College, 30th April: project work

I started the day by making another series of ink drawings based on a scattering of the shreds of my paper, as I had done at home.  Oddly, they didn't seem to be so convincing, possibly because I was doing them on a bigger scale (A2), and possibly because I was getting rather mechanistic about it all.

This one (above) looks vaguely oriental, I did it with quite a big brush and slightly watered acrylic paint.  It bears no resemblance to my paper shreds at all, even though tried to put the marks where bits of the paper had actually fallen.



The next one looked more coherent, I think, and was done with the print-from-strip-of-card technique, but using bigger card than I had previously.

This third one was also done with card-print, but used thicker card and shorter pieces, and possibly much thicker paint.

This next one was done similar but I made a real effort to concentrate the prints in the centre, and to build up a very dense colour and rich, D texture., as visible in the close-up images below.

However, where is all this going?   I had a helpful (if a little painful) tutorial with Mark today, who challenged the direction I've been going for the past few days, with the drawings and painting based on the scattering of paper shreds.   His argument was, roughly, that while it is good that I've been getting away from the physical reality, and therefore the limitations of context, material and scale of the actual paper pieces,  I'm just going down yet another dead end - the 'drawings' are not taking me anywhere useful: they may be visually interesting (although I don't think he thought so) and tactile, but what are they saying?  Without some further explanation, he felt, they don't relate to my concept.

Hmmm.  I can see his point.  And while it has been quite fun to make these pieces, perhaps that is as far as I should go with them.

However, there is something about the method I was using in doing the first of the drawings - scattering the scraps of paper, and slowly making a marked line to replace each one.  There is a method and a rhythm to this process which maybe could lead somewhere.

Mark suggested I look at Marcel Duchamp and the use of chance.  Duchamp applied the use of chance to various contexts, including music (you can listen to the rather odd results here) Also to think about process and method drawing,  such as Sol le Witt.

Some of the work I'd done last week included being able to see the words themselves, and yesterday I had cut a lot more bits of recognisable text.  Mark referred me to have a look at William Burroughs, who worked with Brion Gysin to develop his 'cut out' model, where Burroughs would take a page of text, and cut it into four (or sometimes more) pieces, and rearrange them so you could still read a flow of text, but the phrases were broken and mixed up, and sometimes entirely new words were created from the joined-up fragments of half lines of text.  There is a filmed interview and demonstration of this on You Tube here.  I hadn't come across Burroughs in this context before, although I had been experimenting with other ways of rearranging, or distorting, or obscuring, or erasing the text, and thereby to remove or change or subvert its meaning.   So perhaps this is another route to explore a little further.

However, time is now beginning to press rather urgently, and I need to make some firm decisions this week about what I will pursue, and what I will leave aside.