These drawings are beautiful. Check it out:
http://www.travishead.com/index.php?/ongoing/reading-list--graphite-reactor/
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Collage and image generation
From Blouin Art Info, http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/840686/from-cut-and-paste-to-action-montage-100-years-of-collage
From Cut and Paste to Action Montage: 100 Years of Collage History
A century ago Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, occupied with the development of Cubism, hit upon a technique of humble origins but resounding consequences. Once let loose, collage was so perfectly adaptable to other ways of thinking about art that it has been reworked and repurposed nearly every decade since. What is at the heart of this affinity for the medium in the modern age? To be sure, collage’s felicitous juxtapositions and rude incongruities are in step with the rise of mass culture and its relentless competition for our attention. On a darker note, maybe this method of creation that uniquely depends on a destructive act — wrenching and cutting bits of content out of context — was just what was needed to represent the turbulent 20th century. And the recasting of the romantic artist as scavenger and recycler seems apt in our post-heroic era. Whatever its root, the attraction continues. Contemporary collage has taken over l’Espace de l’Art Concret, in Mouans-Sartoux, France, through November 4, and has been the focus of a range of recent gallery shows, a few of which are cited in this short history of the innovators who used the technique to construct a whole new art.
Cutting and pasting, of course, predates Cubism. But it was the Parisian Cubists who first imported it from the realm of handicraft into the fine arts. (The technique’s name derives from the French papier collé, or “glued paper.”) No one is sure exactly who made the first snip. A case has been made for Picasso’s integration of a piece of oilcloth printed with a cane pattern in Still Life with Chair Caning; others argue for Braque’s use of wood-grain wallpaper in Fruit Dish with Glass. Both works are from 1912. Despite the long-recognized importance of this period to the development not only of collage but also of modernism, fine examples can still be had.
A leading Dadaist, tone poem composer, sometime typographer, and restless innovator, Schwitters introduced the use of collage as a snapshot of the everyday. He integrated scraps of cardboard, bits of text, and ticket stubs found in the street, their juxtapositions emblematic of life’s chance encounters. Newsprint was not an illusionary stand-in for a newspaper in a composed still life, but a piece of the quotidian right there on the picture plane. He liberated the letters merz from an ad for Kommerzund Privatbank and pasted the nonsense syllable on an early work, then went on to apply the term to hundreds of collages, paintings, and even an ever-changing environment of found objects bound together with plaster.
Though too often under-represented in its history, women were central to Constructivism in Russia. Stepanova created fabrics and clothes for the proletariat and designed some of the period’s most arresting graphics for posters and publications, working alongside her husband, Alexander Rodchenko. Collage played a key role in the development of the movement’s style, allowing for a mix of clean typography, active figures and engaging faces cut from photos, and thrusting geometric forms emblematic of the relentless march of Communism. Even in non-propaganda work, Stepanova’s shrewd ability to evoke motion on a static page shines.
“Höch’s work anticipates the feminist observation that the personal is political,” observes Jane Kallir, codirector of New York’s Galerie St. Etienne, which specializes in the art of Weimar Germany. As the most prominent woman in the male-dominated Dada circle, Höch had plenty of reason to take up the cause of women’s rights, but her art was never didactic. As Kallir notes, Höch was able to bring a subjectivity to even overt political topics that grounded her art without dulling its bite. And she embraced a wide range of aesthetics, deploying absurdist social parodies, nearly abstract graphic experiments, and Surrealist dreamscapes with equal aplomb.
Rauschenberg’s best-known work, from the “Combines” he introduced in the mid 1950s to the later screen- prints made of layered imagery lifted from mass media, derives directly from early experiments with collage proper. Works made in 1952 and 1953 already reveal him to be expert at editing visuals from the world around him. These spare pieces often join just a couple of pictures taken from old books with odd pieces of cloth. The addition of an occasional brushstroke of paint — and in one case feathers — now seems to foreshadow the “Combines.” The iconography steers clear of the overtly surreal, but hints at an intensely personal symbolism reminiscent of that of Joseph Cornell.
Putting to use her keen eye for graphic design, Herder built collages whose evocations of architectural facades and stage sets veer into the realm of abstraction. They are striking for her ability to treat monumental subjects at an intimate size as well as to infuse formalism with a sense of play. Where many collagists rely on figurative imagery to engage viewers, Herder’s work delights the eye with mere juxtapositions of shapes and variations of color. Herder honed her compositional skills working as a commercial artist, and although she never took to Pop, her studio was a meeting place for Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and others who would take up techniques from both collage and commercial art.
Romare Bearden
Check out this NPR story covering the work of Bearden: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1428038
Bearden fused photographs, magazine clippings, paintings and old fabric to create collages that document life in the South during the mid-twentieth century. Much of the imagery in his work explores familial relationships, place and dislocation.
Wangechi Mutu
Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She is best known for her large-scale collages depicting female figures in lush, otherworldly landscapes. Her work explores issues of gender, race, war, globalization, colonialism and the eroticization of the black female body. She creates mysterious cyborgian figures pieced together with human, animal, machine and monster parts. She often combines found materials and magazine cutouts with sculpture and painted imagery, sampling from sources as diverse as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry and science fiction.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Paul Noble
Paul Noble is an English painter, draughtsman and installation artist. After completing his degree in Fine Art at Humberside College of Higher Education in 1986, he moved to London, where he was a founding member of the artist-run gallery City Racing. At City Racing he held his first exhibitions, which consisted mostly of small narrative paintings and drawings suggesting infantile dream-like worlds. Later he made whole installations based on a single narrative. The game was accompanied by comic-strip drawings that depicted the unemployed characters leading an aimless existence. Despite the bleakness of his themes, Noble's work is rich in visual delight. Parodying the intense fantastical doodling of teenagers, his paintings, drawings and installations, in which he has invented whole new worlds, marked out a particular territory somewhere between despair and hilarity.
Noble further developed the theme of social hopelessness through the creation of a unique metaphorical urbanscape. Nobson(1998; exh. London, Chisenhale Gal., 1998) is presented as a vision of a utopian city rendered in very large and highly detailed graphite drawings. Upon closer inspection, the dystopian nature of this imaginary city, its institutions such as the Nobspital, and its dysfunctional occupants becomes apparent. Continuing the Nobson theme, Nobson Newtown (1998; exh. New York, Gorney, Bravin & Lee, 2000) depicts a cityscape in which the rows of buildings spell out the town's name in an orthogonally projected typeface. Noble described the work as ‘Town planning as self-portraiture', which helps explain the apparent lack of inhabitants, since the only inhabitant is the artist himself.
Here is an excerpt from an interview posted in The Guardian, 2009.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/sep/19/paul-noble-how-he-draws
Image: detail from Ye Olde Ruin, 2003-4, pencil on paper, 426 x 732cm. Courtesy of Paul Noble, Maureen Paley, London and Gagosian Gallery, New York
I use the devices of technical drawing. These devices help shine the sharpest light on the things I depict. I am against hierarchies and perspective. I arrange the objects of my drawings on a spatial plane using cavalier projection. The origins of this projection lay in military cartography - fore, mid and background are got rid of and everything depicted is equally close and far. The viewer becomes the architect and the drawing, an architectural plan. He or she is no longer earthbound but hovers like an angel over the described scene, taking in the entire design.
I was raised on the north-east coast of England, and this has conditioned my aesthetic. I think like the flat, grey skies of wintery Whitley Bay - tonally. I use very hard pencils, very rarely softer than 4H. Sometimes the pencils are so hard it seems they would rather scratch a hole in the paper than give up their pale graphite.
• Paul Noble was born in Northumberland in 1963. He is represented by Gagosian
Rackstraw Downes
Reposted from Hyperallergic.com
Painting Is a Metaphor: An Interview with Rackstraw Downes
Rackstraw Downes, “Sand Hills with Cell Tower, Presidio, TX, P.M.”(2010). Oil on canvas, 20 5/8 x 35 7/8 inches. (All Images Courtesy of the Artist. © Rackstraw Downes, Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York)
Rackstraw Downes’s recent paintings are currently on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery. Born in 1939 in Kent, England, Downes now lives between New York City and Presidio, Texas. Well known for his panoramic landscapes, Downes works for months on site in both urban and rural surroundings. He is often described as a realist but this term is perhaps better applied to his subject matter than his technique. Through his sustained and intensive outdoor working process, his paintings empirically draw attention to the true nature of the 21st Century landscape. They are places we don’t necessarily linger, but are nevertheless our environments. He represents the very perceptual process, with his “fish-eye” views: the curved horizon lines, matched by arcs and ellipses found in nature and man-made structures. The complexity and strangeness of these forms and arrangements remind us that a painting is always a metaphor, not a facsimile. Downes is also an accomplished writer. He edited an anthology of the writings of Fairfield Porter, and In Relation to the Wholeincludes five of his own essays on art. In 2010, the Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, NY) organized a traveling retrospective of his work.
* * *
Jennifer Samet: I had this experience of looking at art recently, where I felt like I was seeing artists taking “shortcuts,” figuring out ways to stop their paintings too early. When I saw your work at Betty Cuningham’s gallery, it seemed to me the exact opposite. That you are not taking any shortcuts. Also it made me think of this Cézanne quote, “Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, the same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most powerful interest and so varied that I think I could occupy myself for months without changing place, by turning now more to the right, more to the left.”
Rackstraw Downes: Yes, we are a sound bite culture. My work is very slow; it evolves very slowly. I have been drawing in a four-block range, with the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital on the right, and the overpasses and on and off ramps from the George Washington Bridge on the left. I could work there for years. When you’re there, as Cézanne said, you keep seeing more and more things. Almost anything becomes a composition and a possible motif. The longer you look, the more you see. You do really feel like you could paint on that painting forever. You discover new things, new relationships, not only the ones to the left and right, but you stand back, and discover new ones right where you are working. It is by painting it that you clarify it to yourself. You keep searching and searching. And to say that you’ve found it is not true. You’ve only found one section.
JS: Do you think of it as a never-ending pursuit, then?
RD: Very much so.
JS: But ultimately you have to finish a painting.
RD: You do. And you finish it when you say to yourself, I’ve worked on this painting as much as I can, and it’s not getting any better.
Rackstraw Downes, “Traffic Under the George Washington Bridge” (2010). Oil on canvas, 21 1/8 x 63 3/8 inches.
JS: That is amazing. But, it seems like a sad way of looking at it!
RD: I used to paint as quickly as I could. But then I decided I would take as much time as the painting needs. And more and more, even my sketches are not so much sketches. I work longer on them, because they save me time on my big paintings. You figure things out. It is very hard to work on a large canvas outdoors, working perceptually. You can’t see around it, you can’t see over it. You can’t relate the left hand to the right hand. It is very hard to see the whole thing. So if you work smaller, it’s easier to get from the left hand into the right.
JS: I wouldn’t have pictured you working from left to right. Do you do that?
RD: I work in different ways. There is only one rule in art, which is that there are no rules. Sometimes my drawings or paintings creep across the canvas, and you follow, saying, this is an angle, that’s the little angle next to it, now it goes this way, that way. At other times, you say, there’s a tall building here and there’s something round over here, so you start to go from two places at once. As you get closer, sometimes they meet correctly and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes you have to just start all over again. In some drawings, large areas were erased, because they were the wrong size or in the wrong place.
Rackstraw Downes, ”Under an Off-Ramp from the George Washington Bridge” (2011). Oil on canvas, 26 x 56 inches
JS: Many of your paintings have these spliced-in additions. Would you ever splice a section in the middle?
RD: Why not? Sure I would. If the right hand section was wrong, I would add a section in the middle. But I don’t usually do that. It’s usually on the edge. It usually has to do with fitting an area into the edge, and not cropping it. It is inevitable that you edit to some extent, but you try to be as complete as possible. I painted a farm once, and there was a pond, and I had to have room for the sheep to go around. And in the middle, there was a float for the ducks. And I wanted to get the whole pond. That pond seemed to me to be a whole world, by its nature. You can’t find that in the city so much. John Marin did when he painted Lower Manhattan.
I start my paintings with a chord. That is actually a rule I made for myself. You get a touch of green, a touch of blue and a touch of brown. The chord is an idea, where you bring three colors together, so that you see the contrast.
JS: Ha, you have a rule!
RD: Well, I sometimes break it. I square my drawings up with red threads. I don’t square it up with pencil lines, like the old masters did, because then you ruin the drawing. Then, I use a brush to draw with white lines on the canvas. I’m working on top of a stained ground — a brown canvas. This way, you can go toward a middle tone. White looks very bright on that brown ground. If you put a white cloud on a white ground it looks kind of gray. Constable did this with his oil sketches. And so did Vuillard. The white line stage is very important. Because it means, when you start the painting, that you’re not saying, where should I put this hole, the entrance to that tunnel. You’ve already put it somewhere. You get started from the drawing.
Rackstraw Downes, “UNDER THE OFF-RAMP FROM THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE” (2009). Graphite on light blue paper with blue threads, 17 x 36 3/4 inches
JS: So all of these techniques you’ve worked out, is it from your study of old master paintings? Because it doesn’t sound like anything you were taught in art school.
RD: No, I wasn’t taught any of this in art school. I painted geometrical paintings in art school. My first representational paintings were extremely crude. At Parsons, I taught the Albers drawing class. The Albers drawing class has nothing to do with working from observation at all. It’s all to do with separateness. You spent a whole three-hour class trying to draw the collar of a shirt, going around somebody’s neck. You exercise on that one detail. In the spring, I took my class outdoors, by the river, and I said, “Just draw what you see. Draw this whole scene.” They couldn’t do it, because they saw every element as a separate problem. They drew the smoke in one manner, and the ship in another, and the water in another.
JS: So it is the opposite of the Cézanne concept of “relational” painting?
RD: Exactly. And you can see an example of this kind of drawing in the Tintoretto at the Met. You see in the underpainting that his hand is very loose, very position-searching, very modern.
JS: Is this the biggest break from your education?
RD: Definitely. To deal with the whole thing. To deal with light, color, all those things. The whole business. “In relation to the whole,” I call that.
Rackstraw Downes, “Remains at the Site of the Old Military Cemetery, Fort D.A. Russell, No. 1″ (2009). Oil on canvas, 14 1/2 x 36 7/8 inches
JS: In a video interview, you discuss this issue of having to get this particular curlicue of a form in nature – how that real detail is the subject. But, in another essay you talk about how painting is always a metaphor. How do you reconcile these two things?
RD: Yes, painting is a metaphor. You cannot represent a three-dimensional world in two dimensions without metaphor, unless you’re a sculptor like Duane Hanson. That is a total re-creation. It doesn’t live or breathe, but in every other aspect, it is a total re-creation. That’s the opposite of what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to re-create in the terms of painting, in painterly terms. One thing that happens, for example, is you start a painting, and you try to get it right. You say this edge is here, and then, no, it’s not, it’s further over here. And, the color isn’t quite that color. And slowly, bit-by-bit, your painting begins to get a little turgid, a little drab, and painstaking looking, and that’s not what you want. You want it to be lively! You want the surface to be lively, to somehow give the feeling of life, without being life. You give a little fleck to your brushstroke. You want it to dance off the surface. And you see that even in someone very realistic like Vermeer. You get close to Vermeer, and you see that it’s quite abstract. There’s a wonderful passage in the letters of Van Gogh, where he talks about how Vermeer is completely different up close than what you’d expect.
JS: Do you start from subject matter or form?
RD: I’m interested in both. I’m starting from both. Sometimes, the idea is to look up. That’s what I am doing now. I’m looking so up that it is almost behind my head. I am looking up, because, for years, I was painting long-formatted paintings, and I am trying to get away from that. I am looking also for different kinds of structure. In the paintings at Betty’s there were quite a few paintings with ellipses on the ground. There was a dance floor and a cemetery, both the same shape in plan, and I purposely painted them at the same time because one was about life and the other about death.
Rackstraw Downes, “Outdoor Dance Floor, Presidio, TX, from the Bandstand Looking South” (2009). Oil on canvas, 21 1/8 x 63 1/8 inches
JS: I think that on so many levels, that’s what you are doing — two different things at the same time.
RD:Yes. I think that is true. I do want to say something environmental. I think that landscape is often an escapist genre. But, even if you start with an environmental idea, it is not what you profess; it is what you express that counts. That’s my problem with most political painting. It is not very convincing. What do your behavior or your actions demonstrate? What do they express? We say that we want to preserve the landscape but we don’t act that way. We actually want to build more fuel plants, and refineries, and get more oil out of the ground. How many people, for example, do you know, who bought an article of clothing in the last ten days because it was green, not because they thought it fit them well or look cute on them. Few of us take that stuff seriously. I want to say, “This is how we live. We build tunnels under the highway; we put bridges over our heads, and all these sorts of muscular achievements.” We admire those achievements. What do you express when you’re making your paintings? What you express is unconscious. It is not something you planned. I think that plans are less interesting than the aura that comes off your painting.
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