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.
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.
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.
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.
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 anddesigned 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 2003Ruaridh 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 RussPenguin 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.
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.
An exquisite, one-eyed goblin character from The Goblin Spider, a Japanese fairy tale of 1899, printed from woodblock with characteristic colour gradient backgrounds. The translated version by Lafcadio Hearn. See the complete book at the New York Public Library's site.
Karin Ruggaber's Relief 67 (2008). Materials: plaster and pigment. Via Greengrassi.
Tightly-fitting network of catametric elements (1961–62).School: Ulm. Student: Klaus Schmitt. Tutor: Tomás Maldonado. Via Ulm Archive.
Eduardo Paolozzi's Kardinal Syn (1964). Materials: plaster and twine. Via Tate.
Thomas Houseago's Large Striding Figure (2007). Materials: Tuf-Cal,hemp, iron, graphite and wood. Via David Kordansky.
Cy Twombly's Untitled (1976). Materials: cardboard tubes, cloth, house paint, paper tape.
'Gypsum is a crystalline mineral of hydrated calcium sulphate (chemical formula CaSO4 • 2H2O). Gypsum is colorless or white, is not highly water-soluble and is not at all hard. A mixture of gypsum and water can be poured; the gypsum hardens as the water evaporates. In art gypsum is mainly used in the partly dehydrated form of plaster of Paris (2CaSO4 • H2O) to make casts of objects or works of art in sculpture (moulds). The process entails making a negative form, of a sculpture, for istance, which is then coated with plaster of Paris. Plaster of Paris models of sculpture were widespread in antiquity and the practie was revived in the Renaissance. From the late 17th century plaster of Paris casts were made for art academy study and model collections (plaster cast collections), which were taken up by museums and art historical and other institutes in the 19th century.' Via Kettererkunst.
Anna and Bernhard Blume(via pablosanz). New to me but found through looking again at the 'file notes' to Camden Arts Centre's early 2008 show Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring. Sometimes I miss a show I should have seen and this one still haunts. It's such an interesting premise and choice of people. 'A peculiar kind of... Modernism'.
Thinking quite a bit about the figure 'disappearing into the fabric of the building'. Somebody said this revelatory thing at a strange, arid conference in a Holiday Inn and it woke me up. Also abstract movement in, and delineation of, spaces like kitchens and workshops.
Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Linking to the Blumes in its use of domestic but really as a concrete, generic yet claustrophobic space in the way she uses corners, stairs, doorways. And the rhythm struck up by the edit and the beautiful score by Teiji Ito.
Marie O'Connor has sent me this, of an astonishing garment by Arthur Bispo do Rosário. From 1938, in Rio's psychiatric hospital Pedro II, he created a 'minature universe' of works to be presented at Judgement Day. The thread used was unpicked from his inmate uniform.
There is an unintentional visual tally, on the top left of the garment as seen, with the Admiral logo so chunkily applied to c.1975 football kits. Most spectacularly, Coventry City, Wales, Leeds United.
Also reminiscent of Scouting/Guiding 'camp blankets' (via Earth Water Fire Ice), traditionally a record of camping, 'jamboree', hike.
I've started up another blog for a project called 'Fact', set to my Camberwell Illustration group. It's thinking about the imaging of scientific ideas. Trying to move beyond the literal. Here's my favourite thing so far, showing eye discolouration (as seen on the amazing BibliOdyssey) by Majimaganryonozu, from a collection of C18th and C19th Japanese medical books archived online by Kyushu University.
Dermatological conditions by Hosonozu. See more here and note the intertwined image, calligraphic text and the use of flatness and abstraction for organ-forms.
This poster is one from a series I'm exhibiting in an upcoming show at Melbourne Museum. The exhibition, 'New Views', is an open conversation about graphic design today. This poster is talking about the possible connection between a wilfully local-limited-language of available materials, idiosyncratic stories and a universal vocabulary allied to hand craft skills as taught by the Bauhaus. Something about a Local Universe. Everything within your walking distance and arms-reach-periphery.
I was citing this Max Bill poster (via Walker Art Center), with an RGB version of the primary triangle circle square. For me he struck an amazing balance, mentioned in an earlier post, of a machine-aesthetic and hand-craft-method.
The other source was this late Ming dynasty (c.1600) work by Ni Yuanlu, 'Cloud Water Stone'. It is describing the essence of qi, the active energy force that runs through and binds animate and inanimate things. I like the idea of something nebulous being 'konkrete'. Reminiscent too of Alexander Cozen's studies of clouds, which in turn influenced John Constable.
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