Tag Archives: New

The Geranium Project (R&D) 02

Posted on by
Reply
New Installation Drawing in progress

New Installation Drawing in progress

Three wall view of the new installation drawing.

Another week effectively lost because of extraneous factors – as much as you might plan for breaks for a variety of reasons, they have a habit of arriving at the most inopportune moments. This week a planned break to visit family clashed with the need to organise moving studios and with the progress of the installation which gains an extra patina of angst due to the ACE funding. The fact that the project is financially supported makes it obviously more important that it progresses and succeeds. The funding was paid into my account this week which makes the thing real.

So I only really got to work on Friday and moved the drawing on as illustrated.

I re-read ‘The Myth of Wu Tao-Tzu’ this week, Sven Lindqvist discusses the morality of seeking to live in art and his own efforts to do so and awakening to the retreat it represents. In the preface to the first English translation, published in 2012, Lindqvist talks about ways he has witnessed this imaginative leap, in Australian Aboriginal art for instance where the pictures are maps of territories that cross the boundaries of physical and spiritual and of his own experience of Fiona Banner and David Kohn’s ‘A Room for London’, a boat atop the Queen Elizabeth Hall. He recognises that “Wu Tao-Tzu had the courage for solitude[…]He had the courage to disappear and continue alone, on the other side of the visible in art.”

the other side of the visible in art.

I had a visitor a week or so ago who suggested that if your work is not about the imminent threat of our climate emergency then what’s the point of it? Lindqvist comes to much the same conclusion, and presents the same lack of hope.

A mental picture of the space;

The Garden is not a copy, or a description, is it an equivalence (obs.)

You walk in the space. There is a path through the space. There is an apparently impenetrable wall around the space but on closer inspection there are gaps. Any hole in the fence takes you to another world (.wrl sense). Through one gap you enter a vast field, at a distance is an object, you can go to it and see that it is a framework of right angles with an ordered tube curving through it. There is nothing else in this space. Yet.

I have not found a way to make roses, yet.

There is the sound of birds singing some distance away.

In the garden a bird hops from one fencepost to the next fencepost.

A cat crosses the garden, curls up under a tree, slows its breathing and disappears.

If you are here long enough you will the cat will reappear, uncurl and walk slowly out the garden. You may follow.

A bird perches on the fence, a female blackbird, she calls shrugging her wings and tail. The call is echoed from a shortening distance.

It would be good to have a secret superimposition of the real and virtual spaces – there are three spaces – REAL – INSTALLATION – VIRTUAL.

Can (shall) I play the sound from the real garden live in the installation?

NEW STUDIO Week Sixteen

Posted on by
Reply

This will be the last general post under the new studio banner. It’s not that I’m stopping anything, it’s because I was awarded a grant by Arts Council England to develop the Geranium project. So from next week I’ll be posting Geranium Project 01 and should run up to GP40 by the end of the funding period.

fourdrawingscolour_blog

On Monday 3rd June I worked on four drawings that I began last week, working them together towards a larger drawing that I’d stretched paper for. The drawing process is still build up, break down, build back up. I enjoy the prospect of working to correct as the drawing retains some of the character of the erroneous marks when it’s corrected.

fourdrawingstranslation_blog

fourdrawingstranslation_blog

This is the translation to a unified whole, which is far too twee – I think that’s the word – and required some dissolution and retrieval. I dripped very thin black paint over it, took it off with more paper, dripped white paint over it that I allowed to dry and then worked over that with white conté.

ourdrawingstranslation_further_blog

This is where it was at when I had to stop for the day. The reds have had more pastel applied and the central block has been worked over with more charcoal.

Wednesday 5th June I went in to the studio to find there was leak, I traced it up through three floors to the roof, it damaged a sketchbook.

dripdrysketchbook_blog

This is the sketchbook drip dried through the morning, before I had to split it up to dry in the afternoon.

sketchbookdryout_blog

I concentrated on six drawings I had started on Monday by ‘mono printing’ off the big drawing.

sixdrawings_0506_blog

Obviously these are still in progress. I then did a little work on the big drawing.

junedrawing_blog

Friday was a day full of visits again, potential building purchasers, artists looking for studio space and collaborators for the Geranium Project.

In between these and talking to builders and property agents I managed to take down the installation so that I can re-paint and reconfigure it.

installation_blog

installation2_blog

I also managed to work on two drawings from yesterday.

 

blackdrawing_blog

bluedrawing_blog

So this weekend will be spent working out the schedule for the Geranium Project.

 

NEW STUDIO Week Fourteen

Posted on by
Reply

Continuing with drawing this week, and having to concentrate on the 3d model because of the poorly cat.

six new drawings started

On Monday I started six new drawings, these had white emulsion painted on the 17th (Friday) and were added to on Monday.

Garden Drawing 20/05/19

Also began this drawing on four sheets of A1 cartridge. It harks back, as I realised afterwards, to the ladybird drawings I did an age ago –

https://www.ian-latham.com/blog/2015/08/08/ladybird/

https://www.ian-latham.com/blog/2015/08/15/ladybird-2/

https://www.ian-latham.com/blog/2015/11/28/ladybird-2-finished-in-so-far-as/

– All of these drawings are trying to find a way to realise the 3d model as projection and environment for the installation.

sketch notes 20/05/19

I thought it was worth including a picture of a sketchbook page with reflections of the day’s activities. I often write in the sketchbook or my diary to record the way I’m thinking, not really to hold on to it but more to be able to see how my thinking has changed through the process.

drawings continued

On Wednesday I continued working on the drawings from Monday, for some reason I didn’t photograph one of them and I can’t remember why. Wednesday was split up by a visit to a potential new studio in the morning, it has twenty rooms including a small hall/gym and a roof terrace and is just around the corner from where I am now. In the afternoon I had a visit from the architects for the potential buyers who spent two hours measuring for drawings so I’m on borrowed time at the minute.

Wednesday Sketchbook

I started to pick up the elements from the six drawings in the sketchbook and then developed three new ones from the bottom right sketch.

three new drawings

On Friday, as I couldn’t get in to the studio I made a model of the middle drawing.

There are also two new garden videos ready for project with a more robust model integrated as a walkthrough but I’m dissatisfied with the experience as it lacks the quality of the drawings.