I’m doing a series of drawings for my friend Jo Millett and I’m almost finished – these are some of the sketches I did before I started. I was trying to find a system for drawing the intricate patterns found in drying mud on the banks of the river Hull (from memory). None of them really capture that but there is something of the process of mud drying out and being pulled back into the water that seeps through and a couple of them get a nice balance of the stochastic and organic for my liking. The final drawings are quite a lot different as they use a hybrid of some of the patterns/techniques in these and have wandered away from the process I had in mind initially – anyway I don’t want to give too much away – but I’ll post photos of the finished pictures once Jo has seen them.
Also, below is an image of ink that has been left to its own devices doing a far better job than i could. I’m trying to think of a way I could dry out ink in lots of identical small containers that I could then either photograph or scan to make a short film.
I’m thinking a lot about animation at the moment – partly because of all the bits of film I’ve been working with recently and I’ve come to a kind of a conclusion about what it is that interests me about the medium. I’m interested in change rather than motion. Traditionally animation is about defining small slices of time which is a very accurate way in which to build up an illusion of movement. What excites me however is the way in which that is unnecessary, film and video do not need to be constructed of linear representations of things and that using frames for other purposes can create new possibilities and insights into the matter that is filmed, videoed or drawn.
So this tiny loop below and the frames above are an example of how I’m thinking about time as just another axis in which to work on a drawing. I started out with one drawing, then worked on top of it on another sheet, using the previous layer to ‘bounce off’ rather than copy. I see it now as making fairly simple procedural drawings which are fed into a recursive system. The temporal aspect is an analytical tool for understanding each layer’s construction and relationship to the whole – the same drawing process extruded. It’s just the beginning of something but I’m excited about how the process might develop.
Serial, systematic glyphs composed in an a-serial, improvised way using carbon paper to hide the layer beneath whilst drawing. Simply counting specific numbers of movements (straight-lines) per glyph and trying to avoid repetition of similar forms allows the shapes almost form themselves, hiding the layer beneath allows for collisions, building a dense cacophony of structures – like standing in a room full of consonants.
“Glottogony” is the study of the origins of language, I don’t think there is such a thing as “Experimental Glottonics” but I think there should be, as I think do the incredibly vocal cats that live down my street.
I’ve spent far too long in front of open office/google docs this week, needed to do some mindless doodling with the pens and pencils I could find in my living room. First opportunity I’ve had to think about the Real Time Strategies exhibition I’ve proposed for later in the year.
Using bitmap graphics instead of pen and ink these are trying to follow the same procedures as in the previous post. But with the additional ability to stop, delete bits, reconnect lines and reform shapes and set off on a new trajectory.
Maybe I should brave the cold and go to my studio at 4am or, more sensibly, just go to sleep and stop pissing around with Graphics Gale but I quite like them.
A small preview of the second in the little series of zines I’ve been making called Anti-Narrative Comics. In a completely different style to the previous one. This is a series of very quick pencil sketches playing with types of mark making in a far looser way than the previous one. I’m still unsure of the final printed product (if it will be printed at all, it might just be a PDF). The style is either a bit of a homage to Cy Twombly or plagiarised from him depending on your outlook.
Some more images from the Grey Sketchbook which I’m adding quick drawings to on as regular a basis as I can manage. Not sure if anything will come from these, but I am enjoying just seeing them as a visual exercise. Because these are scanned you can see a slight onion skinning effect, which shows a bit of how each image relates to the previous ones, as you can see it’s not intended to be anything like animation, but using the points on the previous images as landmarks. Click on the images for a choice of different sizes, via flickr.
