Tag Archives: Construction

Whatever It Is

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Whatever It Is

Another New Studio

I’ve had a mixed January after time off over Christmas. Lots of time spent trying to get an app from Unity onto the app store, I must have spent twenty hours and it still won’t go on so I’ve resorted to putting the Doncaster Platonics app on the Artivive  App.

It works, which is great, but it costs money to use for anything other than minimal output and there would be further charges if the works were viewed more than a 1000 times in a month. That might seem to be a lot of views but the five Platonics drawings are each individual artworks so that’s 200 views each.

Whatever It Is

Christmas Tree – Oil on Board

While I was at home I painted a Christmas tree, because it was Christmas.

Bird Skeleton

I missed several days studio work after discovering water dripping down onto my stairs from the skylight. This proved to be a hole in the roof so that needed sorting, mostly involving waiting for tradesmen to turn up to quote and then sitting around while the one I chose did the job.

While I was in the roof cavity, off my cellar studio I found the skeleton a small bird, I think it’s a sparrow, and I took it into the studio at c-view to draw. This is 140 cm x 80 cm pencil and pastel on paper. This was started on the 12th of January.

Small Fox

I also painted a small fox while I was waiting around at home and did a lot of digging in the garden.

Whatever it is

Bird Skeleton with Red

On the 15th January I was able to get into the studio again and added some red to the bird skeleton and worked over the shadows and some marks on the paper with white paint. I managed to get help to deliver the lemniscate  to the NHS at Barnsley Hospital and also got some photographs taken of the work I’ve made at c-view for prints and a new website.

Bird Skeleton with red wash

I got back into the studio on the 19th January and painted the background of the bird skeleton with red ink.

Studio 23/01/2024

I also started a new half sized maquette for the three trees variations in cardboard. I finished this on the 23rd January and made a lidar Polycam scan.

Three Trees Maquette drawing

When I returned to c-view on the 24th I started a drawing of the three trees sculpture, I’ve also explored this in the sketchbook.

Three Trees Maquette drawing

And when I next got in on the 29th I finished it.

Whatever it is

Red Pigeon

I was in again on the 31st, after a lot of work on the app and the background story to the big Gardens Project and I worked the Red Pigeon drawing up to almost finished.

I’m thinking that the Garden is the protagonist of the story for the project, asserting itself by becoming in the presence of ‘you’ as the witness. As simple as it sounds the longer you are present in the garden the more you see and the more you interact the more you find out. The plot may be the reconciliation ‘of’ or ‘with’ a fatal flaw in the main character. There has to be some kind of achievement at the end of it.

I wrote a kind of manifesto for my protagonist. Which garden I am depends upon you. I am the garden growing the fridge freezer and the bin bags full of ignorance; I am the garden organised with gravel and abandoned to dandelions and curly wurly wrappers bleached and wilted; I am the garden clinical in its efficiency, with no room for invasions or unwanted natives, made new every season with garish borders; I am the garden abandoned to ideology, at the mercy of the wind and the moss and the tap roots, and the ‘wilding’; I am the garden that tells you what it wants and where it wants it; You are the garden I am.

I really should find the time to work consistently on this, whatever it is.

A small aside about photographing work, I took the photographs below in my kitchen with the iPad, the picture is 12inches square. I haven’t adjusted the colour in any of them, it is just a question of finding the right light. The one at the right is the closest to reality.

Fox, colour photographs

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The January drawings can be seen here

  • Draw Every Day – January 24
    Draw Every Day – January 24
    Draw Every Day - January 24 Continuing to draw every day, using sketching pens, japanese ...
    See photo »

…and the December images here

Draw Every Day - December 23 Continuing to draw every day, using sketching pens, japanese brush pens, a set of moleskine coloured pencils, a Koh-I-Noor 4B and Derwent watercolour and liquid charcoal washes. I also added a set of Winsor and Newton promarker water soluble markers. The 13th sketchbook was completed on December 12th and a new A5 book started on the 13th. Still doing double page spreads. The drawings are made any time from 9:00 am at the breakfast table and occasionally later in the day if I'm away from home. The drawings have been posted since the beginning, 6th May 2020, on instagram https://www.instagram.com/latham_1959 You can see previous months through the galleries page https://www.ian-latham.com/blog/galleries or you can go straight to November's drawings here -
  • Draw Every Day – November 23
    Draw Every Day – November 23
    Draw Every Day - November 23 Continuing to draw every day, using sketching pens, japanese ...
    See photo »

There is a link to the previous month’s Gallery on each page.

The drawings are posted to Threads and Instagram each day.

Reason vs Motivation

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Reason vs Motivation

Another New Studio

On the Open weekend I had twenty visitors on the Saturday and two on the Sunday, I can’t complain because I sold a painting.

I’ve called this post Reason vs Motivation as a step towards an explanation of my current practice. When I was talking to people at the open studio the film elicited some comments about its elegiac quality, which tied into my thinking through Eliot’s ‘deception of the Thrush’. Given that gardens in Christian thought are always the garden of Eden and consequently serve as a metaphor for the loss of innocence, the reference to my own garden uses it as trigger for the desire to reclaim something lost. The something lost is lost “in” innocence rather than being innocence. The problem with the past is that memory and nostalgia render it different to the degree that what you desire from the past isn’t what it was in the past, and the suggestion that it can be reclaimed is doubly erroneous as you yourself are the major difference that prevents its return. This is of course entirely obvious and is not the reason that the work is made but is probably the motivation for it being made. I’m still trying to articulate this properly and perhaps that’s the wrong thing to do as nothing kills creation for me quicker than having a reason to do it. I think it becomes contingent when it has that kind of rationale attached. It has to remain poetry rather than prose.

Since the open studio I carried on with the drawing of the photograph made by Jamie Bubb 

Reason vs Motivation

jb-flowers one

Making the image darker and darker.

jb_flowers one

This was the state of play on the 7th December, and started another drawing from the same source.

jb_flowers two

This was the second drawing on the 7th December.

jb_flowers two

And this is it on the 8th December.

jb_flowers one

The first drawing was darkened considerably by the 11th.

jb_flowers two

More detailed was added to the second drawing by the 11th.

Reason vs Motivation

three trees sculpture 15th December

On the 15th December I returned to the big sculpture and added white paint. Initially I’d thought of painting spots where I wanted to piece holes but when I started I decided that I should just paint the gaps between branches, or an idea of them.

pigeon

As I waiting for that to dry I drew a pigeon.

I made a small cardboard maquette to explore the three trees as separate elements on the 18th December.

adjusted the low section of the model on the 21st December.

three trees maquette 19122023

On the 19th December I built a cardboard maquette developed from sketchbook drawings of the new big sculpture and then on the 21st I painted it red.

studio 21st December

The polycam scan of the thin red maquette.

Reason vs Motivation

A few days after the open studio weekend and before I got really stuck in the mud mentally I wrote a further piece in my journal.

The question hovering above all art is ‘What is it about?’. These days there are labels so that you know immediately, or at least you get a clue that helps you make sense of the piece. Personally the question is always ‘Why did you make this?’. Because the act of making is the act of translating a desire into a realisation (or does the translation create the work?). The work starts with an idea that changes through application, an act of both compromise and development, and is presented, mutated, at the end. My response is ‘that’s kind of what I meant’. I […] think that there is a well of experience, belief, prejudice and angst stirred with study, planning and effort that the work springs from.

It doen’t really make it any clearer.

Directionless Direction

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Directionless Direction

Another New Studio

 

A trip around the studio on Friday 17th November 2023. This shows the “redfilm” [link] video in its new projection, then moves out of the booth navigating the “three red trees” sculpture and briefly views the three red garden drawings that had been framed at this date before showing the different lighting settings for the NHS lemniscate. The video looks at the comfrey torus and ends on the trees.

Directionless Direction

I took delivery of the frames for the new work on the 17th November and started to frame the existing work. Red Garden One is above, Red Garden Two and Red Garden Three below.

Directionless Direction

On the 18th I decided that the new iteration of the Redfilm should have statistics about the climate crisis, centred around global warming. I spent the day making the slides and inserting them into the film. The facts were gleaned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report March 2023

Via World Resources Institute . The new film was entirely unconvincing and makes the whole concept somewhat patronising, so I dropped it.

On the 19th I found a review of Jewel Spears Brooker, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 240 pages. ISBN 1421426528. [LINK]

In which the reviewer, Michelle A Taylor of Harvard University, comments that

“the “deception of the thrush” is that the “world of speculation” can be made real, that the objects of the mind could overcome physical objects, the reality of the body: so Eliot returns to idealism—…—and sees it for what it is. Like interpretation, speculation posits its own world, immaterial, with only some relationship to fact.”

I’ve ordered the book to more fully study this but the meat of it is what I’m exploring the edges of in this current set of work. The idea that the fact of making things as an artist removes from them the possibility of representation because they lack the contingency of design. I suspect that as I reach out for the chance to articulate this the art world itself has fully embraced the contingency of design as a necessary precursor to the creative act. When I was much younger and became a teacher I spent the first ten years of my career teaching design precisely because there are methods and, whilst you can make up the rules you follow, there have to be rules. In art, which I consider absolute, you can’t teach it you just have to do it. This is what I mean by Directionless Direction.

Directionless Direction

On the 20th I made some collages exploring the forms in the big red sculpture and the source for it, two of which are reproduced here. The one above was used as the basis of the bigger drawing discussed further on.

The next two photographs show the drawing “bigred” begun on the 22nd of November and made with inks and pastel.

Also on the 22nd I started Red Garden Four.

At the end of the 22nd it looked like this with the addition of the chainlink and the panel.

Directionless Direction

On the 24th November I added the fence posts and the bushes but decided the piece needed more definition. I added a wash of Indian ink and then painted the sky out with Titanium White oil paint.

I also continued to work on the “bigred” drawing.

Taking it through the stages illustrated above, becoming more like the collage as it progresses.

By the end of the 27th November the drawing looked like this, and the studio was beginning to be ready for the Open Weekend at the beginning of December.

Additionally on the 27th I published the first release of the “doncplatonic” app.

On the 29th I worked more on the “bigred” drawing and started another drawing based on a photograph by a local photographer  Jamie Bubb, with permission, that was posted to threads a day or two before.

I’ll post more of the open day in a separate post and also a more detailed accounting of the reason for it all.

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The November drawings can be seen here

  • Draw Every Day – November 23
    Draw Every Day – November 23
    Draw Every Day - November 23 Continuing to draw every day, using sketching pens, japanese ...
    See photo »

…and the October images here

  • Draw Every Day – October 23
    Draw Every Day – October 23
    Draw Every Day - October 23 Continuing to draw every day, using sketching pens, japanese ...
    See photo »

There is a link to the previous month’s Gallery on each page.

The drawings are posted to Threads and Instagram each day.