Tag Archives: Painting

Stepping Aside Occasionally.

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Stepping aside occasionally.

At the end of my last post I highlighted a gallery of new drawings based on my explorations of lemniscates, or at least the idea of lemniscates.

  • Lemniscate Explorations
    Lemniscate Explorations
    Lemniscate Explorations A series of drawings based around the idea of the lemniscate    ...
    See photo »

I started to think about how to see a lemniscate while I’m waiting for funds to be released to make the large version of the clear resin cast that I posted in Gardens Project 12 , and thought about the idea of two circles and how they might be interfered with to suggest a continuous movement. Essentially viewing a pair of toruses such that they act as Möbius strip.

first leminscate maquette

first leminscate maquette – paper, thread, piano wire – 42x10x23

second leminscate maquette

second leminscate maquette – paper, thread, piano wire – 42x10x23

I built the maquettes above to see if I could find a quick way to explore the concept through physically building rather than constant drawing or virtual modelling. I needed to step away from the virtual for a while after working intensely on the gardens project.

Finitude Large Drawing

Finitude Large Drawing – ink, guache, floor paint, charcoal, gesso – 100×80

From the maquettes I made sketches and then a smaller series of drawings (most of the drawings for this project are done on Amazon delivery bags) using limited colour. The rest of the images can be seen here

finitude three drawing

finitude three drawing – guache, gesso, floor paint – amazon bag

Another deviation from this was to build the torus form from comfrey leaves and observe the drying of the form over time.

Some sources found while I was searching for solutions to the transition between finitude and infinity. The Postmodern Peripatetic, Christopher Brinkley’s philosophy blog gives a background to infinity as a concept.

https://brinkley.blog/2021/03/10/infinity-finitude/

The prolight+sound (Frankfurt based entertainment technology trade fair) has a brief review of Refik Anadol’s exhibition “Temporary Immersive Environment Experiments” from 2015.

http://prolight-sound-blog.com/perception-experience-finitude-infinity/

Or take a look at the very impressive website https://refikanadolstudio.com/

Park Youngjin discusses Badiou’s “L’Immanence des vérités” in which he rewrites Plato’s allegory of the cave suggesting that “Truths are absolute, in that the dialectic between finitude and infinity leads to the creation of the œuvre endowed with an index of absoluteness.” in this article in Nature from July 202. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00864-0

Stepping aside occasionally.

comfrey leaves and thread – 22cm dia

I use a trail camera in my garden and make films from the footage captured, this film is from 13th August when my camera fell from its stand and faced the sky capturing the movement of the trees and the sun for the whole afternoon. I’ve got a full two hours of clips assembled as a film and I made this fast forward version as well.

 

Gardens Project 15: Weeks of Dithering.

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Gardens Project 15: Weeks of Dithering.

There are eight videos tracing the development of the gardens project so far.

The first shows the introduction of the trees and bushes and ends with the errors around the second church.

The second shows the slide and the difficulties with climbing that made me seek a different solution.

Then there is the solution and some of the adjustments.

Followed by the speed adjustments that I needed for the locomotion to work more reasonably.

Then a run around the area when all that was worked out.

This was followed by a digression into the canopy scene – using one of my apple trees as the backdrop for a model of a branch with flowers.

and a video showing the resolution of that into a working scene.

The final video, necessarily at a lower resolution shows the current run through of the project, starting with the cave of the sibyl and running through the oak leaf, through Glover Street, with the falling toy, and into the canopy before returning to the oak leaf. There are still parts to be added to Glover Street and a few tweaks to be made to the canopy digression.

I also decided it was time I updated the webpage for this project how I remember myself

Drawing

I’ve carried on drawing every day and you can see the July images  here

  • Draw Every Day – July 22
    Draw Every Day – July 22
    Draw Every Day - July 22 Continuing to draw every day, in a new sketchbook using a set of ...
    See photo »

The drawings are posted to Twitter and Instagram each day.

Lemniscate Explorations

A set of Lemniscate Explorations

I’ve also started a series of collage drawings of lemniscates that can be seen in this gallery Lemniscate Explorations

Gardens Project 13: The Tale of the Hapless Amateur

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Gardens Project 13: The Tale of the Hapless Amateur

Gardens

This is the kind of back where I was six months ago post, although inevitably I’m in a slightly different place. Work has meant that I was restricted to only a few hours a week and had begun by the end of March to resent it. As I write I have one more day to do before I am retired again.

I’ve got the start of the project to a workable state – there will be a lot of tweaking and tinkering before I declare ‘finished’ – and I think there is something of a story there. I’ve been moving, scaling, positioning, testing and retracting every aspect of the environment over the past couple of months. I’m trying to break the process down into a series of things I’m happy with and things I’m unsure of. The things I absolutely hate (for the moment) I just consign to an unused scene.

The combination of dilettanteism and lack of knowledge is the big drawback to making any project, every step I take with the head set on I see more errors.

My notes for this latest iteration read

‘hands not controllers. Fire out of sync on the torch. Stone texture unconvincing. Leaves too thick generally and difficult to navigate without instruction. Needs an indicator for the portals. There is a long wait for chapter one to load – needs a cut scene. Unsure about the news, not great when falling but OK when fallen? The roads aren’t smooth enough. Lots of the buildings don’t meet the ground very well.

There is too much empty space and aimless movement in the scene – I cut fourminutes out of the video moving between scenes over empty terrain. The main road is a disaster. The water in the boating lake needs to be moving and it needs to appear to be besides the sea. Savick scene is too empty and needs colour removing. Greenway was better in the previous iteration.’

At the moment I’ve decided that what’s missing overall, barring the glaring omissions, is the sense of confinement in each scene so I’m splitting chapter one back into three or four parts and making sure each section is clear and easily navigable. The trick is to limit the possible movements but make it appear as if there are places to go, if only you could get there. I think the aesthetic is going to change as well – it needs to look much more like its been drawn.

The Gardens project posts start here 

Drawing

I’ve carried on drawing every day and you can see the April images here

  • Draw Every Day – April 22
    Draw Every Day – April 22
    Draw Every Day - April 22 Continuing to draw every day, in a new sketchbook using a set of ...
    See photo »

On May 5th I completed two years of drawing every day.

Gardens Project 13 The Tale of the Hapless Amateur

Coffee cup, drawn on 5th May 2022 two years after starting the daily drawings.

The drawings are posted to Twitter and Instagram each day.

Other Stuff

I’ve updated my Yorkshire Artists website, https://yorkshire.art/directory/artist/ian-latham/

and made a 360 video of the garden. The first part of it I inadvertently inserted the wrong clip so from about 25 seconds in for abour 90 seconds you can manipulate a flat image in space with your mouse button.