Praeterita

On my last visit to the studio, I mixed some umber and ultramarine airbrush colours, took a fine point, long-handled brush, and started to paint shapes and images derived from the Sharpie drawings ...

... to the painting that I glazed in yellow on Day 19:

I still don't think it's finished. After all, there are still a few square inches of space left unfilled, damn it!

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Back in the studio for a couple of days after a busy week, I went ahead and coloured that picture brownish-yellow, using a mixture of acrylic glazing medium and a couple of drops each of yellow and naples yellow:

The thing about working with a white background all the time is that there's nowhere to hide. If your lines stray just a little, they stick out like a sore thumb. Glazing a colour over everything gives one a bit more margin of error.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Well, it was only for one night, but at last I got to exhibit in Chicago's swanky River North gallery area. I contributed a piece to a charity auction which was held at the Gruen Galleries. Hundreds of people attended to place bids on dozens of pieces of art displayed on the walls. Most were available through silent auction: each piece had a notepad with a pencil hanging next to it, on which you could write your bid. Six pieces, including mine, were selected by a panel for a live auction, which was conducted by a guest auctioneer from Christie's.

Below is an album of photos I took during the evening.

Heartland Alliance charity auction at Gruen Galleries, Chicago, Feb 25, 2011
Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

The baroque statues in the doorway of the Francis J. Dewes House, a late nineteenth century Chicago Landmark Building.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Meditation/web-talk number 58 discusses a collection of fragments by contemporary artist Gabriel Orozco.

In addition to this video, you can see all 57 previous videos on the Videos page of this blog.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Well, sometimes you go through a two-day process, and it works, and you get some nice piccies to upload to your blog, and you feel like a very fine fellow.

But sometimes you do something that doesn't quite come off. I decided to post photos of that anyway, as the reasons why I decided not to follow this up, at least for the moment, are also part of my process (or 'prah-sesss' as they say here in Chicago.)

Over the weekend, I took one of the xeroxes of last week's Sharpie drawings, and coated it with a layer of Clear Tar Gel:

That glistening you see is the layer of gel (which stinks, by the way: if you use this stuff, make sure you have adequate ventilation or you can close it up in its own room).

I let it dry overnight, then I immersed the coated xerox for about 30 seconds in a tray of warm water:

That loosened the paper fibres (or fibers, as they say in Chicago), enabling me to do the next stage:

... which was, to flip the thing over so that the dried acrylic skin was facin…

This week, on the evening of Friday February 25th, there will be an auction of art at the Gruen Galleries, Chicago, to benefit the Heartland Alliance's work. I contributed an older piece of work to the event -- mixed media prints on an assemblage of cigar boxes, derived from my trip to Cuba lo these many moons ago:

So if you are in town, and you want to pay $125 to attend (ahem), then I'll see you there on Friday night!

Here is a link to the work by participating artists.

Below are the full details of the event.



Heartland Alliance and the Junior Board will host The Art of Human Rights, our annual silent and live art auction, this Friday, February 25!
Join us for this after-work party which offers a great opportunity to buy artwork from emerging and established artists as well as Heartland Alliance program participants. Purchase your tickets before midnight tomorrow to save $25 off the door price!
Proceeds from The Art of Human Rights support Heartland Alliance's work in ho…

It's still an automatic drawing, with the perimeter of the lines of one form suggesting a new shape which, during the drawing of it, turns into another object.

Here's a tiny detail of Sharpie drawing number 1 enlarged 800% on the xerox machine:

With this xerox, I can make a lithographic-style print by moistening the paper with a mixture of gum arabic and water, then rolling it with a mixture of etching ink and Setswell compound.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Another superb short video from The Tate Channel: an interview with Scottish artist Callum Innes about his use of watercolour, to coincide with the Tate's survey of watercolour art from the last 200 years:



If for no other reason, watch this for the enviably large studio Mr. Innes has at his disposal.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

One of the luminaries after a recent repositioning.

'The Guardian' newspaper has an article on its arts page about a show of collaborative works between Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois. Only yesterday, I posted my latest web-talk about the late Ms. Bourgeois, so this is an interesting coincidence.

My opinion of Tracey Emin has always been extremely low, and my opinion of Bourgeois extremely high. My reaction to Emin's work was already formed when my etching teacher in London, who worked on some prints with Emin, told me some very unflattering anecdotes about Emin which cast aspersions on, shall we say, her intellectual capacity. I made the mistake of recounting this story in full on someone's Facebook page recently, which earned me a perhaps deserved rebuke for being impolite.

But Jonathan Jones, who wrote 'The Guardian' article, has exactly the opposite opinion. He responds positively to Emin, and Bourgeois leaves him cold. And I have to say, if Bourgeois thought Emin worthy of being in the same room as her, m…

At our house 140 miles from chicago, a watercolour of mine from 1998.

The 57th in this series concentrates on the career of Louise Bourgeois, with illustrations of about ten of her works, rather than just one. The length of her career and its ups and downs can be a source of hope for relatively late starters like me.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

On Thursday, I led the students in the Journal and Sketchbook class in an hour of automatic drawing. There was lots of scribbling and furious gestural movements. All 16 of the students produced really free, chaotic drawings.

In preparation for going to the studio, I was in Kinko's taking photocopies of lots of found images from the internet, which I am using in the Lucerne Project. I also photocopied the Sharpie drawings that I did in the last few days, so I can turn them into acrylic skins. Then at the back of my sketchbook, I found a few squiggles of crayon that I'd drawn in order to illustrate the process of automatic drawing to the students. I decided it would be fun to enlarge some of these marks up to 400%, then turn the page a little and repeat, just to see what came out.

So I used the paper-litho transfer process to transfer the images to Kitakawa paper, a beautiful Japanese handmade printmaking paper that has an ochre-beige colour. The results were, as our American cous…

Sorry about the dual genitalia there.

Look! Look in the background! See all the pretty stars!

Derivation: when we were children, my brother and I sometimes drew invented creatures, the more outrageous the better.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

For our Journal and Sketchbook class yesterday, Patty and I took the students to the Center for Book and Paper Arts, a stellar organisation that is part of Columbia College Chicago, to see an exhibition of artist's books made by someone called Robin Price:

These pictures were taken using my cheapo cell phone, but hopefully they give you some idea of how beautiful these objects were. That one above was a modified accordion book with all kinds of prints and letterpress text, housed in a collapsible box imprinted with more images.

The following one was a wooden clamshell box about two feet high, wrapped in canvas, made to look like an old-fashioned travelling trunk:

There were lots of other works there, including collaborations with artists, writers, and designers. As someone who does a modest bit of artist bookery myself, I was humbled by the level of crafstmanship on display. It made me realise that at least half of what goes into the work of an artist's book is the design and …

Lots of circles:

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

It's strange to see what comes out when you start drawing just before you go to sleep:


I hasten to add that this is not a self-portrait.

Though I did have someone specific in mind.
Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

On the days when I can't get to the studio, I'm going to try and do some things that I can take back to the studio and work with later in the week.

I did this drawing with a fine-point Sharpie marker pen. I'm going to photocopy it, spread clear tar gel over the xerox, let it dry, then immerse the whole thing in water. I can then scrape off the paper fibres, and the black drawn lines will magically be left on the transparent acrylic skin. I will then glue this to the surface of a canvas.

It sounds like magic, but it really works. I'll post photos of the process soon.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

If I spend four hours patiently drawing shapes with airbrush colour, why would I cover the whole canvas with water, take a big brush, and partially erase the drawing?

Your guess is as good as mine, guvnor. Actually, maybe my guess is better: the lines were too dominating, so I  pushed them back a little in order to keep the various elements in balance.

This photo is a truer representation of the tone of the picture than the photos I posted yesterday. However, I quite like the yellow-gold tone of those photos, and I am considering adding that to the painting. That will haev to wait until next Friday, which is the next time I'll be able to get to the studio.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

So as I was working on this picture on which I painted all the texture and the dot patterns:

... I felt emboldened, for some reason, to start drawing all over it, using a fine point brush and airbrush paints:

I have an idea about where this all came from, though I don't know why it came forth today and not earlier. I've done a lot of automatic drawing in the last few years, some of it random, some of it clearly related to the personal narrative work. Mostly I felt able to combine figurative and non-figurative elements in prints, and artist's books, rather than in paintings.

Over Christmas, I read part of Xenophon's 'Anabasis', regarded as one of the greatest texts of the ancient Greek world. Without going into too much detail about the story, the main thing that stayed with me was the idea of the word 'Anabasis' which can be translated as 'journey to the interior'. Most of what I am trying to do in the studio ultimately is just that: a voyage to…

I finally got back to the studio today after a three week break due to flu, a conference in Washington, DC, and teaching at Columbia College.

The first thing I did was to catch up on printing some pages of the 100 page accordion book I'm working on for the Lucerne Project:

Then I worked on a panel that I did on day 13:

What I'm doing is pouring a little bit of fluid acrylic over several layers of dried shapes, then dragging the pigment across the surface using a sawn-off window-cleaning squeegee.

This causes the ridges of previously dried stuff to be extruded (good word, what what?) through the thinner pigment:

When that's dry, I'll add something else to it.

Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader