I finally got The artist vaulting over a balcony onto my balcony 10 floors up a 20 storey block of flats in Peckham.
The model was heavily protected with Yacht varnish which i learned about from a great article on The Papier Mache Resource. In the background you can just make out the famous Peckham carpark which recently hosted BOLD TENDENCIES III an exhibition of large sculptures curated by Hannah Barry. It would be great to get something in next years show.
I recently saw this piece (or one similar) in a show in Borough called 70+Artists100+Hours. It is by an artist called Annie Attridge and made from porcelain with a tin glaze and on glaze enamels. I found it very desirable. Not just because it sort of depicts motion (or a pile up of body parts) but more to do with the material.
As one of my aims on the MA was to make desirable objects – and which I completely failed at – nobody wanted to buy a huge mass of cardboard – perhaps porcelain might be a way to go. There’s a ceramics course in Peckham. Transferring computer models to clay might be a good challenge.
I now have three websites dealing with art projects:
I was recently honoured to present The artist falling off a plinth at the launch event for the CCW Grad School. The setting in the Purcell Room allowed for some dramatic photographs.
This a small local community show. I came third one year and won a bottle of wine! This year I entered a couple of motion studies. One below printed onto 20 stacked A4 acetates suspended so it can be seen from both sides.
And also the cardboard man touching his toes, which I’ve requested to be suspended at about eye level.
I’ve decided to continue with this blog, on which I described my MA progress at Camberwell College of Art up to 2009. The main focus here will continue to be the artistic depiction of motion, covering my own and others work, both historical and contemporary. This blog will form one part of a personal website hosting all my projects. I’ve decided to continue blogging as I’ve built a small audience, and it serves to promote my work and enables me to contextualise my work. I’ll be re-organising the front end over the summer.
Futurism at the Tate Modern
This was a good show, but perhaps not so good for the Futurists as it over emphasised pre-war painting. Where the Futurists really shone (and fulfilled their name) was in alternative new media – manifestos, graphics, photography, theatre, poetry, performance, and sound art. They applied their dynamic philosophy to all aspects of their life releasing bizarre manifestos on food, clothes and artistic revolution. In this show, painting wise, the Futurists are outshone by other more focussed movements; the Cubists, the Rayonists, the Cubo-Futurists, and even the unfairly maligned Vorticists. However the cross pollination between all these groups gives a good impression of the artistic ferment of the early twentieth century. Many works overflow with fragments of urban life and the expressions of simulaneity and dynamism are ever present. These paintings excite in the same way the city excites.
I’m specifically interested in the attempt to capture motion (or conversely the space passed through) and I’d like to analyse the different approaches to painting motion, largely invented by the Futurists. Did they succeed?
Multiple Frames
The Futurists transferred chronophotographic techniques to painting – displaying several frames from a particular motion in the same pictoral space. This can clearly be seen in Gonchorova’s The Cyclist (1913). This can be easily read as an attempt at portraying movement – but can be criticised (and was) because the eye never actually sees this kind of multiple image. It is more like a crude diagram of movement. There’s a naivety about this method, multiple feet look humourous, and it is the kind of effect used a lot in comics.
Force lines
The more advanced version of the above blurs all the frames into a single swirl of motion. The multiples become abstracted into geometric patterns trailing the leading pose. Taken to graphical extremes this can make for some striking paintings, for example Russolo’s The Revolt (1911). The Futurists hoped these paintings would galvanise the audience into action, literally sweeping the viewer into revolutionary acts or at least into seeing the world in a new way. These sort of geometric paintings are often sited as good examples of expressing movement. The eye is supposed to vigourously flow around the painting – I wonder – the eye may move around the canvas, but is always contained by the frame, and the gallery, and the next picture along and so on. Movement is curtailed by the schematics of the design. Occasionally this can work, for example Nevinson’s Bursting Shell (1915) which he painted while on Ambulance duty in Britain in WW1. Here the motion is supplied as a kind of optical illusion.
Pattern
Other Futurists used pattern to break apart an image and force the eye all over the canvas to express the vibrancy and motion of an event. Again the eye is moving and not the subject of the painting. There’s a puzzle like quality to the work Severini’s The Dance of the Pan-Pan at the “Monico” painting (1911). The eye flits from shape to shape.
Boccioni’s States of Mind
By limiting the formal experimentation to a square frame, perhaps potential ‘kinetic’ energy has been dissipated. This is one reason why Boccioni’s Double Triptych States of Mind seemed to me the most exciting work on display (apart from his other undoubted masterpiece Unique Forms of Continuity in Space which seemed oddly isolated in this show – his death aged 33 in WW1 was a huge loss for Modernism). By looking at a single event from three different perspectives – a train leaves Milan station (people exchange farewells, some go, some stay) – Boccioni opens up the space between the paintings setting up multiple contrasts. After visiting Paris Boccioni then reworked the triptych in a more Cubist inspired style which sets up another layer of comparisons across time, space and artistic stylisation. Individually several of the 6 paintings are beautiful compositions of fleeting parts of trains, buildings, trees and passengers – exactly the type of thing seen through moving windows of a train journey compressed over time. The double triptych multiplies this dynamism many times over.
These triptyches are exactly the type of starting point I need for a series of planned digital prints which take a London location as a focal point and compress a series of short video sequences into single images, by algorithmically recombining the frames (for example scratching them through each other). Working on several different perspectives should help give a structured framework to work against. Boccioni’s horizontals (leaving), verticals (staying), and swirls (farewells) may be a useful initial formalisation – I was thinking of allowing the broader movements of color blocks across the videos to determin the finer trajectories of the combinations. The resulting images are hard to explain in words, and Boccioni’s work is something like what I had in mind. As I make these works I’ll post the results and explain the programming in more depth.
The end of year show was a great success with over 3000 people attending during the week. Andy Stiff, the course tutor, said the show was very professional and I think everyone had a good time. My sculptures were really well received and there was a lot of interest in all the Digital Art work on display.
Here are some photos taken during the week of my two sculptures:
The artist falling off a plinth.
The artist vaulting over a balcony.
In many ways the last year of my project has been about scaling up my voxelisation method. Click on the image below to see it fullsize. You’ll have to attend the end of year show to see the final life-sized sculpture.
Digital Arts MA09
Private View :
14 July 6-9pm
Exhibition Continues:
15–17 July 10am–7pm
18–19 July 11am–4pm
The Basement
Camberwell College of Arts
Wilson Road
SE5 8LU
For more information and map go to the show website.
I’ve block painted the model with help from Nicola, and have made an important decision which is not to try and make the colouring realistic. The reason for this is that the form itself has a certain crudeness (due to inevitable misalignments and the low resolution of my process) and to add a realistic face on top of this would look strange, and pull the sculpture in a punch and judy direction. The face has been roughly modelled and I quite like the lumpen-ness of it all.
As i was painting one thing that I noticed was that the wet paint bought out the form more, as the contrast is greater, for example the right black leg below. I may do some experiments with varnish next week.
Incidentally there was a huge lump of sculpture in the same space as mine last year, of a sort of toe. Half figurative half abstract, it was one of my favourite pieces in the show. I can’t remember the name of the artist, but it was someone from TRAIN research group at Camberwell.
By keeping the painting crude and not adding realistic features to the face, I hope that the line between figuration and abstraction will be emphasised. As people walk up the stairs below the sculpture I hope that the coloured lump comes to life as a vaulting man.
In terms of balance I did a trial last week downstairs, using boxes for support and I it seemed easier than I’d anticipated. Given the hands joining the balcony is strong enough I think that all the weight will be supprted on the one leg with just a single wooden strut to stop it from tipping sideways.
For now, back to tidying the studios in preparation for build week.
Geoffrey Mann is a Scottish Product Artist who graduated from the RCA a few years back. He has received a lot of acclaim for his Long Exposure models which share some similarities with mine but are rendered out of porcelain, plastic and glass. Geoffrey takes a film of a motion (usually moths or birds in flight) and then traces out each frame as a silhouette. These shapes are then passed into a 3D modelling package and are joined together to form a continuous model, these are then rapid prototyped and then cast in a fine material. By reducing the motion to slices he avoids all problems with watertightness and bad meshes. I should thank Geoffrey, whose work I discovered at the beginning of the course, and whose name long exposure sculptures I also used, as it was the most simple and effective way to describe what I’m trying to do. It is interesting that like Peter Jansen, Geoffrey has chosen to place these forms mainly within a craft & design context, something my hulking cardboard models are not suited for.
Flight Takeoff
Nocturne moth, Long Exposure series, Nylon, 2009
More recently Geoffrey has started to look at human forms in motion. This one is a forward hand spring of a gymnast friend of his, rapid prototyped in polymer.
Geoffrey has recently expanded his website with lots of great images and magazine articles.
I’ve cut out all the card. And glued the sections. I stacked them and took some photos. The bulk was impressive, approximately 2m high and wide and deep.
The two challenges left are
Painting – I’m aiming to put detail on this model to try and capture my likeness, and to emphasise the folds and undulations in the model.
Support – all this bulk rests on a single foot sized section (shown below) and the hands resting on the balcony. I’ll need struts of some sort to support the sides, or weights attached to the leg to shift the centre of gravity. I can’t get into the detail of this until the build week when I can work in situ. In the mean time I can paint all the sections.
