Calligraphic Chairs

Sally and I are working towards Midcentury Modern, happening next month. Nearly completed a set of four c.1960s dining chairs, restored, reupholstered and hand embroidered by Sally from my drawings, shown below.



Interesting to anticipate the quality that will come with the handwork. We discussed CNC embroidery technologies, direct from the drawings. But too many memories of sample blouson jackets emblazoned with mind-melt-motifs coming in from the supplier in Sally's fashion days put pay to that. She is just beginning to use something of the shift and variety possible in hand-stitch and we are studying a growing shelf of reference books to understand and incorporate a wider scope of stitch. For me too, to anticipate types of stitch when drawing.



Here's the original drawings. They work aligned horizontally as a set, with motifs drifting from one chair into the next.







A funny amalgam of not-so-esoteric and long-loved and digested visual matter feeding the language used. The consistent is something of a space between images and words. That's why they're named Calligraphic.



So, some (only some) of the cues. Cornelius Cardew's scores...



...Unknown Pleasures...



...Pastoral Pylons...



...Striped Socks...



...and Miró's colourfield paintings, particularly Blue II (1961).



Also Catalan Lanscape (1923/4). His paintings of this nature really broke typography for me in college; the behaviour of the elements, their mutable character and line. Illusion and abstraction. All in one undersea-overland picture.

I, Me, Mine

It's Nice That invited me this week to write an article for their feature 'Weekly Discussion'. Saying 'I, Me, Mine: do we specialise too soon?' Go, read and tweet your thoughts. It's live until next Monday, I think.



Somehow the point I'm attempting to make is evidenced (albeit from then, not now) in the work of Max Bill. Each of these projects is borne of intimacy with material, use and unfettered thinking. The result is a work which often synthesises two previously discreet functions or habitual forms.



Bill's applied, tactile understanding of the behaviour and limitations of process and materials in no way hampered his ability to think laterally.



(via Kultur + Kontext, cianomagentagiallonero, V&A, thebestoftime)

Joint Effort

A couple of weeks ago we reassembled 32 studio tables, originally built last year to Enzo Mari's Autoprogettazione plans, published in 1974. The open-source, self-design logic and aesthetic uses cheaply available timber (2 x 1) and arrives at an object that, as he says, does not 'seem' but simply 'is'.



During the reassembly, Autoprogettazione Revisited opened at the Architects' Association.



Invited designers have been asked to develop plans for furniture, responding to, yet adapting, the originals in the book. Round-table public discussion next Friday with Himself.



This, however, is a direct translation by AA student Korey Kromm, via Wallpaper.



There was pleasure in the lack of skill required to cut and build such a volume of the tables. But the junction points have a kind of basic certainty, equivalent to, but without the finesse of this beautiful shaker joint, via An Ambitious Project Collapsing.



Some parallel with Max Lamb's stool, for Reference Library / Apartamento Magazine's Everyday Life Objects Shop; and that of the Ulm Stool, shown in a previous post.



As seen at Richard Lamb's The Everyday Life Collector show, during Design Week. Son Max responsible for the shelving. Family resemblance to the stool.



Mr. Lamb was very interesting and welcoming. An RAF man, with 15 years of collecting studio pottery, mostly rooted in Cornwall. His folder-bible of magazine clippings was great. More meaty and indispensible than a blog. Weird time for Ceramics. Beautiful newly refurbished galleries at V&A; threatened courses throughout the UK. At a time when there is so much exciting work.



Such as this, by Jochem De Wit. Saw his work round the corner, also during Design Week.



Back on the joints. Allan Wexler's Crate House (1991). Out of my most-treasured, now-hard-to-get, twice-lost-and-found book, Custom Built (as designed by Daniel Eatock and Andrew Blauvelt. Wexler's vocabulary is 2 x 1 timber...



... and 8 x 4 sheet. Permutation out of limitation. Often with misalignments and overlaps highlighted in a flat colour paint.



The almost-isometry and jointed configurations above, call to mind Oscar Reutersvärd's Impossible Figures (via Galleri Bergström).




Immortalised as Swedish stamps in 1982, with granular, hatched tints that, for me, surpass the flat washes of the originals.



Finally, Sam Windett's Cup with Sticks 2 (2008), via The Approach. Somehow fusing the structures and vessels above.



Sorry- also Claire Barclay's Untitled (2007), via Stephen Friedman gallery. If you can, go see her work. Rewards you if you stand back. And if you look very close.

What I Saw On My Holidays: Afterlives

Battersea Park, London.

Aglou, Morocco.

Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.

Aglou, Morocco.

Tyrella, Northern Ireland.

Tyrella too.

And again.

Forms and Permutations

Quietly collecting, thinking about form, permutation, material. Helps with drawing sensibility but there is an itch to make, that has yet to be scratched.









Three experiments here for cupboard-door-pulls, each a take on the same act. I like very much the ergonomic of early tractor seats, bicycle handle grips,... where the body is mechnically and somewhat cartoonishly mirrored.





Somehow, having these cut, themselves inform judgements on radius, tangential contact points and rhythm back into in picturemaking.

Somewhere Between Orange and Red

Petrol pump attendant, Mirleft, Morocco.

Skip Dive Tile, Camberwell, London.

Dick Bruna's Poppy (1975).

Papaver, Dulwich, London.

U-Bahn, Berlin.

Persona

Just completed this image to Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), referring to the convergence of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. The film has an extraordinary title sequence.



The Bergman Foundation's site includes an interview where he talks about his intention here to make a 'poem in images': "I reflected on what was important, and began with the projector and my desire to set it in motion. But when the projector was running, nothing came out of it but old ideas, the spider, God's lamb, all that dull stuff...". On the images of, for example, the burning monks' anti-Vietnam-War-protest: "At most I can read about such atrocitites with a kind of greed – a pornography of horror. But I shall never rid myself of those images. Images that turn my art into a bag of tricks, into something indifferent, meaningless." And "gradually the precise word I'm looking for comes into focus".

On the Bone, under the Skin

Plastered skulls, c.7000BC, from the Neolithic 'Ain Ghazal site near Amman, Jordan. The plaster-mix was applied to skulls, once cleaned of soft tissue, as part of a funerary process. The function was to preserve a likeness. It seems that it is the 'visage' which is rendered, rather than the entire volume, sometimes stopping above the mouth.



Cowrie shells were used for the eye, bitumen for the pupil. First saw and drew specimens in the British Museum. I hear there are others at the Ashmolean in Oxford.



Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960), directed by Georges Franju.



A toad's shed skin. Recourse to flatland, as seen in Edward R. Tufte's seminal Visual Explanations.



John Stezaker's Mask II (1991-2), via The Approach.

Gelb

Overhauling, updating, uploading to my site with new work, such as this. Gelb is a growing image kit, a kind of ode to Berlin. Only been once but it crept up on me in a way which had nothing to do with museums, landmarks and other city fodder. Much more to do with U-Bahn rides and E-Bloc buildings.

A Shared History of Play

I'm giving a talk next Saturday with Marie O'Connor; A Shared History of Play. The invitation to talk came from Europa, who designed this invitation and exhibition graphics to the show History Repeats Itself by Winchester School of Art Graphic Arts programme. Looking forward to the other talks by Roland Früh of Hyphen Press, James Goggin, Sarah Gottlieb and åbäke.

Card Kit, Cake Sale

A Card Collage Kit for my kids' Christmas School Fair last December. The interchangeable modules allow for Pious or Pagan takes on the season. Of course, the children's cut-and-pastes that resulted surpassed my expectation, imagination and ridiculous linear logic. My favourite, consigned to memory, was an apocalyptic reindeer skull.

Bits of Brutalism

The forms and language of Brutalism have always inspired, especially the internal structures, radiuses and shuttered imprints. This image (via Tumble) gives a detail of St. Peter's Seminary in Cardross, near Glasgow. The building, commissioned in 1966 and designed by Metzstein and MacMillan (of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia), is now a ruin having been abandoned in 1980. Even in its graffitoed delapidation friends tell me of the magic of it's aspect emerging out of the now overgrown site. In 2003 Ruaridh Nicoll argued in the Observer for its world-class status but also bemoaned public distaste for the restoration of such a form.



A long-coveted bible of Brutalism from Camberwell's library, also born in 1966. Featuring a beautiful kindergarten with a white-brick cylindrical den on recall, which I must review. The austere, gravity-laden typesetting and grid totally at one with the subject matter.



A Stephen Russ Penguin Poets jacket from 1967. His designs for the series throughout the 1960s carry a real signature quality. The premise for the series, sustaining an abstract-pattern-interpretation to the content, is something I always wish could carry through more to prose fiction jacket commissioning. I guess Picador got close with Russell Mills' images for Ian McEwan's early novels.

Star City

Two from a series just completed for a visual essay on Star City, to be published in Visual Communication. This was the Cosmonaut training camp through and since the Soviet era, revitalised under Putin and income from space tourism.



The training environments, a mix of cramped simulators, vomit-comet-centrifuges, submerged replicas pertain to the Salyut, Mir and now the International Space Station. The process seems as much to be about desensitisation to nausea, claustrophobia, weightlessness and ‘negative emotion’ as the acquirement of skill. Will post the others once it's in print.

Inside Outside

A gap since the last post, finishing projects. Back now with the intent to post drawings with frequency. They run in threads and this should become apparent as they arrive. Always interested for example in an inside-outside head structure.

Exoskeletal, elemental Furniture

Charles & Ray Eames' adjustable jig to to 'determine the seat and back angles of the molded-plywood chairs' (c.1945) (via Library of Congress).



Ulm stool by Max Bill, Hans Gugelot, Paul Hildinger (1955) (via the Ulm archive).



Lisa Lapinski's Nightstand (2005) (via Johanna Koenig).



Martino Gamper's Gallery Furniture (2007) (via Arttattler, photo © Francis Ware), as seen in Wouldn't It Be Nice recently at Somerset House.