Tag Abstract

In A Flash

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

Whenever I don’t have to drive, but am driven, I like to look out of the window at the world as it passes by, to daydream. It reminds me of my childhood and Sunday afternoon drives, safe in the car away from all the witches and ghouls which were out there in the woods, which were left behind – those were the days when you didn’t have to wear seatbelts – I was fascinated with looking out of the rear window to make sure that we weren’t being followed, to watch as we left behind.

I remember my father driving us in the darkness to catch the ferry back to England to visit my grandmothers, the bright lights of the car dashboard, of the ferry and port. The moment of held breath as we embarked, over the ramp, the car laden with all of our stuff, low to the ground. Even now I get a buzz of excitement when driving late at night and the heavy machinery rolls out onto the motorway, the flashlights, the hi vis, the noise.

Over the last year I’ve started filming the landscape as it rushes by. We went past Stonehenge on our way back from Exeter in June with all of our daughter’s stuff in the car.

The sky is more or less static and the mid ground moves a long quite slowly, with Stonehenge almost gliding across the screen. And then there is the fast moving foreground – I find the fence line and the traffic paraphernalia fascinating – the way in which the posts seem to be animated, punctuating the foreground, jumping up and down, reminding me of the graphic equalisers on my first stereo.

I wanted to create an image with less immediacy, with some distance, some sense of layering and so I experimented by filming the footage from my iPad with layered clingfilm over the screen.

I like this shortened version, I think it has more impact, or maybe it gets to the point a lot sooner – my social media shortened attention span at work.

I played around with different effects and took some random screenshots.

I like the abstract nature of some of the images, the sense of ghostly imprints, an image which is not quite there, or that was there, but has since moved on.

Wayfinding

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I think that I’m finally getting some clarity. Or maybe I’m seeing connections and signs where perhaps there aren’t any, but it seems to make sense, in my head anyway. In my second tutorial, Jonathan commented that he had a sense that it was all leading to something (the first sign).

So far during this course, trite as it may be (although Jonathan has assured me that it is essentially what art is about), I have been concerned with understanding myself and my place in the world as a practising artist. I’ve been working from memories, guiding me like a compass on my exploration, probably slightly off kilter, as well as my day to day life, thoughts and feelings. I have been trying to concentrate on the process as opposed to the result (a sign), experimenting along the way, and producing very few finished pieces of work. I did feel uneasy about the lack of finalised output, but no longer. I’ve been on a dérive (our session on Guy Debord being another sign).

In my Study Statement I question whether it is actually possible to ‘find myself’. Kierkegaard thinks not, in the sense of a static and unified concept, for the self is constantly being formed not just by reflecting on the past but also by engaging with the present; it is in a state of becoming, in a state of flux, something I have said I feel on several occasions in this blog (a sign). I accept in my Study Statement that I can only hope to know myself as at a certain point in time, and that reflection is something which will have to be a continuing process. Something else I have mentioned on several occasions in this blog, to fellow course mates and to Jonathan, is that I feel like I am a different person to the one that started the course back in October last year (a sign); I have changed and I will continue to change – to become.

Recently, I’ve become interested in the subject of maps – the comment in my Unit One feedback that I seem to be engaging in a process of mapping jumped out at me (a sign). That led me to start thinking about maps and the process of mapping and map-making, experimenting with cartographic symbols and mark-making. The subject of maps is a huge one but during my research I came across the philosopher, Korzybski, the father of general semantics, a central principle of which is that the map is not the territory (rather like the image is not the thing: Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (I used this idea with my red telephone at the Interim Show (yes, another sign)). In short, our models of the world are abstracts of reality, and do not represent it. This is a principle I’ve been trying to be more mindful of since I read about it – my map of the world is not the same as everyone else’s, so we can be in the same situation or look at the same photograph but have our own very different experiences and interpretations of it (our sessions with the photographs being another sign). Something which is blindingly obvious, but which I don’t always appreciate.

This then led to the notion that geographical maps themselves do not reflect the territory in the sense that there is abstraction and subjectivity in the production of all maps: the size of countries and borders can be manipulated for political and social ends, the purpose for which a map is intended can determine what is included and what is left out, viewpoint and projection can distort the world view.

Mercator Projection

Authagraph Projection

The Authagraph Projection is considered to be the most accurate flat representation of the world. It highlights the distortion caused by the traditional Mercator projection in terms of the size of Africa, South America and Greenland, amongst others.

I have been reading a lot about cartographic theory, a discipline which has only become a thing relatively recently. There is lots of disagreement about what a map is and the separation between the artefact of the map and the process of mapmaking and mapping. Post-representational cartographic theory does what it says on the tin – it argues that maps are not the territory but actually create the territory, are in a state of flux and are constantly changing, and theorists have moved away from the idea of a map as an artefact, but as being performative and processual, and always in a state of becoming.

Whilst working, I have been reflecting on past events and experiences, but whilst doing so I have been conscious that my recollections are probably my version of the truth; that I am my own unreliable narrator. I have been interested in memory for a while, particularly as to its probable unreliability and its potential to be manipulated. The way memories are formed and retrieved means that they are not fixed archives, but are constantly being formed and reformed with each retrieval; they are in a state of becoming.

The link between selfhood, mapping and memory is the concept of the state of becoming: ontogenesis. In my research paper I want to explore ontogenesis in the context of autobiographical artistic practice because it is the essence of what I am trying to do. In my experimentation and production of unfinished work I am engaging in the process of mapping, changing and becoming, relying on my memories which are also in a state of becoming but how can I represent this in a visual form which is also in a state of becoming? Hopefully, by the end of the research paper, I will have a better understanding as to how it can be achieved, if at all.

That’s the plan for now anyway, although I may change my mind, in my state of becoming.

The Eyes Have It

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I went to see Jenny Saville’s The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery a few weeks ago. I went thinking that I admired her work; I came out knowing that I only liked some of it, mainly her early work. It was Michael Craig- Martin all over again.

Her canvases are huge. It made me wonder whether it is all about size. If they were smaller would they still have the same impact? If something is large do we immediately perceive it as being impressive? I always thought that large meant there was nowhere to hide, but now I’m not so sure; maybe it’s just a case of first impressions.

I love the way she paints flesh, in her earlier work that is. I look at my skin and I see those colours, usually with the advent of summer, with a sigh and a determination to keep as much of it covered up as possible, no matter the heat. I have those imprints once I have relieved myself from the claustrophobia of overly restrictive clothing. I can relate.

And then there’s the work which comes later, the last image being an example, at the more restrained end of the spectrum. I can’t connect with it; I think to myself, why paint such wonderfully realistic eyes and then treat the rest in the way that she has, bordering on abstract figurativism? I feel like she’s stuck on a fence; she wants to embrace the abstract approach but still wants us to know that she can paint a good eye. I find it jarring and slightly irritating, probably because it resonates with my own feelings of indecision.

Last night I was channel surfing, and came across Alan Yentob’s last interview which he made in March this year, two months before he died. I’m a great fan of his Imagine series; you can tell that he has a real interest in people. The interview is with Jenny Saville, on the eve of the opening of her Gaze exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna. It is only 10 minutes long.

During the interview, in which it rather ironically takes her an age to make eye contact with Yentob, Saville comments that she likes painting eyes; think of all the visual information and memories which go through this structure, something she has been intrigued by since she was a child. Making her heads so large allows her the freedom to experiment with the surface of the paint. From a distance there is the holistic nature of the head, but as you get closer the surface is heightened. She confirms that she is committed to figurative painting but is experimenting with how she can get realism in the face which goes beyond a simple rendering. Whilst looking at one of her large heads, she comments that there is something psychological going on in that you are convinced by the head because of the eyes – something happens in your brain that allows you to piece it together, and as you get closer to it you go on a journey. So she’s using the figurative to help the viewer make sense of the abstract?

That’s explains a lot, but I’m still not convinced by the eyes.

To The Manor Born

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I love this time of year. The hedgerows are full of hawthorn blossom and clouds of cow parsley, there are blue carpets of bluebells in the woods, if a little threadbare by now, swathes of flowering wild garlic, crops growing in the fields and trees in full leaf.

I took my daughter back to uni in Exeter a week or so ago: a lovely drive down the A303 past Stonehenge, under the mystical big skies of Wiltshire and the rambling green fields of Somerset and Devon. On the way back I took the alternate route through Dorset along the Jurassic Coast and stopped off at Athelhampton House, a Tudor manor house I haven’t visited for a number of years with a very strong connection to Thomas Hardy. I didn’t know that Hardy was an architect before he became a writer and that he had worked on the house with his father, or even that he had lived into the early part of the 20th century. He seems to belong to a different time.

The gardens are wonderful – a house with many rooms (this seems to be a recurring theme recently).

Inside, apart from some wonderfully old glass windows which distorted the view outside,

was an exhibition of work by Arthur Neal, a painter and printmaker practising since the 1970s. He appears to vacillate between the figurative and the abstract. It would have been difficult to guess that all of the works on display were made by the same artist. I was particularly drawn to his small abstract oil paintings, his work in charcoal and his more recent prints.

The exhibition made me think. I would still like to explore charcoal and drypoint, and after that I think I’ll be done. It will be time to reflect.

The small oil paintings reminded me of a stack of small canvas boards we’ve had for ages, as yet unused. I can’t recall why we got them – I don’t generally do small. I think my husband bought them because they fit in a small pochard box he is going to use for all those landscapes sketches he’s going to paint, once he has wiped off all the dust. It wouldn’t take more than a few brush strokes to cover them. No excuse really, not to do something every day.

I have a fascination with Jackson’s Inside the sketchbook series – of looking at the sketchbooks of artists, to see how they work and think. Sketchbooks are personal spaces and it’s exciting to get to look inside, although I’m in no doubt that they choose to talk about their best ones. A recent one which springs to mind is Unga from Broken Fingaz. He talks about how working small means that you have to let go of detail. I think I’ll give it a go.

As I Was Going To St Ives …

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

We’ve gone to St Ives in my weekly oil painting class, more specifically looking at the work of Ben Nicholson.

I’ve only recently looked at the work of the St Ives artists; aside from Barbara Hepworth, it didn’t really interest me before. I often go to the Pallant House Gallery and they have a few as a part of their permanent collection.

The brief was to make a drawing of the still life and then make two pieces, one with a slightly Cubist slant (using a tracing of the drawing to recreate shapes) and the other with a landscape in the background, both in the style of or influenced by, Nicholson. We used a limited palette of burnt umber, ultramarine blue, cadmium red light, lemon yellow and white.

I think that I would say that the finished pieces were more influenced by, than in the style of Nicholson! I’m not sure what I think about them. I swing from loathing them to actually quite liking them. I prefer the more abstract of the two.

What I have taken away from this exercise:

  • Lemon yellow takes an age to dry.
  • I really like the contrast between areas of pure ground and areas of opaque colour – I’ve often thought that some of Nicholson’s work has a ‘collage’ effect to it, which I like.
  • I like the interplay between the visible graphite lines and the oil paint.
  • The combination of the different genres of still life and landscape is really interesting.
  • I feel that I’m veering away from the figurative.
  • I wish that I had been less literal – I should have been more adventurous in my composition of the still life, mixed it up a bit more and not included figurative renditions of the individual elements, especially in the one with the landscape.

Next, is one of Nicholson’s inspirations, Alfred Wallis, known for his naïve art-making.

Sorry, Are You Talking To Me?

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I’ve decided that I’m probably learning far more about myself by simply being in this process than I am by looking back on my life.

I need to retrain my brain. My legal training has made me focus on detail, anticipate every possible eventuality, dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ all within a rigid framework of rules and regulations. That way of thinking served its purpose then, but it now stultifies creativity.

When I’m in a scenario which is unfamiliar, I like to know the parameters within which I’m expected to navigate; quite often I feel discombobulated when things don’t go the way I am expecting, the paper workshop with Christian Azolan being a case in point. We were instructed to fold the paper. To my pedantic mind, folding involves a deliberate act of bending something over on itself to create a clearly defined edge. It doesn’t include scrunching. But once I had overcome my initial confusion and accepted this unexpected variation of the parameters, I enjoyed myself.

I definitely preferred using the blank paper – I don’t know what brand it was, but it felt really good. It led me to confess my fetish for pristine white paper to some of my fellow students. I think it stems from being at primary school when the teacher would write my name on the front of a new exercise book with a marker pen and I would go back to my desk and give it a good sniff. I now appear to associate blank paper with a solvent high. I don’t think that my school ever had a pupil who was so keen to man the stationery cupboard at break time. In fact, I used to get palpitations and a bit of a sweat on just walking into WH Smith (R.I.P).

Working with the blank paper seemed to allow more freedom and I liked that the results took on a sculptural quality. The effect of the folding on the reverse of the paper was equally, if not more, interesting at times than the right side; areas which were peaks on one side became troughs on the other and vice versa.

I felt inhibited using the print of the back of my head; I became too concerned with the resultant image which seemed to impose restrictions on how I folded, so maybe I like clear parameters, but not too many of them? Also, the effect is less sculptural than when using the blank paper; the areas of shadow are less apparent and the focus shifts to the distortion and concealment of parts of the image rather than the creation of form.

We then went on to do some linocutting – it seemed a bit incongruous with the folding activity, but nevertheless we all launched into it with equal enthusiasm.

I prepared two linocuts; one inspired by tree roots and the other a reduction linocut of an abstract shape – I printed it using yellow ink first, then cut away more lino and printed using red ink.

I also printed the tree roots image on a transparency, having torn up bits of paper to create a random mask. It is interesting to see the effect of overlaying it with the two prints; how it creates a sense of discord on the prints where it’s not in sync with the image below, and how it creates areas of intensity on the print over which it lines up.

As I was taking my lino into the next door room to print it, Christian heard me reminding myself as to what I was planning to do. Sorry, are you talking to me? No, just myself. Doesn’t everyone do that? Yes, of course. When I went back in to print my second lino, I asked him how long we had left. Sorry, are you talking to me?…