I was delighted to read today that one winner of my recent Art Giveaway square collage postcards has very generously blogged about my artwork in his own art and drawing blog - I do not feel worthy of such praise, but the kindness of his acknowledgement is most flattering. I urge anyone passing by to read his blog for the wealth of art-historical references and for the attention given to the process of drawing as both creative practice and theoretical discourse.
collage postcards, 2009On another note, here is another of my intaglio collagraphs on canvas, titled according to my colour value rules (although i decided to add the 'red' afterwards).
havana [red], intaglio collagraph on canvas, 5" x 5" x 1.5"I was inspired to pay a short visit to the website flickr to view some photographs of the crumbling decay of the city of havana - a place that I can only dream of visiting - but another example of how some rules of chance can lead us to see new things.
Lastly, I am endeavouring to be more rigorous with using the appropriate capitalisation and punctuation from now on......Edit: If you want to support, through charitable gift aid, the first aid and recovery effort after the shocking devastation and loss of lives in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, please see this page on the BBC news website for ways to donate...
colour values
looking at the paint colour cards in a diy hardware store always leads me to think how paint manufacturers attach emotional, subjective meanings to their palettes of colours (whose job is it? do they sit around a table and say yes, that shade of blue speaks crete? or we like the sound of tuscan sunset, let's mix the colour to match). perusing the diy store's colour charts i felt i was on a virtual holiday as i came across coral canyon, niagara blues, delhi bazaar, celtic moor, sicilian summer, himalayan musk - the last confering bohemian values, artistic, refined, culturally aware, spiritually enlightened.. but i preferred the single word descriptions from another paint manufacturer: smoulder, wildwood, snowfall...so my thoughts naturally led to the colour chart works of gerhard richter, who, in around 1966 saw some colour charts in a hardware store and thought they made the perfect found or readymade abstract paintings, colour separated from any narrative or symbolic meaning (although as mentioned above, colour is marketed by its emotional association). as with much of his work, there are themes or concepts to which he periodically returns. from his first colour chart paintings of the 1960's he revisited a systematic approach to colour once again in the 1970's, this time using formulas to first mix and then arrange the placement of the colours, made more interesting in that the colours were mixed and graded very methodically but the placement of colours in a grid format were organised by chance, selecting numbers at random (much like the lottery draw).in 2008 he returned once more to the colour chart theme, creating his most ambitious colour chart to date, 4900 Colours - 196 panels made up of 25 coloured painted squares each, which can be arranged or grouped in any sequence, from one very large-scale work to any permutation of small scale works (but any resemblance to lego would be unkind).
gerhard richter, 256 colours, 222 cm x 414 cm, oil on canvas, 1974i wonder if there is any logical or mathematical connection to the 256 colour system developed for early computer monitors?grids and squares, order and arrangement have been some of my artistic preoccupations over the years.. so, when thinking of some possible titles for the first few of these little experimental canvased collagraph prints, whilst adjusting the images in photoshop, i thought about the numerical values that are returned by the color picker tool, the combination of letters and/or numbers (hex, rgb) matched to a print swatch colour (such as pantone)...a little time spent googling and i set about creating my own color code rule... sushi was returned as a first title, and it seemed quite suitable; a reference to nori (on reflection a better title), of japanese ceremony and etiquette.. curious as to how reliable this rule or the code would be, i tried it once more with another print/painting and it returned fjord, immediately conjuring up images of glacial paths and crisp norwegian landscapes (as with the colour swatches from the diy store)...
sushi, 2010
fjord, 2010so i'll be playing by the rules for a change...
from white snow to grey earth
for a few days, i found the transformative power of the bleak, white wilderness both beguiling and oddly unsettling, thinking for a moment (as i observed and sketched) that it could stay this way for a long time, that i must re-adjust my vision and any perception of colour, in preparation for the colourless days ahead.. and the dazzling whiteness seemed similar to the glare of a desert landscape, a neverending space, and yet disorientating in its cool erasure of the usual geography, the familiar blurred, and buried...
the snow had swept up into little scarp-like drifts along some of the high ground...
and a back road meandering between the flat fields slept soundly beneath a clinical white blanket of snow, comforting or suffocating...
i made my small mark within the white landscape, creating a path i would not otherwise make..
and then the true greyness of the landscape emerges, sodden and soiled, and ragged at the edges, but marking a clear road ahead...