drawing 2


"To know what you're going to draw, you have to begin drawing."  
via Brain Pickings by Maria Popova - Picasso on Intuition, How Creativity Works, and Where Ideas Come From



The core or reason for making a drawing is to know what you are trying to communicate.



FSD 258 Forms of Drawing  


Teacher:  Sue Lovegrove
Represented by:  Bett Gallery, Hobart
                              Gallerysmith, Melbourne
                              Beaver Gallery, Canberra




 Task 1

This first project is an exploration and means for finding a range of possibilities to extend your thinking and problem solving beyond what you know.

 Study the two randomly chosen pictures and write a 300-word response to them and then make a series of exploratory images informed by your responses. 


  1


The first photograph is an aerial view looking down onto the rooftops, driveways, roadways and surrounding garden spaces of a residential subdivision.  Each house has its own space within the whole.  The plan is based on a grid, and is very regimented, but shows differences in each house design by a slight shift in the arrangement of the size and shape of each house on its block giving the impression of an irregular grid pattern.....like a pattern language or hieroglyphs.  Looking down from above gives the viewer a sense of floating or hovering.

Associated words:
  • aerial view
  • plan view
  • external
  • outside
  • above
  • grid
  • mesh
  • block
  • pattern
  • floating
  • distant


  2


The second photograph has similar graphic qualities and is also associated with housing, but is the exact opposite.  It is a close-up perspective looking in from the outside, through a window screened by open venetian blinds, into a small room used as an office. The framing of the scene excludes information about the room and it feels confined.  The image is devoid of people and feels lonely through a sense of absence. It is also voyeuristic looking in on someone's private space.   The room is lit by artificial light that is caught by the horizontal blades of the slatted blind.   The linear pattern across the image suggests slicing and masking.   The contrast of dark and light creates an optical shift.


Associated words:
  • perspective view
  • internal/interior
  • front view
  • looking through
  • close-up
  • voyeurism
  • contained
  • linear
  • slatted
  • optical
  • kinetic
  • contrast
  • layered
  • masked
  • empty
  • lonely



Finding connections between the two photographs

The two photographs are both visually geometric through the dominant grid structure of the squarish shapes in photograph 1 and the linear horizontal lines in photograph, have housing as their subject matter and are a juxtaposition of opposites; grid-linear, aerial-perspectival, outside-inside, distant-close-up and communal-private.    There is a micro-macro dimension associated with the two images and both have voyeuristic qualities.  The viewer is either hovering from above from a drone or positioned on the outside looking in. 

The key words that encompass both photographs and are central to the drawing investigation are:
  • housing
  • pattern
  • grid
  • layering
  • masking
  • spacial illusion
  • contrast (dark/light) (open/closed) (outside/inside)
  • enclosure/framing
  • segmented
  • shift

My first visual association was of a window view I had taken at the Pomidou Centre in Paris about 4 years ago...

...and kinetic artwork in the exhibition there at the time.
  
unknown artist 
Jesus Rafael Soto


Jesus Rafael Soto 

Soto wanted to engage the viewer in the experience of a work and to incorporate the perception of movement into his art.  He was influenced by serialism in modern music in his early work and tried to find ways of achieving complete abstraction by completely disassociating drawing from its traditional function of representing everyday reality.


Housing
The core visual, conceptual and emotive connections that I subsequently made between the two images was that of HOUSING and the concept of LOCATION.  The idea of being elevated above the ground looking down on the roof of my own house with its linear corrugations gave the visual connection between the linear and grid elements of the two original images.  I took quite a few photographs from different angles and in a variety of lighting conditions, including the shadows of the solar tubes on the roof.  

 Mount Rumney roof photographs
I used the following three images  in my first investigation:  
horizontal strips cut out of the photo


squares cut out of the photo


strips cut from corrugations


Influential artists
In taking this angle of exploration I recalled the work of Ingo Kleinert, where corrugated iron and the grid are the basis for a series of works.

As humans our sense of ‘place’ and preoccupation with sites is fundamental to our order and existence as producers and makers.  The emphasis we give to ‘place’ controls and directs in no small way our priorities and aims, and the choices we make in directing the path and destiny of our lives’         Ingo Kleinert 1992

The weathered marks of age and experience on his found materials are a metaphor for life.  The appeal for Kleinert lies also with what he calls its ‘unpretentious and democratic’ possibilities as a material everyone can respond to, yet in quite poetic terms is also capable of expressing the emotions evoked by a historical account of the passage of time. 
                                                          Threadbare 2007, corrugated iron




Emma Langridge
It was suggested I look at the work of Australian artist Emma Langridge.  The linear quality of her work sugges the parallel corrugations of the roof.   the I was immediately drawn to her aesthetic.   
Emma Langridge’s paintings create a classic visual conundrum. Physically, they are composed of few elements – line, proportion, colour, support and medium – but visually and perceptually, they resonate with incredible complexity. There are no figurative elements included which might otherwise provide a viewer with the necessary frisson experienced whilst contemplating the differences between a subject in reality and its re-creation in paint. Instead this sensation is provided purely by the formal relationships created by the aforementioned five basic elements and their reaction to each other.
Her practice involves an optical interplay involving gridded, overlapping lines. Well versed in art history and theory, her inspirations may also be found in a wider catchment area that includes geology, mathematics, architecture and music, particularly electronica. She is fascinated by the concepts of accretion and layering, of sedimentary deposits that build up to a final product which is as much an object in itself as it is the revealed x-ray of its own history.

It’s all about measuring time and measuring the paintings, like sedimentary layers, this idea that you build something up and these things get trapped in the layers and they sort of mark what time you did it. It’s like a reporting, or an objectification of your time. And I wouldn’t want to have any real expectation of what it should look like at the end anyway. Not until that very last point.
I tend to create single works over multiple panels, always rectangular in form. The primary intent is the reconciliation of the given area, using striped sections for the “object” and solid sections for the field or “background.” These stripes tend to be 1mm in width, although many paintings have multiple widths to denote different sections of the form.

I try to create a sequence based on the overall composition, which transcends the individual panel, usually breaking the shape up into recurring motifs: the meander, the broken loop, the interlocking form, etc.
My paintings play on the assumptions of continuation, pattern recognition and the mind’s tendency to complete the incomplete. I do not mind that most people cannot discern the overall sequence/form, as part of the pleasure for me is in the encryption.
For the last few years, I have been moving from flat right-angle based meandering shapes and interlocking two dimensional forms towards the appearance of a three-dimensional “object,” although I maintain that my work is non-objective. This I do by using a flawed perspective, reminiscent of isometric drawings, which creates a warped and flattened sense of space.
Langridge says her work is the ‘accumulated result of the repeated action of hand and arm, left to right, upper edge to lower, mapping an expansion of time and space’.

 Conundrum definition: 
noun:  a confusing and difficult problem or question
synonyms:  problem, difficult question, vexed question, difficulty, quandry, dilemma, puzzle, enigma, mystery. 

                                                Floorpiece 1996 28 panels c. 30cm x 30cm


                                                                    Fundament 2014 40 x 25cm

                                                                    Drawbacks 3 2013


I attempted to use tape on drawing paper.  While it pulled the fibres away and did not result in clean lines it has potential for further exploration.  I cut out either linear or square grid areas from each of the photographs, overlaying them in two different arrangements.  


Other artists:
  • Mandy Martin:  http://www.mandy-martin.com/
  • Ewen Ross:  http://www.anitatraversogallery.com.au/Artists/EWEN-ROSS.aspx
  • Tony Bevan:  http://www.tonybevan.com/Tony_Bevan_welcome.html
  • Anish Kapoor:   http://anishkapoor.com/890/Drawings.html
  • Ed Ruscha:  http://www.edruscha.com/featured-works/
  • Tacita Dean:  http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/works/tacita_dean
  • Roni Horn:  http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/1412/roni-horn-selected-drawings-1984-y-2012/view/
  • Dan Miller:    http://outsiderartfair.com/artist/949
  • Gosia Wlodarczak:  http://www.gosiawlodarczak.com/Pages/Installation.html
  • Hannah Quinlivan:  http://hannahquinlivan.com.au/art/
Note:  powdered charcoal used as pigment for cement is available from Mitre 10 and other hardware stores.



Investigation 1

I cut out either linear or square grid areas from each of the photographs, overlaying them in two different arrangements.  The cut-outs of these three photographs were laid over photograph 2 (the venetian blind image) creating both the grid and linear qualities of the photographs to achieve the illusion of looking through layers into deep space...




The crisp graphic quality was effective, but making a personal connection and pushing the idea further and translating into a drawing project was an an initial barrier, but there are elements that could be incorporated in a future concept.

These investigations were very Matrix-like and reminded me of Japanese artist Rioji Ikeda's data.matrix works exhibited at MONA, which does however inspire the feeling of hovering or floating above, in space..... which is an concept that has always fascinated me, and want to harness this idea and connect it with observing from the elevated position of roof level. 

                                                                      detail data.matrix digital series
   




Investigation 2 

Another experiment, using the ideas of Gabriel Orozco, was to cut shapes into one roof photograph and lay it over another combining two different perspectives to give spacial illusions. 

"Gabriel Orozco’s diverse practice, which includes sculpture, photography, painting and video, explores philosophical conundrums through random encounters and spatial relationships. Using everyday objects in the contemporary urban environment, Orozco makes visible the poetry of chance connections, whimsy and paradox. He works with found materials or situations."



The effects were interesting but this optical visual language did not make any emotional or intellectual connections with me to instigate further exploration.   




Investigation 3

Instead I painted some small scraps of thick ply and used them to draw with graphite using the corrugations from the rooftop photographs as a subject.






From these small investigations the work of Agnes Martin (Canadian) was suggested to me.  


Agnes Martin built her oeuvre around the search for sublime beauty and serenity, following her belief that “art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” Her fine-lined grids, bands, and square blocks of pale, lightly applied color fused the emotional resonance of Abstract Expressionism with the spare purity of Minimalism. Martin’s mastery of line and grid was a great source of inspiration to artists like Eva Hesse and Ellen Gallagher, and her work is often discussed alongside Sol LeWitt’s famed wall drawings. The square is integral to Martin’s work, both as the shape of her canvases and as an enduring motif, influenced by the Taoist pursuit of balance and harmony. “My paintings are not about what is seen,” she said. “They are about what is known forever in the mind."
Wood 1963 ink, ballpoint pen, pencil on paper


Untitled 1960 ink on paper

                                                                                                                
 Gabriel film 1976








Investigation 4

The rooftop shapes in photograph 1 suggested icons or a pattern language.  I cut out a large number of individual house blocks along with some separate and scattered shapes.  I drew through the stencil in three layers, beginning with a light layer using a 4B Lyra pencil.  Rotating the stencil I next used a 7B Lyra pencil to get a mid tone.  Rotating the stencil again I pressed harder with an 8B Progresso graphite pencil.  The visual effect was to give the illusion of space with different tonal layers.....the lighter tone receding and the dark tone coming forward.  An accidental result was the white negative spaces resulting from the overlapping layers that echoed the cut-out house shapes added a conundrum to the image. I also experimented with colour.  This idea has potential for further investigation.




     
graphite pencil


       
    coloured pencil




I tried two more works on painted plywood, one beginning with a dark layer of graphite and lightening the layers by scratching into the ground....the other beginning with a white ground and building up the drawing by adding darker layers, allowing the underlying texture of the board to be part of the structure of the drawing.





             
HOUSING was the key connection made through the two photographs.  Formal elements explored:
  • pattern
  • grid
  • layering
  • masking
  • spacial illusion
  • contrast (dark/light) (open/closed) (outside/inside)
  • enclosure/framing
  • segmented
  • shift
My garden is my office, the gum trees the venetian blinds to the sky.  The roof of my house is the layer sandwiched between the sky and the ground.





Artist Statement

I have an interest in the need to order, organise and control, but it is the ephemeral, the chaotic, the unexpected and spontaneous that embodies the spirit of wonder that we look for.  It is through the juxtaposition of opposites that we discover poetry in the new.  The subject central to both images is the architectural dwelling seen from two opposite viewpoints, which is typically an architectural rendition, and aerial and a front view.  They are depicted in two contrasting visual styles, the grid and the horizontal and vertical, one viewed from a distance the other close-up.  The investigations that I have made incorporate the regimentation of pattern and layers, but uses random chance and chaos to create special illusions and shifts. By using spontaneous marks and layer shifts I wanted to create a sense of kinetic rhythm through texture…..a warp and weft of light and shade.

The linear corrugations of my roof were used as the subject for the task because they embodied both the visual properties of the venetian blinds and the aerial perspective of a roof seen from an elevated position of a plan view at roof level above the ground.

Negative spaces were cut out between the corrugations in various photographs of the roof, which echoed the visual property of venetian blinds, while a chequerboard of squares cut out in another represented the grid of the aerial suburban view of rooftops.  Overlaying these different layer masks created an unusual optical perspective.   Similarly the negative spaces created by cutting out the rooftops in the original image, made an irregular patterned grid to use as a screen for graphite pencil.   By using different tonal values with several randomly rotated screens, the resulting image also produced interesting shifts of perspective.

It is these optical changes of perspective that interests me because it reflects the way random chance and chaos create the sparks that prevent the onset of boredom from the regular and predictable.


WORD COUNT:  324







Task 2

 Further Investigation for Assessment Task 2
My house and garden is my office...in the building design and construction materials, and landscape plants and garden elements.

 Multivalent definition:  having or susceptible of many applications, interpretations, meanings, or values......"a visually complex and multivalent work"   (google definition)

 Isomorphic definition:  corresponding or similar in form and relations   (google definition)
  • illusion of the kinetic
  • sense of illusion
  • appearance of the three dimensional
House layers:
  • sky-clouds
  • roof
  • building construction materials
  • carpet-tiles-concrete-bricks
  • house plan
landscape layers:
  • gum trees
  • native plants
  • grasses
  • woodchip mulch-gravel-stone paving
  • aerial map-landscape contours
landscape textures:






landscape contours:  Warlimpirringa Tjapiltjarri
http://www.mukmuk.com/gallery/by-artist/warlimpirrnga-tjapaltjarri/
 Tingari (Men's story)







Artists :

 Stephen Burley (Australia)
This diminutive painting appears almost monochrome, but it’s not. The effect is the result of a process whereby many layers and veils of colour are carefully dragged over each other. Once I had the fragile colour field laid in, I made marks into the paint, which cannot be erased other than by being painted out. Each expressive line is a once-only combination of deliberate gesture and chance.

These processes combine to create the bush view before you. The paint itself, with its delicious buttery texture, provides the spatial depth. Then, drawing into the paint develops anecdotal and tactile forms on the surface. Together they create a work that is a memory of place.
Stephen Burley Chewton Bushlands 2015





Linda Green (Scotland)

24 Hours Side View


24 Hours Plan View


Gosia Wlodarczak (Australia)
Gosia is fascinated by an awareness of the moment and the mind’s relationship with the outside world conducted through the senses.

I draw my environment as I see it, in real time—tracing and re-tracing the visible. My intention is to record present continuous time to archive my space–time, all bits of the present and my mind’s realisation of now. I translate my living energy into the drawn line.
I can and do only draw what I see. I can and only draw being in the present moment. For me drawing from the imagination is impossible. The lines I leave after each glance accumulate across the picture forming the ever-growing substance of drawing.

The line I draw is processed by my sense of sight and communicated through my body. It is shaped into outlines of real things that my eye registers by its every glance, and contains evidence of being by documenting its fundamental manifestations: making a step, sitting down, lying down, rising up, leaning against, swallowing, taking a breath ...





Roni Horn (Canada)
For the past 30 years, the work of Roni Horn has been intimately involved with the singular geography, geology, climate and culture of Iceland.  She insists that one’s sense of self is marked by a place in the here-and-there, and by time in the now-and-then. She describes her artworks as site-dependent, expanding upon the idea of site-specificity associated with Minimalism.



Roni Horn collected photographs of the famous English river for her photographic project Some Thames from 2000. Presented together, the pictures create a veritable mosaic of subdued brown, green and blue hues. This project, too, relates to the concept of identity that Horn holds so dear. Indeed, "identity is a river", says Horn: flowing, changing and endlessly diverse. And yet we as people have agreed to call this variable water the Thames, as if it were a constant.
http://www.ing.com/ING-in-Society/Art/Search-in-Collection/Art-Display-On/Some-Thames.htm



Task 2 Proposal



From the investigations already undertaken, the proposal for the next task will be to develop the idea of creating the appearance of the three dimensional using the illusion of the kinetic to create special arrangements.  I am fascinated by the juxtaposition of opposites in the contrasts of order and chaos, light and dark, the geometric and organic and the ephemeral and the real.

My own location and landscape will be used as the basis for my idea to give the finished work a strong sense of place from a space with which I have strong physical as well as emotional ties, and where I draw my inspiration.  Elements of pattern will be taken from either the built environment and/or landscape elements, and will be repeated, rotated and layered, while in contrast to these mechanical gestures, random chance will be introduced through the use of ink wash and/or mark making with graphite, charcoal or coloured pencil and include the ensuing random negative spaces and overlapping forms.

A multi-panelled work representing regularity, order and the grid will establish the controlled parameter of the work, while the material used to make the work will create the chaotic/random/organic visual thread that weaves the panels together across the predictable terrain of the work’s surface.

There are elements or mark making in the work of Emma Langridge, Agnes Martin, Stephen Burley, Roni Horn, Linda Green, Cy Twombly and Gosia Wlodarczak that I admire and connect with, and whose work will form a point of departure for this work.














Task 2 development

While I had big ideas to begin with that related to my location, the reality was that they were too big and I had trouble breaking down and simplifying the elements of my initial proposal to develop a process of working towards a final major work. 

My first divergence was to consider the shapes of the wood chip mulch in my garden as the focus for a grid of shapes that might be the basis of a template cut-out...used in a similar way as I had done in the first task, but this time to build the contour forms of my hillside by building up layers from the template to reveal a form.  I tried drawing around them with watercolour to see what the chance shapes might reveal.  




The intention was to use layers to give the appearance of three dimensional form with a sense of kinetic shifting by overlaying the template marks as I had done in Task 1.  To me this also conjured up the shimmering, shifting movement of a murmuration, when starlings flock and move in a single mass before they settle for the night.  Like birds the shapes were individual units that came together to create an organic, moving form.

My first attempt to develop a murmuration shape was to simplify my template cut-out shape to a simple square.  Using a roll of Japanese paper I overlaid the squares and drew into the form. Unfortunately I did not take a photograph of the unsatisfactory result, but the detail shows the effect. 









I cut the drawing into strips and overlaid them vertically to resemble venetian blinds.  The result was that it gave the effect of dappled light and shifts between strips of shadow and light., and was much more successful as a work. 





We were introduced to a range of watercolour artists, and these are some exponents who have exceptional skills that I enjoy. 
Jude Rae




Thornton Walker



'Pengosekan Still Life'  2007






Watercolour is a drawing technique that I have never tried because of its seemingly uncontrollable nature, although this is the aspect that makes the medium, in skilled hands, such beautiful marks and surfaces with which to express ideas and observations.   Rebecca Salter creates beautiful textures with watercolour washes. 



Rebecca Salter








Without the obvious imagery of landscape painting these works make one aware of how we really need to look.  Perhaps as Agnes Martin suggested, looking at art should inspire the same approach or response as looking at the ocean.  “You just go there to sit and look” (Agnes Martin from Agnes Martin and Richard Tuttle, exhibition catalogue, Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth 1998 26/4 - 2/8).  This simplicity of approach pays out an equally rich reward in the case of Rebecca Salter’s work.                                        
Anna Moszynska 2006 
(catalogue introduction Rebecca Salter Bliss of  Solitude, Beardsmore Gallery)

Japanese paper- washi paper
Despite it fineness and flimsiness, washi is much tougher than wood-pulped paper and has the ability to withstand working on both sides, thus allowing attention to be drawn to its objectiveness rather than two-dimensionality habitually associated with paper.  Besides its textured consistency, the particular translucency of washi allows traces of marks on one side to remain visible on the other.  Salter has used this to create a dynamic between marks made on the frontal surface and images impinging from the reverse.

Anna Moszynska 2015 
(catalogue introduction Rebecca Salter Along These Lines, Beardsmore Gallery)

Salter’s use of line also significantly straddles both Japanese and western methodologies.  On the one hand the use of the grid, which acts as an underlying structure to so many drawings – either ruler-drawn or formal through the joining edges of different cut-out papers. Salter uses the grid in many of her works, but then allows serendipity to undermine its controlling substructure with puddled ares of thinned watercolour.  Yet on the other hand the fluid marks, which cross many of her drawings in rapid rills or in swift horizontal lines are reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy, which she studied in Tokyo.

techniques
  •        Salter also cuts up the paper into sections and reassembles
  •        She uses sharpened sticks as the conduits for ink
  •            Feathers may inscribe marks
  •        Or even impressions of muslin cloth
Sensations of rain, the movement of sky or wind-speed can be intuited in the varied registers of line she uses, acting as memories of the changing weather patterns she has encountered.

(Hush of nothingness) as in the empty space associated with Zen meditation.  Time is slowed down and as with the works of Agnes Martin, creates a space for thought.

Rebecca Salter’s beautiful contemplative work stays with the viewer long after they have left the physical object behind.  Her labour intensive process retains that element of craftsmanship, which she acquired during her time in Japan at a formative stage in her career.  Her layering of marks, dashes, washes is worked on, removed, covered, building up residues of light, tone and line which fuse and meld into a quality of other-worldliness which is both ethereal and adamantine. Her work, frequently informed by a grid-like structure, has always been dependent on observation, sometimes leaving a horizontality which suggests the meeting of land and sky, at others and this seems more present in some of her most recent work, a strong verticality.
Fiona Robinson


Rebecca Salter - Into the Light of Things  ISBN 978-0-300-17042-9





Watercolour Notes from class
Watercolour is traditional colour pigment mixed with gum Arabic (gum from trees) and is resoluble.  Traditional colour pigment is ground up precious stones/minerals/gold and is more expensive than synthetic pigment.  These can be obtained from:
·      Kremer (NY): http://www.kremerpigments.com/
·      Cornaelissen (London): https://www.cornelissen.com/

Pigments can be transparent or opaque.

Gouache is pigment mixed with an inert white pigment such as talc or chalk, which makes it heavier and more opaque.

Tempera is pigment bound with egg yolk and distilled water, and is typically used to make small marks.  The viscous material has a tendency to crack when used to apply large brush strokes.

Cheap watercolours tend to be flat because they contain less pigment with added fillers.  More expensive quality watercolours have proportionately more pigment.

The difference between watercolour and acrylic paints is that watercolour is soluble and often transparent, whereas acrylic paint is pigment that is bound with a waterproof material

Layering watercolour is the means by which colour is changed.  Traditionally burnt sienna or raw sienna (contains cadmium yellow, a luminous gold) washes were applied underneath with ultramarine washes over the top to give a three dimensional appearance to landscape.  Warm colours come forward while cool shadows recede.
GLOVER – made small marks and built up lines
RUSKIN – (Pre-Raphaelite 1860s) used stippled marks
TURNER – built up marks, smoothing out the lines

Light underdrawing is sometimes used to denote the idea before applying colour.  Masking with magic tape or latex can be used to control the areas where colour is applied.

CONTROL OF TONE
Tone is achieved through the strength, control and fluid expression of marks.

There are two basic techniques:
Wet on dry – making wet marks on dry paper, where each layer is allowed to dry.  This is very weather dependent.  Cold and damp weather is not conducive to working this way. Layers dry more quickly on a sunny day. 

Allowing each transparent layer of separate colour to dry between applications gives more life to mixed colours.  Light travels through transparent watercolour. Layers = depth of colour.  Colour has a tendency to become flat when mixed before being applied to the paper.

Gouache (body colour) is opaque and can be used to paint over the top to edit and block out.  Gouache when watered down is not as luminous.

Wet on wet – wet marks are applied to damp paper, where applied colour bleeds across and into the damp paper.


MIXING WATERCOLOUR
Granulation occurs when transparent colours are mixed together (like burnt sienna and ultramarine)
Cockling is the wrinkling or puckering effect when watercolour dries

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INK & WATERCOLOUR
Ink is a dye with shellac, and can be either waterproof (can’t change) or non-waterproof (can be reconstituted and bleed).  Chinese calligraphy ink is often non-waterproof, and is produced as sticks.  Samuel Palmer used non-waterproof ink (sepia dye and gum Arabic)

PAPER
Printmaking paper is unsized to absorb maximum water.  Watercolour paper is sized in the process of making it and is made from 100% cotton rag.  It is often sealed with egg white.  This helps to keep the colour on the surface rather than being totally absorbed in the paper. Some papers are semi-sized.  Paper matters a lot when using watercolour.  

Smooth paper is hot pressed, while rough paper is cold pressed.
         200gsm is the minimum weight to use.  It can warp
         500gsm is expensive, but firmer 


BRUSHES
Sable and squirrel are the best.  They are fine and hold moisture well.  Brushes are loaded with water and then used to pick up colour and mix  before applying.  Fine lines are achieved by holding the brush vertically and with a stillnes in body and concentration.
That is How the Light Gets In
My own watercolour experiment....That is How the Light Gets In was titled from words in the the Leonard Cohen song Anthem.....'There is a crack in everything, That is how the light gets in'.

Anthem, by Leonard Cohen
The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what

Has passed away

Or what is yet to be.


Ah the wars they will

Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring


Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.


We asked for signs

The signs were sent

The birth betrayed

The marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring



You can add up the parts

But you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
There is no drum
Every heart, every heart

To love will come

But like a refugee.



Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.















This finshed experimental work is so much more pleasing than I thought it could be, and has inspired me to continue learning to use watercolour as a medium




Japanese artist Maio Motoko, used small strips of vintage fabric to create this impressive impressionist screen, which could be sky, wind, water or indeed an idea of a murmuration  


On Golden Ponds, Maio Motoko
http://www.kehoe.com.au/artists/on-golden-ponds/


The slivers of landscape observations in the Weipa works of Fred Williams are also reminiscent of the idea of the blind blades capturing horizontal views of a cut landscape.


  Weipa 1, 1997

  Weipa IV, 1997







Lines in nature
Queenstown, Tasmania

 The lines captured in the sedges photographed near the cemetery site at Linda on the west coast are an inspiration as subjects for future drawings.


....as are the lichen covered eucalypt trunks on the Lyell Highway.
Cameron Robbins
What I love about Cameron Robbins' work is the energy contained in the fine lines that express such a beautiful and unpredictable spontaneous form.

 Excerpt from Cameron's website

 The Wind Drawing Machines are installed in different locations to receive weather energy and translate it into an abstract format of ink drawing on paper.

 A physicist from the Bureau of Meteorology has described these wind drawings in mathematical language as 'phase-space diagrams'.

 The drawing machines are instruments.  More like clarinets and pianos than compasses or set squares, they must be maintained, practiced, and performed to produce work that communicates.

 The machines respond to wind speed and wind direction, and allow rain and sun to also play on the drawings.  The principle employed here is tht the wind direction orients a swivelling drawing board connected to a wind vane, while the wind speed drives a pen on a wire arm around in a cyclical motion.

 While it is a mechanical thing with axles, bearing, and pulley wheels, it also has inbuilt flexibility which allow it to respond to subtle and chaotic dynamics and to stray from any predetermined path.
http://cameronrobbins.com/wind-drawings/




Murmuration  works

A murmuration of starlings preparing to roost, in Scotland. The starlings are generally a highly social family. Most species associate in flocks of varying sizes throughout the year. A flock of starlings is called a murmuration.



 detail





 detail



 detail



While there are aspects that I like about these drawings, particularly Murmuration 1, I feel I could develop this idea much more successfully, as they haven't quite realised the forms that I imagined.  Murmuration 2 requires more development to finish this work.





Artists Statement
Task 2

Observing the nuances of the visual and emotional landscape is at the core of how I look at the world around me, finding poetry in the formal elements of line, light, texture, pattern and shadow seen in the diversity of the organic and constructed world we live in.

The idea for these works was to create the appearance of three-dimensional space through the arrangement of chaotic, random and controlled marks while maintaining an energy and life within the work.  The predictability of everyday life demands control and it is the spark of marks that is an enjoyable relief from the mundane with the aim of feeling the pulling of light from a matrix of lines and tonal areas to give the impression of looking at or through an object.  Am I looking from the outside in at reflections on a window with slivers of light seeping from the inside, or is it a landscape seen from the inside through open slats?

Whether it is strips cut up to make a whole, as in the hanging blind That is How the Light Gets In, or the body of lines in Murmuration 1 or the mechanical gestures overlaid through a template in Murmuration 2, it is the light and shade created from random chance combined with the elements of fabric and built construction that interests me.  The matt transparency of watercolour washes and the rich shininess of graphite are both seductive surfaces that maintain a delicate fragility on Japanese paper, emphasising the tenuous nature of light.

The way in which Cameron Robbins’ wind machines create lines, and the impressionistic fabric landscape screens of Japanese artist Maio Motoko are inspirational in the way the parts make up an energetic whole.  The phrase ‘There are cracks in everything, that is how the light gets in’ from Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem is a connection between these works that gives them all a common emotional bond.  Light pierces the darkest spaces creating highlights, shadows and transparency and it is the pursuit of the ways of light that has been the underlying objective of these works either through a moving body of birds or the light seeping between the cracks in the slats of blinds.

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