Praeterita

There’s a student in my Journal & Sketchbook class who produces these ornate automatic drawings in a constant outpouring of mark-making. He always uses black pen, but after a conference last week in which I suggested that he use colour, he’s started doing drawings with coloured pencils. It’s clear he’s discovered new things, among them the realization that you can overlay shape on shape when you move to a different colour. The latest things that I saw in his sketchbook reminded me of de Kooning, or maybe early Jackson Pollock. J&S student automatic drawing The obvious point of comparison is the looping movement of the lines, all over the picture plane, and the way that the abstract swirls and scribbles at certain stages trigger recognition in the mind, making the hand add representational elements, such as eyes or faces. Pollock’s earlier work, just before he broke completely into the world of Action Painting, does this all the time—inserting symbols of the real world into ...

"The utopia in great art is never the simple negation of the reality principle but its transcending preservation (Aufhebung) in which past and present cast their shadow on fulfillment. The authentic utopia is grounded in recollection."---Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension .   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

A voyage to the interior using Neocolor water-soluble oil pastels: "But in contrast to orthodox Marxist aesthetics I see the political potential of art in art itself, in the aesthetic form as such. Furthermore, I argue that by virtue of its aesthetic form, art is largely autonomous vis a vis the given social relations. In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience."---Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension .   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Start with a cat lying on a chair in front of you. When he moves, draw that. When he moves again, draw that again. Then turn the sketchbook upside down and draw the other cat into it. Turn the sketchbook again, and without thinking or interfering in the process, start drawing automatically, letting lines connect to other points in the drawing. If a video is playing on your laptop, look at that and do some blind contour drawing from it into the original drawing. Take a photo of it, and put it on your blog.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

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

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