Best thing of the day: grappling limply with lamps when a member of the public stops by to see what’s going on in the Project Space. The lamps have been giving me trouble all morning. A shadow has been ruining all the video. We say hello. I grapple a bit more. I laugh and say,
‘Argh. I don’t suppose you’re some kind of lighting technician are you?’
‘Um, yes, I am.’
And this unexpected stranger put down his bag and systematically settled my lamps until the shadow below the pen was almost invisible. He showed me what you have to do, and the shadow we ended up with he described as ‘friendly’. And so stranger, wherever you are, THANK YOU.
Combine this with another trip upstairs to see the Graham Sutherland exhibition this evening, the delicious ink of last night’s etching lesson two, and a flick through the catalogue of David Hockney’s RA exhibition at the hands of the etching teacher, and I’m left with a change of mind.
I’ve been fighting and fighting against the grain of the page, trying to elimitate it by increasing the exposure level of the videos in Final Cut. When you do this you get images like the one I made yesterday: clear white backgrounds and lines zooming around in the space. But because the image is overexposed, you lose some of the crunchiness of the ink as it blots into the paper, bleeds outwards, settles and is absorbed. This is what I love about the line and the ink.
So I’m thinking about keeping the grain. Working with the light tent this week – and the advice from today’s lighting technician – I’ve been able to get much a much more regular grade of light across the surface of the paper. I’m also using a better camera that’s capable of focussing neatly on the surface of the page, and I’ve started drawing much more slowly too, which means there’s very little blurring. I’m starting to wonder why I was so intent on letting the lines float free in space in the first place, I mean, who was I trying to kid? I’m not trying to pretend it isn’t real ink. On the contrary, I’m trying to keep the ink inky.
So that’s the plan for tomorrow. A pair of drawings (and maybe some words) with grain, ink, line, time, and no trickery.
ps. I think I’ve used the word GRAPPLING in every single post since the residency began. This must be significant.
pps. A short article about my residency appeared in the Oxford Mail this morning. Headline: “ARTIST’S WORK IS ON WRITE LINES”. Ha!
