I’ve been looking back at some of my previous posts to try and assimilate my thoughts and ideas.
In this week’s session we considered an excerpt from Art & Fear by Bayles & Orland. We discussed the gap: “…Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did…”
My earlier post,Making A Sound, referenced a comment made by Maggi Hambling:
”…there wouldn’t be much point in painting a picture that it was possible to paint…”
So, we shouldn’t mind the gap. If there is no gap, we are not pushing ourselves or allowing exploration in our work.
Art & Fear also threw up another corker. It’s from Stephen De Staebler:
“Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.”
When I went to the Pallant House Gallery to see Dora Carrington recently there was another exhibition on at the same time: Maggi Hambling – ‘Nightingale Night’.
Nightingale Night VI
Nightingale Night X
Nightingale Night XIV
Nightingale Night III
Nightingale Night IV
Hambling spent a night in a woodland in Sussex in the Spring of 2023 listening to nightingales. I didn’t take photos of all of the paintings – I think I was only drawn to some of them on the day, or maybe I was tired from exploring Dora, but Iooking again at the images on the identification labels, I’m regretting not having done so.
I’ve since read an entertaining interview with Hambling about the exhibition in ROSA Magazine – I like doing further research after I’ve been to an exhibition; never before.
I’m not entirely sure what I think about it all. I’m not sure that I like the gold on the black ground, although I can absolutely understand her reasoning behind it, and I do like a bit of gold. Does she succeed in communicating the otherworldly divinity of the nightingale in the darkness? The sense of it, absolutely, but the sound of it? I’m not convinced, and I think it’s the mark-making. The swirls and definite vertical and horizontal marks are successful, I think, in representing sound; my issue is with the drip-like marks – they don’t allude to the beautiful song of a nightingale to me; it’s more akin to me having a warble and eventually running out of steam and giving up. But I think I’m being harsh, because even she admits that it’s impossible to paint the sound of a nightingale, and that what she hopes to have captured is a sense of the fleeting moment. She comments:
”…there wouldn’t be much point in painting a picture that it was possible to paint…”
It’s an interesting comment, one to think about.
It would be interesting to know whether Hambling made the paintings from memory, or whether she played a recording of nightingale song whilst she worked. I’ve assumed that it is the former because it’s about the whole experience, of being in a certain place at a certain time bearing witness to something extraordinary.
I have been carrying on with my pen doodling, some of which is unfinished – I became bored, and moved on. I also decided to give nightingales a go. The concept of representing sound in a 2-D form is really interesting – the consideration of tone, volume, intonation, rhythm etc. I’ve represented it in a linear way, thinking initially about sound waves, but it would be interesting to explore other methods of representation.
The song is so diverse and improvisational that it was very difficult to think of different mar–making to represent what I was hearing. It was an interesting exercise, and very calming listening to birdsong with my eyes closed.
I like having an inked page – I think I will go through my sketchbook and randomly ink up or paint pages. I also like trying to work with unexpected events such as the solvent stains from the gold coming through to the reverse of the page. This is, literally, just playing – it’s enables a period of convalescence.
Guilty as charged: I have form for overthinking, overworking, not knowing when to stop and basically bludgeoning a piece until there is no life left in it. My problem is that I have an expectation of how it should be. It’s not even as if I enjoy the process – it makes me frustrated, stressed, and downhearted to the point of threatening to pack it all in. So, to put an end to this way of working I need to adopt a new approach; create a new habit but one which opens up possibilities, as opposed to closing them down. Admittedly, I have already begun to experiment more recently, but it needs to become second nature.
There’s a lot to be said for drawing exercises; I’m a particular fan of continuous line drawing but the drawback (excuse the pun) is that I’m still drawing something, I’m just not allowing myself to draw it as accurately as I might otherwise want to, and so there is still an expectation as to how it should look.
Sometime ago, I watched a documentary about Maggi Hambling. She gets up at 5am every morning and with a cup of coffee and cigarette in hand, she starts her day by making a drawing – she doesn’t like the term sketch – using an ink dropper and, in this particular instance, with her eyes closed. It is a form of automatic drawing, a concept embraced by the surrealists and latterly by the abstract expressionists, which involves the artist making marks without any conscious control.
I think this is for me!
There are numerous possibilities: pencil, charcoal, ink, paint, collage, eyes open, eyes closed, different ways of holding, holding more than one, dominant hand, non-dominant hand and the list goes on.
So this is the first of my daily automatic drawings:
I used a charcoal pencil in my dominant hand and, with my eyes open, I just let it wander over the page without any conscious thought or control. Maintaining the same pressure and manner of mark-making started to become a bit tedious so I almost unconsciously varied the pressure and the way I made the marks, holding the pencil higher up so that there was less control from my hand, rocking it backwards and forwards in my hand, holding it perpendicular to the page and then on its side. It was a sensory experience in that I was aware of the feel and the sound of it: the sound of the charcoal on the paper and the squeaking and stuttering of it on the upward stroke creating broken lines, as opposed to the smooth downward marks. I then randomly smudged and blended some areas.
There are some quite interesting passages and if this is my subconscious expressing itself then I might have cause for concern! All in all, I’m pleased with what I produced because I enjoyed the process – instead of being mindful, it was mindless – and I hope that if I do this often enough I might just free myself up.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 