So…

My last piece of work at the Akademie before I left, made under the guidance of the artist Bruno Wank (Erzguss – Bronze).

Lithograph Prints 14/2/2010

I have been making these Lithograph prints under the guidance of the artist Gesa Puelles (head of Lithografie) at  the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. They are my first works using this medium.

There are both drawing and ‘poster’ qualities to the Lithograph prints that I’m quite interested in. The Standpipe has remained through the work, maybe developing into a pop motif through which these experiments into imagery and representation are revolving.

New Work 23/01/2010

I’ve been working on this object for the last 10 days or so, the idea has been playing around in my head for the last 5 months. The Bronze Casting is not quite finished (maybe by the upcoming Wednesday) but I documented some of the stages in the process so far.

This particular form, unlike my first, was constructed from the ground up with wax. This skips the more costly method of making a form, say out of clay, casting the said form and then using the cast to make a hollow wax positive. However this process of constructing originally from wax takes more time, for example this form racked up well over Fifty hours of work in a single week, and once cast into bronze that’s it – there is no cast from which to make duplicates.

New work – first Bronze

Three Months in the making, my first Bronze Object is filed, sanded, polished and ready to show.

Its really quite a simple Object mainly made in an effort to see and understand the processes of Bronze Casting in action. I started with a clay ‘base’ into which I inserted two cuboids made from wood. There were a few concepts behind my decision to use this particular form, firstly I was interested to see how, when the Object is cast into Bronze, the only evidence of the original materials is the contrast between the grain and geometric rigour of the wood, and the (appearance of) soft, malleable clay. Secondly I had been looking at Rodin’s Bronze torsos, which were seen as vulgar abstractions of the human form, and was interested in this notion of taking an abstract, yet soft and supple, form (the clay) and inverting its relationship to the plinth: thrusting the wood pieces (metaphors for the plinth) into the subject form (moreover this violent action could perhaps symbolise the sexual aggresion of Rodin’s own sculptures?). Lastly the overall shape of two protrusions, thrusting out from the centre, evoke the New York standpipes of which so much of my recent work has focused upon.

I’ve included a few close detail photographs to show some of the surfaces I’ve been banging on about.

 

At Long Last…An Update (featuring baby Jakob)!

Just a couple of photos from the last stages of my Lithograph made from an image of my dear friend Anna’s baby boy Jakob.

I orginally planned the Lithograph as a Christmas present to Anna and her husband Markus, Anna’s sister, their Mum and Dad and Anna’s aunt – who is a very close friend of my mother’s. They had all been a great help to me during my time in Munich so it was a nice way for me to say thank-you, but also I like the idea that Jakob will grow up with this image of him on the walls in the houses of his close family – the prints forming a circle between his special people, even as far afield as Britain.

I started the print in December but due to a malfunction with the stone I was forced to turn a simple black and white print into a two-colour print, I printed the first layer in a light grey and this week finished it off with a second stone printing in a slightly transparent black.

New Drawings (Photocollage) 7/12/2009

Drawing with my Canon

I took/made these photocollages last night on my way home from the studios. As my technique develops, I’m starting to play around more with the collages, roughly assembling them in my mind as I snap and then properly doing so in Photoshop. When you use the camera in this way it becomes a really interesting drawing tool, and thats exactly what I’m doing: drawing, and therefore flattening, space with my camera. These are not photographs they are drawings.

Enjoy.

17/11/2009M

I took this photograph somewhere around Chelsea side of Manhatten, don’t think I realised quite how good it was until I was back in England. It just sorta sums up my how excitement over these objects and like I said about the colours…

I worked a bit on a multi-panel drawing from this image. There are few things going on in it. I would draw each panel seperate from the others hence a slight mismatch when they are assembled together and then some of the papers I used had different properties which in turn affected the charcoal, Oil and chalk pastels and the Paintstick which is maybe interesting. Its not trying to be a faithful representation, indeed maybe the its relative accuracy is more of a failure on my part than success.. What interested me was the series of abstract blocks of colour that made up the original image, and how these pieces interrelate, making up a whole and so on.

16/11/2009

‘The artist singles out that which he feels needs to be experienced. Possibly because it hasn’t been experienced enough – is rare – When it has been experienced (on a cultural level) this isn’t  necessary and may no longer be within the bounds of ‘art’. Hence, everyday, common objects, acts, forms of another culture (i.e., Japan) may seem close to art for us but to those of that culture they are just part of their everyday experience. The object of art may be to seek an elimination of the necessity for it.’

James Turrell, from ‘A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the LACMA 1967-1971′

..we find that the world is a more complex thing

‘[Using the example of Einsteinian physics as opposed to Newtonian physics] Einstein physics did not in any way assault or disprove anything that Newton did; everything he did was still, in a sense, in place and correct. He simply changed the dialogue: in which Newtonian physics wasn’t in the world view any longer. One had to deal with the thing being a more complex set of problems and more complex set of issues…

 

…the whole history of modern art was never anything against or anti-pictorial reality, the fact of a pictorial reality existing and being as sophisticated and lasting as long and still going on and will continue to go on, the idea that painting is dead is an absurd idea, put forth by the conceptualists – which makes it most humerous because the conceptualists, who said that, are the perfect, or one of the best representations of the present pictorial art. In that everything they do is still a system of signs..’

Robert Irwin, MCASD/UCSD 2008 Russell Lecture