguing mixed-media assemblage by andy cairns - an artist who was also in the salthouse exhibition i was in last year, and whose work is mentioned in my little bloglet devoted to the salthouse 09 art exhibition - and also a rather small but perfectly formed susan gunn painting... i would like to see this year's salthouse exhbition, landmark 10, but travelling is a bit problematic at the moment (with a knackered, soon-to-be decommissioned iron horse...)...i have been thinking about a collective title for these small intaglio works on canvas, briefly considered iCons (or eye-cons) and then decided upon eikons (from the greek, a symbolic or representational object) - it was still a suitably concise-sounding word - but an icon now also refers to little square computer symbols or visual shortcuts - but the variant, more archaic ei spelling also suggested a reference to the electronic internet... with so many con-nections, i was suitably con-verted...everything is so e, i or ii these days, isn't it... do you have an e-car yet? i once made a birthday card with a comical u-pod, using an apple-style umlaut, with party like it's 1978 as the tagline, appropriating an image from a knitting pattern that i found in a charity shop, of a chap modelling an itchy-looking sweater with a (now) very retro, 1970's sony cassette player - oh, how w-e laughed about the u-pod!! but i-digress, i-had better just keep to the art (but it was quite artistic, in an 'i made this just '4u' sort of way)...so, in the small (ei-kon) works i inverted the process of idea/source to object/meaning by employing various processes and methods to determine a unique 'identity' for the work... they began as humble, small-scale textural experiments for printmaking purposes, drawing upon the visual signs of decay in agricultural outbuildings and the local environment - but then some analysis of colour and associated words, and their real-world connections or counterparts, led, inevitably, to the concept of pursuing some virtual travelling, an activity which gave rise to the titles, and thus gave the work a new, more global resonance and identity... those diy paint colour charts were just the start of it...what's in a title, a name? is it vital or important, is it meaningful, revealing, persuasive, or just a means of differentiation? within the context of (or absence of) subjective art titles one might also mention the artist martin creed again, or mark rothko even, but i am just seeing a lot gushing red stuff, so let's not go there today...i liked pursuing the open-ended nature of this sideline activity, that i would, in a vaguely lynchian way, create works that followed a more convoluted, non-linear course; the end became their beginning. it was also a deliberate move away from a series of strictly numbered works... the virtual travels also inspired the idea of starting a faux sketchbook... in that, if anyone cared to contemplate upon it, that the vast network of the internet is not just a window to truth & knowledge, but is equally a platform for some deliberate artifice & creative reinvention of one's identity and sense of place in the world...random fact alert! i actually graduated in the presence of the great david lynch! he was awarded an honorary degree by the RCA......
a lichen drawing in a sketchbook, june 2010i have also created a new webpage to show some of my recent lichen-esque drawings...i really would like to pursue the idea of doing some larger versions of these - where does one get rolls of good drawing paper, and perhaps, more importantly, is it very expensive?? i probably have one too many ideological plates spinning (or they are just wobbling and are likely to shatter in a very messy, greek fashion) - the eroded circles/discs, the cubed/3d prints, the lichens and their various transformations, the green mould prints, dissolved image transfers, small etchings, virtual travel sketches...now, i am even contemplating growing fake lichens in my spare time...
on achieving a perfect lichen-ness [part two]
the lichen-ness continues, though not that much further on in the process...
lichenscape I (a working title) has suffered some surface erosion, in the manner of the real elements - i am not scared. many years ago a tutor at art college said that that one had to push the image-making to the point of almost losing it, right to the critical edge as it were, and then resurrect it - it would then embody some of the passion, tenacity and spirit of its making. this method of working is not for every artist; it is risk-laden and sometimes stressful, but ultimately liberating. for myself, the secret history of the surface, the discreet (or discrete) signs of erasure or slow accumulation of layered matter over time is at the core of what i do. it also denies the sterile nature of cool, perfectly-rendered abstract paintings. i have a rough plan, a road map, an agenda even, but i will take the necessary diversions to fully explore the territory of my own making.just what is it that makes artists such as twombly, kiefer and hodgkin so different, so appealing? (to quote richard hamilton's work entirely out of context) - answer - they lay bare the messy truthfulness of the painting process. i was reminded too of the two works of sequeiros and reigl in the tate modern - there is some evidence of denudation or guano here, not entirely out of place within the environmental context of lichens...
a very close-up detail of eroded surface textures...my interest in surfaces continues even within the documentary process - i discover more found paintings. of course these are just reframings but they exhibit the same concerns and qualities that i seek within my abstract photography.a few years ago i applied for a grant to support a found paintings project. i wanted to re-present my small paintings as found, or 'reframed' in the conceptual sense as large abstract photographs - which, i thought at the time, would question the authenticity of the photograph (its source) and the creation (or reproduction) of a painting. in short, i would create the paintings, but would disseminate the photographed, found surfaces as the final artwork, images that i had re-authorised through my own photography...i made a brief reference to this idea in this blog post from february 2006 and earlier in december 2005 i wrote a little about my feelings on the rejection letter. yes, they politely declined my request for funding my research & development. it was, on reflection, probably a fair decision. the idea was just that, one in perennial incubation, it was not clearly mapped out how i would do it and why - but, now there are the means to create large prints and canvases on demand, which makes the idea still a possibility, albeit a costly one; it's always a matter of time and money (of which i have little)...and so, progressing on to lichenscape II...
which i contemplated and scrutinised quite closely today... here are a couple of close-up images of the surface textures...
i hadn't, during the process of painting, referred directly to my photographs for compositional elements, but looking at them now i can see that i am edging closer to an impression of a colony of lichens...
but i wasn't sure about the scale, the number, the shapes, the placement - it just looked a little busy, too cluttered... so, with a little jiggery-pokery i quickly manipulated the photograph to edit out a few elements of the painting... such a simple idea... here is the result...
then a quick play with a little digital effecting... a simple inversion and i uncovered some fungal mould spores, or is it bacteria, some rogue pathogenic cells, a deadly virus..? who knows what it is, but i'm not scared...
this reminds me of the dissolved, blind landscape photographs and the digital image transfers that i experimented with a while back - needless to say, those particular ideas are in cryonic suspension while the lichens take hold...