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.

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.

The Goblin Spider

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.

Mary Ellen Bute

Mary Ellen Bute's Dada (1936).

I forgot about Steven Wright

'I went to the hardware store and I bought some used paint. It was in the shape of a house.'

White Goods

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.