Hand Bones and Sand v1

I have continued to work on ideas for the stop frame animations based on my hand the bones I made last term. In this short piece I have introduced the idea of the sand and archaeology as a way of exploring the theme of mortality. Some of the sequences work well whilst in others the pacing is laborious and loses momentum. My plan is to make a series of these and then work them together into a longer sustained piece that will complement my other art work on the hand:

Back to the portraits

After a very fallow Christmas and New Year period when I found it really difficult to engage with art at all, I was dreading the the first portrait class of the year. I was fearful that any gains I may have made in the first term would have been washed away by the festive miasma. In fact it wasn't quite as bad and I did appear to have retained some of the lessons learnt, although there was the usual pain and anguish before producing one half decent drawing:

 

This was actually a half way reasonable likeness although I was in the end dispirited by the fact that my charcoal drawings are starting to all look the same. I apply the same techniques, go through the same tortuous process and end up with a very similar looking picture. So I want to address the question of how to get a fresher look, something a little more risky perhaps: less formulaic. I intend to broach this with James and perhaps try some other media as well.

In the meantime, I was motivated to try some more portraits at home and saw a display of Lee Jeffries fine portraits of homeless men and woman. I have since started to do charcoal sketches of one of these a day. So far it seems to be a useful exercise. Each of his characters are full of rich and quirky detail (he also jacks up the contrast which helps). Here are the first three:

Animation Part 2: Hand and bones

For my second attempt at an animation piece I have brought in the sculpted bones and worked up a short piece that tries to link the bones and the hand. There are a few (gratuitous?) special effects to emphasise the transitions. I have also added a little low key music.


Although I get some satisfaction from the superficial appeal of this short piece, it has rather made me wonder whether this is a productive direction to go in. I feel it is a little too obvious and 'on the nose' as a script writer may say. I am not sure whether this is a medium that will allow for a 'malleable' piece of art. Perhaps I am fighting the film maker in me again. 

I will persevere with a few more ideas and then perhaps think about how I could pull them together in a single piece. Nevertheless I can only explore this work in my own time with the copy stand at home, and I find I am rather daunted by the prospect of another day in our rather cramped studio as I am very unsure where to take my 2D work.

Animation Part 1: my drawing hand

During the first year my nephew Jesse Ash , an accomplished artist and art theorist, introduced me to the work of William Kentridge, the South African artist who spent some time working on sustained animated charcoal drawings. Jesse felt that it combined my enthusiasm for charcoal drawings (that had been instilled largely by Tony Hull's first session on this course) with my background as a film maker. I have been resisting any connection with that part of my creative experience on the grounds that I was not much taken by video art and I felt that my professional sensibilities would get in the way of anything authentic in the way of art. However, the Kentridge videos did get me excited and I had always intended to give it a try.

Following my investment in my hand, its injuries, its bones and, I suppose, its eventual mortality: I thought that I wanted to explore the role my hand plays in my art in general and then, in particular, its role in my struggle to draw and make art. So, it seemed that a charcoal animation might be the way to develop this idea.

I knew enough about the process to know that it is very hard to do without at least some sort of solid stand and lighting and to my intense surprise, I found myself locating and buying a professional copy stand on Ebay, closing the deal on a very reasonable £75. I decided that I was going to restrict myself to still images on a stills camera, rather than use a video camera. These images would be edited in a very basic Microsoft editing programme Windows Live Movie Maker.

This was my first effort:



The wooden hand was one of those artist models that I had been using to help me draw: (actually they don't help much as they don't really resemble a human hand at all, more the hand of  rather poorly constructed robot!).The struggle to draw it was all mine! I resisted the temptation to 'tidy it up', it felt like the odd appearance of the drawing hand itself had a useful foregrounding effect. It does not look like the work of a film maker, and that feels right at this stage.

Sculpted bones

To my surprise the next step in exploring the bones in my hand was to start sculpting them out of polymer clay. It was chance activity, I had the clay for another purpose entirely (making prints), but stuck for something to do in the studio session. They results were surprisingly satisfying. Initially I was concentrating on representing my dislocated finger:

Then I thought I would link the sculpted bones to the still swollen finger. It was strangely disturbing process. To have such a strong reminder of what had happened to the actual bones gave me a strangely physical jolt.

When I showed this image to Tony he was very struck by its potency which surprised me as I felt there was little meaning aside of my own very personal reaction. It caused me to think more about the development of really personal art. Thinking of Tracy Emin and her personal fragments that only resonate in the context of her particular history.
I decided to pursue the idea of sculpting the bones in my hand and although I only had a limited amount of clay which meant that I could not maintain a consistent colour, I did make all the bones in my right hand. Once pieced together they created another promising image:

That dislocated finger

In the  November 14th post I write about how I was pushing myself (and being pushed) towards a more personal engagement with the work I had been doing on the skull and bones. It has proved a fruitful development and it all began with that dislocated finger. Whilst in Thailand I slipped on the side of a swimming pool and dislocated my finger in an alarming way. I was taken to the local hospital where they took an X ray which I was allowed to keep:

I wanted to find ways to represent that view of my hand and its injury and thought about some of efforts to describe the bone shapes by rubbing into a charcoal field. It seemed an ideal way to capture the X ray effect, so I drew an X ray of my hand:

I then started to work on that charcoal drawing with a series of watercolour washes to try and show the way an X ray has  a ghostly shadow of your flesh and skin. The colour was not not really right, but the image did go some way to recording my experience and indeed the discomfort: and to reinforce the connection I added a fragment from the envelope that was presented to me by the Thai doctor:

The last stages of bone and skull

 Before moving onto my new developments around the hand, the impetus for which I wrote about in my last post,  I wanted to record the last few pieces of work I completed on the skull theme. I was feeling rather aimless and seemed to be seeing the skull work as a bit of a dead-end. However, looking back I now feel that there was some interesting developments in that work and I don't want to lose track of it.

I had been pleased with some of my experimentation with a range of media on one piece: it was something that had struck me about Henry Moore's drawings in the underground and indeed of the elephant skull. he layered a range of media: pencil, pastel, pen and ink and wash. At the same time, several people had reminded me of  Georgia Okeeffe's paintings of landscapes based on a skull. So, in the rather cramped circumstances of our art room (a circumstance which has indeed rather cramped my ambitions) I created a layered skull drawing which was pleasing in the way it suggested some of the rich texture of the skulls I have been looking at:

I then started to work with my soft pastels in a more expressive way. Still looking for a way to turn my skull studies into landscape. A couple of these suggested that this too was not worth abandoning totally.

Finally, I brought all this together with a longer and considered piece based on the skull that used soft pastel on rough watercolour paper, as well as a strong black ink wash to provide a contrasting background. Of course, it would not excite Tony, falling as it does at the hurdle of 'meaning' or 'malleability', but I want to allow myself at least some satisfaction in producing something that has some of the ambiguity around landscape and mortality and is, I think,  pleasing on the eye. It seems like a fitting end to a sequence of work that may be little more than a staging post for where I will eventually go with this, but still has some value in its own right.