White Balance

Some new forms, redressing and curdling the pinking stacks of the last batch.



Like this. Will write more words soon. Using up too many in other places.

Wie Zeichne Ich

A substantial pause. Some work posts soon but it's useful to give some time here again to looking and thinking. This, passed to me by Josh Walsh (about to graduate from Camberwell Graphics), is one of two from a series of 25 published in the early 1960s by Musterschmidt, Göttingen (Germany). The series, by the mysterious Sigmund V. Weech: Wie zeichne ich... (How I draw, or, How I design (I think)), tackles portraits, hands, ballet, flowers, cars, interiors and so on.



This, Bd. 25, could be the last; perhaps there are more. Tackling letterforms. It's interesting, without being able to read the text, to see the exercises' emphasis. Given that the series is non-specialist or 'amateur', some of the optical considerations are interesting. Also, the characters drawn in the context of 1962 (I've included here the more geometric forms out of bias).



I guess there is a venacular/modernist odour here, the essence of my interest in type. In the absence of a formal training, does one remain only an enthusiast, no matter how much reading?






File alongside Fairburn? Emberley?



I enjoy the manual generosity of spreads like this, somehow harder to find in typography booklist books. I know this is something else. Not making much sense but something with which I'm struggling at the moment, in the sense of perceivedly illegitimate texts.



I also have the loan of Wie schreibe ich schrift, to be posted imminently.

Werkbox, Direktorenhaus

A new edition of Handwerk is exhibiting in Berlin at Direktorenhaus, a new space in an old building, "The Director’s House, (dating) back to when the building was part of the State Mint in Berlin-Mitte. Built in 1935, the wing’s well secured vault was used during World War II not just to store minted coins, but also to protect the art works of the State Museums of Berlin from the threat of bomb damage."



I'm showing thirty boxes, along with other artists supplementing an exhibit by Olaf Hajek. Working towards a bigger show of my work there in September. The premise of Direktorenhaus is interesting, that of a Gesamtkunstwerk. More on this later. The boxed variant pieces have grown, with markmaking of granular character. Both to magnify surface and to dispense with textual information in favour of something mute.



Similarly, interlockables have been added, with continued trials of inlay.



The boxes before shipping. A detail of the box label, a surface work replacing the only text on the first edition. I'm trying to get at a lack of instruction, a muffled play as stated at the outset of this project. The woodwormish, red-green rag motif is something of an optical zoom, pulling one closer to the MDF Kraft Ply Laminate and inside the box.



It's carried through to a bar of laminate hardboard. The material, that of the damp cupboard back. A slab of kitchen strata. Also mindful of Susan Kare's Macpaint palette, as discussed previously here, out of Rob Giampietro's burst of inspiring writing.



And latterly, currently, Dust: a book by Joseph A. Amato.







This edition extended beyond the set of thirty for Direktorenhaus. There are more available for distribution on inquiry.

The Point Chair

We have finished and delivered The Point Chair. For Isaac, aged 1. As discussed already, I was asked to work from Nilsson's The Point. The step, in terms of ongoing work, was to make something with a functional behaviour, helped by the use of this small wooden school chair.



Really my previous post, explaining the tattooed nature of the design and its relationship to instruction and reading and lifespan, still holds.





Always the thought of what is next and the back, with its closer correspondence between the imagery and the pocket-use, is the root of something where I'd like to make a piece with Sally that exclusively talks about use. This may involve making the furniture itself, as the correct kind of carcass for a very simple surface grammar.



The buttons were another step; the left is a dog's nose, in case it doesn't read.







This is really how we expect and want the chair to live, with the books and the drawings that take him along the way.

HW1

Inked and took a print from this block, same small A6 scale as the Haiti piece. I wanted to try a single indigo-ultramarine colour, to pull out the nuanced wooden and perspex surfaces. Still the block itself is more satisfactory; I could be expecting something that doesn't come from a relief print.

The print, to find the right hierarchical balance between reading of the engraved line and woodgrain, needs perhaps to be larger. I'll continue, next laying down a flat, risographed slab of near-black and then overprint from the block in white and skewed whites. This way the block should have more object-volume on the lightweight paper (which is Zerkall, around 100gsm). I want to produce an ongoing series, mirroring and imprinting from the box elements; so the initial method has to be worked through and out.

Open House, The Point

We are in the midst of Open House this weekend and the next, a part of Dulwich Festival. Please pop in and see us if you can get here. Showing Sally's knit's and for my part, the chairs. This is a commission, at the stage of screenprinting the design onto a stout linen with a good half tone (so white thread will read as well as black and other colours). Using a little wooden school chair and a move to a more functional piece, with pockets for notebooks and picture books and pencils. This won't make sense with these images but will post images of the overall structure in a couple of days.




We were asked to work with The Point, Harry Nilsson's curiosity of an album from 1971. Imagery-rich and naturally sequential, so the surfaces have a kind of reading order and lifespan I hope for the little boy whose chair this will be. The drawings are somewhat influenced by lots of looking at information images, with indiscriminate perspective, flatland co-existing with the descriptive, the dimensional. On a basic processing note, the drawing I have screenprinted to give Sally a much better ground for stitch.



She found this, an embroidery-ready piece of fabric. A moment of forehead-smacking realisation that we should be doing this, rather than stitching through newsprint when not drawing directly onto the fabric.



Some of the imagery sits on and refers to the functional parts of the cloth structure and I want to work through another chair which talks purely of use. Sometimes ones reads something that sticks. This, by Jurgen Bey: "The language of products is a language that we give them so that they can communicate with users. Sometimes they have an interpreter in the form of a written set of instructions, sometimes through tattoos on their body. It is a functional language that tells us what they can do, where they come from and what they are for".



Damián Ortega's Elote Clasificado (2005). Saw this at Tate Modern in 2005, almost the same time as reading J.Bey in the book Bright Ideas, Beautiful Minds and the two illustrated one another.



The Point involves a Hole too. This will be used to punch said Hole. Sharpened it last week. We will need to back the linen and use a kind of blanket stitch to seal the edges.



A dog's nose button will be cut from ply. These are fragments I know and it will make sense next week when I photograph and post the chair complete.



Also continuing to move the box parts around compositionally. Took a print yesterday from some of the components and will take some more this, then post.



Also making a new edtion of Hand Werk this week, for exhibition in Berlin. News forthcoming.

More Midway

Walker Interview and Midway Process

I've been interviewed by Ryan G. Nelson for the Walker Art Center Design blog, here. The structure and tone set by Ryan made for something I was very happy to do. It's not so common to have such detailing and empathy in the questions asked, which helped me greatly to synthesise the working thinking as a whole and realise that the portfolio site needs a serious edit and overhaul. A lump of work I now need to leave behind.

These studies, ongoing; post-Hand Werk manipulations. A second edition will come in the next couple of months, this time distributed to order. News to come; thankyou if you have enquired). Looking at marriages between found (preserved) and made. There is some background thought on taxonomy, in mind since a trip last year to the adjoining Pitt Rivers Museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. We spoke to both curators, who made clear the contradictory systems of each collection, cheek-to-cheek.

Any system of classification or any hierarchy may be unhelpful to express in writing, directly.

Paul Elliman consistently (as in, every read is a scalesfallingfromtheeyes incident) finds a way to use writing as something like a score. So his articles in any context always feel like artworks. This is Batia Suter's Parallel Encyclopedia (2007), by Roma Publications. He says, in accompaniment, "I pass. like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech".

My challenge often is to shed a pictorial, illustrative attitude when grouping objects. But the housing of found and made, clean and soiled within a box or dish is certainly shaking my drawing, in the set terms of representation and compatible forms within one rectangle.

Gelb (see interview), still in development, has been affected. As has an image to be finished this week for Landfill Editions, based on the V&A's Gilbert Collection of snuff boxes, bonbonièrres, toilet services and drinking vessels. Will post on this next week.

Also cutting plates to ink and print on the relief press for the all-too-imminent Open House Dulwich Festival event, starting next weekend. Will welcome some on-the-press decision making using this and other intercompatible plates, for some small editioned prints.

Something and Nothing Book

Concluding the busy month away from school with this unfinished business. Know I'm going to need to step back from it, in order to continue to work through a very nice chair commission using Harry Nilsson's The Point and a contribution to Landfill Edition's Risographed publication for Pick Me Up at Somerset House.



So this is a way of logging something in order to keep it needing to be made in the near future. It was started as a quasi-workshop for Kids.Modern but quickly proved to be needing some more time and care. A bit dubious about posting it, particularly because the line quality is so first-stage but wanted to air it. It's a Something and Nothing Book.



The idea was to make a two-colour Risographed activity/colouring book for children. The first consideration was the things I've done spontaneously with Molly, Sadie and Syd the last 10 or so years. A tendency has been to start a drawing as a prompt to get them drawing. They all do so really well anyway. What is apparent, is that colouring-in books' drawings are so poor and nowhere near the exploratory, explanatory and visionary level of drawings the three of them author. So, I make incomplete, quarter-drawings that they complete– always sublimating anything I could imagine they would do.



I think all children love to make their mark on a book, whether it's asked for or not. I did. So the premise here is to make a half-book. It can work as a narrative but begs completion, needs intervention. So the compositions need a porous quality. Also the paper stock needs to have a key, a grain that welcomes drawing in that kind of sugar-papery way.



It's also addressed in the first person, so the book is speaking to you, asking you to answer. In terms of language, it has become something of a realisation that I need to achieve some imbalance and discord in the imaging. A little escape from too much Modernism. Very interested in the way Sadie for example has been determinedly drawing 'Manga Eyes' and wanted to deliver something in here that ticks that box for her (see top image). These three are the users first and foremost and I will post as they test later on.




Wanted too, to concentrate on a kinetic across the pages whilst maintaining the kind of fragmentation that allows breaks in pictorial space and logic-lacking perspective.



So these pages are some way off but they give a sense of the limited palette (two- or three-colours?), text-image relationships and interplay with the object-page.







It will end somehow like this, a page within a page. Some precedents and cues for this thinking below. Starting with each of the three's drawings.



This is one by Syd, who is six years old. He draws a great deal, very naturally. He is something of a force of nature, with inclination to explain with cross-sections and panoramic views. He is also anatomically quite unnerving! This is Fart Club, a set he did a few weeks ago. I love its totally unfettered view of that which fascinates, let's be honest, us all.





Sadie, aged nine, writes and draws to create worlds. This is not her greatest– she uses colour quite a bit– but it is typical of sheets and sheets of characters she develops for 'Pipi World', a super-developed subscription-only phenomenon which needs its own blog to fully explain. Note the recurrent eyes here.



Molly draws a little less now. She is 11 years old. Comes into her own with observation. This startling, somewhat harrowing portrait is me! Each of their habit and attitude to drawing feeds in to this project. What strikes me most is their capacity to accept and read clashing stylistic modes within the same image. And also makes me aware of how close I could come to (and need to escape from) making imagery using modular pattern that pleases parents' taste. It's not enough and a dead end. I want to acknowledge the fragmentary, patchy nature of our bookshelves and stacked up soft toys' eyes, coming from a nosebleed-inducing breadth of styles.



I've looked a lot too, at Beni Montresor and this, I Saw a Ship A-Sailing (1967). Amazing lack of black and virtually fluo underprinting. Such conviction in the draughtsmanship. Never skimping on the will to make a lion very lionish. And the chalky, impish protagonists.



Generally, with regard to depiction, I have wanted for some time to apply the composition-determining atmosphere of information images, or those where something is worked out or explained. In a very basic way this is what I did as a 7, 8, 9, 10 year-old. Can see Syd doing it too. This fine example is by E.C. Large, from the beautifully designed Hyphen book by Stuart Bailey. The drawing is 'from his Presidential Address to the British Mycological Society'. What I'm getting at is the free use of pictorial convention (spatial, cross-sectioned, vignetted, ideographic, illusionistic) within the rectangle and how somehow this makes sense; perhaps an equivalent of modes of explanation within the same conversation where something is trying to be understood.




Finally this, Enid Blyton's Hurrah for Mary Mouse, illustrated by the excellently named Olive E. Openshaw. Archetypally sadistic and simmeringly racist. Beyond that, if you can, the characterisation is acutely creepy. Note the Mother Mouse's hands holding the framed punishment picture of the cat. Note too here a fine example of the kind of on-the-book drawing that has inspired this project to date. I hope to post more on this in the not-to-distant-future and particularly to show some corrective to the limited, too mechanical line quality of these roughs.