Found Paintings

I took these digital photographs at the Bristol School of Art. This kind of suface is the result of layers and layers of accidental painting and repainting. Contriving to produce such a surface rather defeats the point, and (like the difference between distrssed furniture and an antique) often looks daft. Of course, the act of framing a section of a rich, paint-spattered environment is a powerful one. Compositional beauty (perhaps all beauty) lies in the correct application of a grid, and I am no photographer. Often, the beauty my eye finds in these found paintings in the environment relies on a semi-conscious editing out. I cannot photograph what I see.

I have a passionate attraction to all things distressed, dirty, moldy, verdigris or patinated. Looking at lichen or the cracks in leather can occupy me for hours. I think it has something to do with the scale-invariance; aerial photographs and microscopy have much in common. Staring into rockpools, I lose my sense of scale. For a feverish moment, my sense of myself expands and contracts at the same time.

I seem to loom, ballooning, yet simultaneously, vertiginiously, to dwindle down to a mote. I call this sense 'the giantiny'. Along with this scale trick, the kind of surfaces in which I find most pleasure have that quality of Leonardo's Wall (which many men have spat upon). Yet even this rich hallucinatory material does not fully explain the almost culinary attraction I have to this kind of thing. They are a feast for my eye (I have but one). On seeing such a surface in life or art, I almost need to lick my lips. Reach out and grasp with my hands. Open my mouth. I cannot fully describe the sensation, the hunger I have for the speckled surface amazes me.

I have a troubling 'Truth to Materials' Leech-style superego, which takes an offence (comic in its intesity) to material made to look like something it isn't, but in a half-arsed way. A copy of a copy. Why, for example, do cigarettes have mottled orange filters? The filters were once made of cork. Accident lazily becomes tradition. The reason such a thing as the colour of cigarette butts makes me so angry is, I hope, bcause it is emblematic of a wider trand in culture. The future becomes a thoughtless shallow copy of the mask of the past.

The Gatehouse

The Gatehouse is a hybrid image I made in 2006 from a number of digital photographs, combined mainly by abusing the Photoshop healing tool. During my late teens most of my work was made in this way, using Photoshop to combine scans, sketches and photographs to create this kind of lyrical gothica. The Gatehouse was the first such image I had made for a couple of years, and I was pleased to find that working with 'real' media (drawing and painting) had improved my Photoshop skills. Mammon and my Collapsed Notebooks notwithstanding, I have yet to return to digital imagemaking. During the next round of The A Game, my current project, there will be ample opportunity to rediscover what is possible; the progress I have made over the last few years with my penmanship will, I think, stand me in good stead when I come to experiment with web-based work. The most challenging part of this next phase will be learning about vector graphics, a whole new breed of digital techniques far removed from playing with pixels.

Dryads

From time to time I find myself drawing dryads.

Infovis

This is my first expriment with information visualization using the publically available software Many Eyes, charting simple correspondances between myself and some of my favourite artists.

The Fall of Language

This is an ink and graphite drawing on reclaimed sunbleached card. The composition was influenced, Surrealist-style, by the characteristics of the surface. Hidden within the inked swirls are the letters of the Alphabet and the Arabic numerals. The pale tower has onehundred and fourtyfour layers of assymetric bricks, hand-drawn with technical pencil.

The Overstrung Piano

This ink drawing on Fabriano paper, completed over a fortnight in Easter 2006, is around one by one and a half metres. It's a crooked, inaccurate rendition of an overstrung upright piano with the front removed. The strings, by far the most excruciatingly time-consuming aspect, are chirstmas marker and gold gel pen. Well, two gold gel pens. The drawing has annotations embedded within it, describing the functioning of certain parts of the overstrung mechanism.

Collapsed Notebooks

I keep, a little obsessively, a series of notebooks. Any scrap of apt information I come across gets jotted down, roughly in the order they're encountered. I used to use those black fake-Hemmingway style ones, but they're too expensive and the pages are too small. I switched to these three squids brownpaper ones, which I fill with "Eye" pen and correction fluid. Here are some overlayed pages from my most recently completed one, Idris Khan style. My favourite of the collapsed pages are the crow drawings, done ambidextrously: one page one hand, facing page the other. Then done over with both hands again to complete the drawing. The final image is a collection of the White Pawn studies I have been doing. The Queen's Pawn.

maMMon

This is maMMon: fat, fatuous and grinning. Without pity, incorrigable, avarice incarnate. My golem, built of despair and apathy, vat-grown from googled parts. This is carcinoculture encorporate: growth for growth's sake. Look up and see him appear to the fanciful in shimmering oilslick on the side of a skyscraper.

When writing about serious issues, indeed even when thinking about them, one instantly comes up against a barrier. To use the word 'environment' is to immediately alienate your audience. To talk about corporate misdeeds, environmental damage, social ills, whatever, is to be ignored or fobbed off as a 'crank'. There is no way to broach the subject. There is no way to look someone in the eye and say:

“I just found out about what Coca Cola is doing in Columbia. I can’t get the image of the 14 year old daughter of a trade union activist who was kidnapped, tortured, and dumped at the side of a road out of my head. My friend, I, formerly a lover of Coca Cola, can no longer drink this or any of the thousands of other drinks owned by the Coca Cola Company. When I go to Turkey, I cannot drink the local bottled water, or anything else bought by Coca Cola. The fact that the sugar used in Coca Cola is harvested by child labour, the environmental destruction in Bhopal, India, none of it mattered to me. I drank Coke regardless. But this, this story changed my mind, and I cannot forget it. My friend, I come to you for your advice, and solidarity. I can no longer suffer alone. I must share my story. I cannot do this alone. Join with me in not drinking Coke. Show me that this does mean something.”

But no, it cannot happen. My story is ridiculous; a secondhand anecdote about foreigners.

I don’t know why it is, but seriousness is taboo. There is the feeling:

“If I listen to this, if I give my heart, where will it stop? If I learn of the wrongs of Nestle, I can no longer enjoy their ice creams or chocolates or cereals or the products of any of the many other companies they own a large stake in. Where will this end? Every choice I make will require weeks of research, choosing between one manufacturer who poisons the water and another who subcontracts sweatshops. There is no holy path in this world. I do not want to know about these things; who am I to cry about the fate of the world, or to sit in hand-me-down judgement? We must be realistic. We must harden our hearts. I have no time to mourn the deaths of those I don’t know. People die every day, and if they die at the hands of American-trained paramilitary militias working on behalf of Coca Cola to suppress workers rights in bottling factories then so be it. If union leaders are executed at their bench in the factory then so be it. I wash my hands of it.”

Public space is increasingly invaded, branded and privatised. We are bombarded with information specifically designed to demand our attention, compromise our judgement and self control, and misinform us about the reality outside the bubble we live in. Our views, our ideologies, our various sub-cultures are intentionally shaped by multinational corporations; the collusion of ad-funded media and complicity of governments mired in massive debt hides systemic coercion and corruption beneath.

The crucial thing to understand is that this has not happened all of a sudden. Nothing is ‘going wrong’ with the system. Power has always been inextricably linked to wealth and force; to control. The only differences today are differences of scale and means. At no other time in history has Man had the power to alter the workings of the planet as a whole. Much of this is intentional; interlaced empires span the globe, funnelling the wealth of the world into fewer and fewer grinning mouths.

Dreadful as this is, the game has been the same since the Holy Roman Empire. What have changed are the unintentional means: bioaccumulative poisons jumping ten times with every step up the food chain; millennia of stored carbon pouring daily out of chimneys; fiddled genes creeping into the pool. We have the power to damage things we cannot repair, and we are using it.

My rage, my bitterness, my despair is carcinogenic. I cannot live with this knowledge, yet I am compelled to learn more, uncover more. No more can I believe VERITAS VOS LIBERABIT. Rather, THE TRUTH HURTS. Yet there is an enjoyment, a very similar enjoyment to smoking, I think. I crave dark knowledge, powerful truths that can bleach hair. Wisdom that shows in the face. I can’t help but read: read as if the next article will show me how to solve the problems, all the problems; read as if knowledge itself were enough to protect me from the horror knowledge itself provokes; read as if it made a difference; read as if the next line can forestay the crippling apathy and futility. I read everything I can, and finish nothing. My room is piled with open books, nested on each others’ cracked spines.
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The A Game Map

This image is a collation of my preparatory studies for The A Game. I use annotated diagrams to record and develop conceptual and spatial ideas, exploring how concepts link to one another and how these connexions can be expressed visually. (I've posted this as a very big image so the text is a little more legible, so downloading it before viewing is advised).

Early Plans for The A Game

Here are two double page spreads from my book A to B, which contain some early notes and sketches on the develoment of The A Game. The book they are taken from is an ongoing project using maps from a 1970s touring gazetteer of the british isles as the stimuli for drawing and collage.


These diagrams reference a number of starting points for the Game's development. Among those shown here are the five Chinese elements, alchemy, environmental damage and the politics of cartography, and Mammon. Mammon is the embodiment of callous avarice and fiscal corruption, an anthropomophic personification with roots in the Old Testament.

The A Game

On the occasion of my completion of the First Round of The A Game, I here begin a weblog charting its progress and vagueries. These images of the board and single pawn were taken during the Line of Thought exhibition held at Paintworks, Bristol (16/05/07...).

The board comprises sixty four separate tiles, each just shy of one foot square, on 3/4" fibreboard. Each was produced as an individual image and no two are the same, although motifs are echoed by more than one tile and there are several sets of tiles produced using similar techniques.


A list of materials and equipment:
MDF
Indian Ink
Quink
Mitsubishi "Eye" Pens
Corretion Fluid
PVA
Polyfilla
Acrylic
Acrylic-based Varnish
White Emulsion
Solvent-based Gold and Silver Inks
Gesso
Porcelain
Pastel
Graphite
Grass-stains
Salt
Wax
Iron Wire
Thread
Transfer Type
Printed Map
Blowtorch
Spot-welder
Firelighting Gel
Scalpel
Axe


The pawn was made by hand from porcelain and then fired and glazed. The Second Round of the game will involve making a full set of pieces from a variety of materials, including carved sea coal, brass and latex. I have begun my preliminary researches for the Second Round and hope to have completed the four Rooks by early 2008.



Some points of departure:

The Alphabet: The history of the Alphabet is one of abstraction and the evolution of graphic memes. Basic hieroglyphic forms which could double up as syllables in names or for use in words which had no hieroglyph were adapted by Egypt’s Semitic population for use with their own language. This altered body of signs was then eventually taken up by the Greeks, who further simplified and abstracted the images.

The original pictographic signs were worn smooth by countless hands, simplified by an endless process of Chinese whispers until they became abstract shapes. These 26 sigils were useful precisely because they are meaningless, empty signs that can be filled over and over again. With centuries of use, however, the letters of the alphabet have gained faint meaning again, not least because of the development of alphabet books for to help children memorise the letters (A is for Apple and so on).



Chess: The evolution of the abstract chess piece follows a similar course to the alphabet, travelling hundreds of miles between people who only half understood one another. The original Indian forms were themselves the result of centuries of development, a set of complex miniature sculptures rich with symbolic detail. When chess was taken up by the Arabic world, their religious prohibition of representational images meant that new pieces were made, retaining only the rough silhouettes of the Indian originals for recognition.

From the Middle East, these abstract pieces were taken all over Europe, and gradually over the following centuries marking and then full relief was added to the pieces in the tradition of Mediæval European carving. During this period, older abstract sets in precious materials remained in play, and many cheaper sets were made for use by the general public. These sets, often of ceramics or turned wood, were a mixture of abstract forms and representational elements because of the cost of carving.

The abstraction and then loss of the original representational forms was a critical development, however, because it allowed a pluralism of ideas about the form and meaning of the pieces. Across Europe, pieces were made differently. This meant that during the Renaissance, new abstract forms for the pieces could be invented. Many such forms were inspired by the wood turning process. These were combined with representational crowns for each piece to aid in identification.




Games: There is a certain kind of looking that only comes when one is deep in a game. Attention is enhanced, narrowed. Schooled to certain stimuli, the mind overlays an invisible lacework of potential correspondences onto the eye. Relentlessly, the eye attempts to bore into the surfaces of things, only to glance off them, restlessly flitting from one knot to another and back. Looking, looking. All the while feeling the threads linking the knots, feeling the tremor of a movement in the web, feeling the fine lines like a hair under the eyelid, feeling that maddening itch of something on the edge of perception.

It is as though I am playing a game of chess inside myself. I can feel the subtle power of making a move, but I have not yet found how to make a board and pieces outside myself to share the game with other people. (Sometimes a calligraphic line can mirror part of the game for the instant after I draw it.) Any object can become a pawn, any word. Each square on the board contains another board. Each move is like a song.

A different game is being played out in the world, as unlike to my game as death is to life. The A Game. In this game I am less than a pawn. Lead moves into flesh. Money changes hands.