diagramism

problems with painting

i’ve been trying to transfer my abstract drawings onto canvas. I just don’t feel happy with them. They are too rough to physical. They have too much of a physical presence. For me, they are object sculptures and seeing them this way, as objects means i can deal with them more easierly; it is a way in.

i don’t think it was always like this. Before the internet world paintings on canvas, to me, were a way into another world, had illusion had depth, now they are objects very physical. i don’t like the idea of hanging them on the wall, I’d rather lean them against the wall or put them on little stools and lean against the wall. Whereas the drawings on paper get closer to this scaleless void space of the world wide web. The marks on it create the nature of the space, but paintings on canvas are too physical – they are objects that i can act on, process on, have things done to, but i can’t play with their scale. Or at least i don’t think i can.

still want to make object paintings and feel much freer now to be able to do it.

it is also good as it means i can reflect on what bits from my diagrams i can investigate through the canvases.

Titles

I need to spend more time thinking carefully about my titles.

What do I want to achieve through my titles?

With my titles I want there to be a lead into the diagrams; to make the viewer think or imagine that the diagram illustrates the title, to ask, through the title, the viewer to search in the diagram for meaning. One of my works, ‘City Cell’ http://tinyurl.com/7usebf3 was in part inspired by the idea of the modern city being a fortified one, reminding me of castles and moats and walls, and the biological cell. I like this conjunction of things from different scales and domains; this brings a new idea to both. The only problem with this title, and therefore this work, is that the idea of the city as a cell is already in the collective domain. Also, this title is too connected to the diagram, it makes the diagram too much of an actual representation of a city cell, where I want the artwork to hover in between this scientific explanatory data visualization and purely formal elements. Also, I like the idea of imagining impossible things, things that aren’t there yet. For example, with a recent work I was inspired by the printing errors in the word document table, curving lines where there should be straight, I created geological like colour strata that looked a little like hills. I decided to title it ‘are their hills in cyberspace?’ this way it relocates the drawings into the world of the Internet, and asks the view to imagine what hills in cyberspace might look like. Alongside this the title has to lead the viewer somewhere but not too far it, has to in a way bring back to the brick wall of the dead end that is the formalist qualities of the artwork but perhaps just peak around the corner a bit.

How does my method of working/titling connect to other art movements?

As much as I love to loathe Mr D. Hirst’s model of being an artist I do like his titles. They are literary and conjure up something beyond the work itself; but are also dead ends.

I have always been drawn to the simplicity of the concrete poets and Apollinaire’s Il Pleut, a poem about rain where the letters fall from the top of the page like lines of rain. There is some connection to poetry in my work. Though generally speaking I don’t like a lot of poetry. I don’t like the sentimentality, the melancholy that is present in lots of poems, also I don’t like the sound of poems, or rather I don’t want the sound of poems spoken to be in my work. The unemphasized machine like drone of a list appeals to me.

What words or symbols or marks that I use in my work, I feel I need to reflect on for longer and be more considered. I have been using some words that I have found in the artwork of others, e.g. Braque and Picasso but I think this borrowing is just a way of getting to another destination with my work.

I am, as ever, drawn to the absurdism of Dada, created in world that was dealing horror of WWI where the structure of society took over and created craziness that was accepted by people. I suppose I feel that we are still living in a world of craziness where the structure of society/the world dominates and causes us to live our lives in increasingly strange ways. But, this strangeness and oddity of how our lives are structured and the terminology that we use to describe and organise it fascinates me. Part of me is mocking the paper work and admin/ structures of the contemporary world, but part of me is fascinated by its richness and intricacies.