Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Five Small studies

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I did them for a few reasons: for the sheer fun of it (and they were fun), and some are tests for work I want to make bigger.  Also, I neglected to order the glass I needed to finish the large window I am making and the final sculptures were not done being cast, so I had an open couple of weeks.  That will not do!!!

So, when I say “for the sheer fun of it”, I mean that part of what I wanted to do was explore motifs and techniques in a “safe” way—i.e. low stakes because they are small and not all that time consuming or expensive.

Here’s the dirty low on each one:


“Threshold” 16.5” x 7”
I keep returning to this figure that is banging on a door.  Like a cat, I imagine she wants to be let in if she’s locked out or she wants out if she is locked in.  I made this particular figure in b+w last year, but decided to finish her as part of this series.  The other one is not done yet as she will have a color test which is taking a bit longer.
Here is a piece from 1999 with the same motif.  It is in the V+A in London. 

Birdbath”, 35” x 18”
Why am I so obsessed with this theme?  I dunno.  Paging Dr. Jung!
NOT DONE YET!  9" x 5"

“Murder of Crows”  10" 10"
Three stages of painting
 I doodled the head and figure separately, as I often do.  I wanted to make at least one roundel as I consider myself to be rather massively influenced by this tradition.  Here are some awesome examples from Ye Olde Country (England).


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“Ennui”  12" x 14"
Three stages of "Ennui" in progress
 
(Alternative title, “Ageing Cheesecake”):  Yeah, I’m 53 so whadaboudit????

“Luster”  12" x 13"

three stages of painting Luster in progress
A kinky suntan or maybe not. Maybe its you who are the pervert? The chain is not attached to anything.  I like you to interpret these things, not me.


 “Three Tiered Cosmos”  12" x 15"
 three stages of painting “Three Tiered Cosmos”
This I can say the most about.  In the post below I am going on about “The Mind in the Cave” and that’s where I got the idea of what to do with this sketch.  I was originally imagining her on a “desert island”—one of those tiny comic strip trope islands, big enough for only one person.  Reading about the universality of the three tiered cosmos got me thinking as I wanted to depict her island surrounded by fish which I was sort of loosely associating with the subconscious (or, in macrocosmic terms, the underworld).  By using the concentric ovals, I put the sky surrounding the whole thing.  I just needed to make her desert island into some sort of yin/yang because design-wise, I was making the underworld dark and the heaven light and the middle had to be both but the dark had to be touching light and the light had to be touching dark for it to work metaphorically and visually.  Does this make any sense?  See examples!!!


Like this!
Or this!!!  (Robert Fludd)
Or this!!  (Outside shutters of Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights"


"Waiting Room" NOT DONE YET

Friday, May 2, 2014

The Mind in the Cave


Currently I am reading The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams.
What a fascinating book!!  As much as it is about the origins of art, it is also about the origins of human consciousness.  Some of the themes of the book I find most interesting are his connecting normal, universal neurological activity to our conceptions of reality. For example, many, many cultures conceive of a three-tiered cosmos; a “normal” level at which “normal” life and perception take place, a lower level and an upper level (in our culture that might be hell and heaven).  The author believes this conception arises from neurological activity that affects our awareness in altered states, like dreaming and hallucinating.  They tend to take on either the qualities of pressure and sinking feelings or soaring and flying sensations.  Hence, they are later explained as an underworld and an overworld.
 


Another theory he develops is that mark making also follows universal tendencies, those being grids, stars, zigzags etc.  These “images” are what we see when we close our eyes and are called “phosphenes.”  (More on phosphenes here). 
As he states on P. 127, “People in this condition are seeing the structure of their own brains”. So, then when we make these marks, when we idly scratch away at notepads, we are drawing our own brain.  Whoa! Pretty amazing.
“Phosphenes”  28” x 24”, 2008  (yes, this is exactly what the inside of my brain looks like.  That's the whole point, is it not?)
But I am most interested in his theories on the origins of image making (and, by extension, art).  What’s interesting?  Well, one thing he says is that it could not have arisen from body art. Wow, jewelers, fashion designers, tattooists, scarification aficionados et al: you have just been demoted!  Could this be the origin of Craft vs Art?  There's a thought.

Lewis-Williams believes that 2-D representations, which he calls “parietal”  (stuff on walls) art are a wholly different paradigm. He says that order to “invent pictures”  (my quotes, not his) one needs a socially agreed upon context, something that relies on language.  He also notes that it’s a real chicken and egg dilemma: what arose first?  Our ability to perceive images as meaningful or our ability to make them?  He dispatches with some popular theories too: that drawing arose from cavemen with charcoal embers scratching in the ground out of boredom and happening to notice they look like something.  Or that the shapes of rocks looked like animals so they just kind of helped them along with pigment.  No, these images rely on there being an existing “database” for 2-D images having meaning.

OK, I am no anthropologist and I may wish I was a neurologist, but, sadly, I am not one!  How frustrating as I wish I had enough knowledge to really discuss this. I still find value in the theories he is disparaging.  What about all those facial recognition modules in the brain?  What about how we see shapes in clouds?  That is surely nature and not nurture  (although I gather his point is that without the social context of language, those images we see would remain “autistic” and locked away in our individual experience and even un-remembered as we would not have the language to codify them and to a great extent would be just more useless detritus of being alive.) 
He points out that there is no evidence of stages of inventing drawing/image making.  No evidence of an “artist” trying out different subjects or styles.  And this really gets me!  Why, oh why, is there so very little images of humans and of human faces?  What is with all the bison and aurochs?? I get it, bison and aurochs were very important to them, but surely so were their own faces and bodies. I am really astounded by the fact that we did not choose to draw ourselves!!!

One thing the author doesn’t discuss (but I am not finished yet, actually, so maybe he does in the last 80 pages) is how images making/drawing develops in children.  Children make scribbles for a while, which seem to gradually coalesce into something more meaningful.  Then they go on a trajectory of attempting “realism” and I think (but can’t say for sure since I am also not a child development expert) that they compulsively draw human forms.  Is that nurture?  Could be.  But I think the draw (pun intended) towards figuration is very deeply encoded into us…so why didn’t the cavemen do it??
Representation of a human puking by me at age 3 or 4.
Someone go do a Ph.D. thesis on this, please!