Construction

New Lines

Just something I've been tinkering away on for awhile.

Drawing a Language

I recently had a collaborative show at First Site Gallery at RMIT University with the very talented and creative James Little, www.jameslittle.info.

The works produced for the show, were focused more on the process of our practice and how we both use mark making to create a drawing, then the particular imagery represented in the work.  The 'language' is the way in which we communicate our ideas and thoughts as artists.  How we create the composition, the materials we use, the medium we work in, we utilise these things and more to create a drawing.

The exhibition consisted of three drawings, James and I both created one separately to each other, but the third and central piece was where the collaboration aspect of the show came together.  the image below.

We were incredibly unsure of how our styles would work together, and there was a lot of discussion as to how we were going to do it.  We had to constantly talk about where we were going to bleed into each others half and how far we would go, how dark would we go tonally, and how much detail would be enough.  It became a real fluid way of working, one which I'm not used to, but it meant that the work was constantly evolving and being discussed, which is something which comes out in the work.

Recent Work

Some new line drawings from a series I've named Tim.  The references I used were from some old analogue photos I took of my friend Tim in 2007 during my first year of a visual arts diploma.

I used one of the photos I took as a reference for a previous work,https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhml9xBFAK6APqA1RYsaNT35hFzBiYgyqbza6FBKLS8Rp3m15qQUwT2aH03u_VfW5gkYuZKbCPgWGNO5NzgLpz7rYLlwOPN376moYTpz4du0Sj8tCIaMOId55ep1R2rh89KBtbVDiq8rQVQ/s1600/IMG_0087.jpg

I donated them to the 2012 RMIT ESP fundraiser auction, but I think we'll see Tim again one day

Past Work Dump

Just a collection of old work.

More lines

Here are the other two drawings I did for the Bacchus Marsh Rotary Art Show.  Didn't end up winning a prize, but the drawing of the old bridge at Anthony's Cutting was nominated for the Local Content category which is sponsored by Western Water.  So its nice to be noticed at least

Bacchus March Rotary work

One of 3 works I put into the Bacchus Marsh Rotary Art Show which is on this weekend, opening tonight, with any luck I might win some money.
Haven't done a landscape for a long time, find it a lot easier than portraiture, can get away with a lack of detail when doing grass, rocks, trees anything like that.  All A4 and framed.
I'm finding I'm getting quicker with these line drawings, averaged around 6 hours on each, which is good news.

Past Work - finished and yet to be completed.

I have been looking through a lot of drawings and the like that are scattered on my bedroom walls and underneath my bed recently, just to see how my practice has changed and to try and trace the when's, why's and how's  that enabled my artistic growth.

And so I thought I'd post some examples and give brief explanations on what I think I was trying to achieve.

I did this little piece around the end of first semester, 2nd year of my course.  I was starting to explore narrative in my work, and I also think I was trying to incorporate my love for the medium of comic books into it, and so I did a few experiments with tracing paper, acetate and plastic sheets.

I had the idea of presenting narrative and movement by combining unrelated scenes and leaving the viewer to create the connection, and also of presenting every frame within a sequence.

With the latter I used the film strip idea to create a flow and create a more controlled and structured presentation of my narrative based work.  This work was created by painting masking fluid on a plastic sheet and soaking it in black ink.

This piece was just a simple drawing as part of an early animation for an elective class I took in 2010.  But it marks the point when I started the digital side of my artistic practice.

It also is a great example of the blocked black and white that I started to employ within my work, something that I still do and am experimenting with.  I had previously done black and white paper cutouts in my first year, but this work was the first where I was happy with the results and it didn't feel quite so much like craft.  I don't want to put too much negative connotation on that term, it's just up until this point, when working in this style, I wasn't completely sure why I was doing it, other than it looked cool.

But this little experiment changed that for me, until that point I was using found images from film and comic books and this was the first from a reference I'd created myself.  It was liberating and I've been using this style ever since, and one day I aim to fully flesh out what I'm trying to do with this particular style.

'No Moping' was the first large scale cross hatch drawing that I did and it took roughly a month, its just over A2 in size .  I drew it while doing part time at RMIT.  

During my second year of arts school I hit a block and struggled, which I could have worked through if I had put my mind to it.  I failed a couple of subjects and got a little down on my work, technique, all those things that come with '2nd year blues'.  I decided to split my 3rd and last year over two years, spending 2010 completing the subjects I failed and getting the majority of my electives out of the way so when it came to my last year I was doing nothing but drawing.

And from this decision I decided to get a studio outside of campus to work in and create.  This led to being part of a group show organised in the gallery the studio back onto.

I wanted to make a splash so I used an old reference of a friend I took in 2007 while at TAFE and started drawing this piece.  It sold, as well as the A4 drawing I also exhibited, to someone who wasn't part of my family or who I knew, and it really energised me and helped me get to where I am now.

This work is still under construction and is one of the exercises I do to get away from straight black and white drawings for a little while.

Its a scene from the Akira Kurosawa film 'Nora Inu', Stray Dog in english.

I have thought about playing with more colour and expanding my palette in the past, so far I've just gone into greys, but you never know.

This piece continues the blocked black and white style but using graphite to block in the contrast.  I did this in my final year just as an exercise to give my mind a rest from the all the animation and project document writing I was doing.  Its a promotional shot from the film 'Philadelphia Story', staring Cary Grant, James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn.  I'd never seen the film till ACMI had their melodrama season screening, and it's awesome, if you haven't seen it, do, its amazing.

It ended up being part of a loose series of small works on black paper, a couple other can be seen in this particular post http://joshhook.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/white-on-black.html, but more of a focus on materials than the other two, and it is a lot more effective in when looking at it.  It becomes more than just a cool use of white, it becomes interactive under a light source and engages with the viewer more so than the others in the series.

Yes, so just a little insight into my artistic practice past.  Its given me the idea of doing more of these but with a lot more past work.  So probably in the future I'll give up more of my thoughts about what I do.

Mendacious Lines

Apologies for the bad reproductions, taken with a iphone.  One of these days I gotta get a decent camera for all this art stuff.

On average, each work took 15-20 hours, with some taking longer and some taking shorter.  lucky I'm already insane so the whole experience didn't do too much mental damage.

Decide for yourselves what is happening with this story, you can neither be right or wrong.  Think of it as a less abstract rorschach test and what you see is your own interpretation of events influenced by events of your own life.

Or just marvel at how pretty it looks.  Either is fine with me. (smiley emoticon face)