reality slippage

nature wrecked vincent

just a little note to self really:

after visiting the van gogh museum in amsterdam, i noticed that when van gogh painted nature - be it trees, flowers, grass, sky etc - was when he really started to abstract his brushwork and his colour combinations.

as if nature itself was the catalyst for breaking out of the conventional and striking off into new territory of possibility.

his contemplation of, and ultimate expression of, the true nature of the world around him, led him to develop new forms. forms that truly communicated the human interpretative feeling of nature rather than direct representational copies of nature.

ps - i only really say 'wrecked' vincent as this abstraction of nature seems to go hand in hand with his evolving slide into melancholy and emotional dissipation.

drawn from design

a couple more drawings in ink.

these were inspired by a trip to the museum of art and design in copenhagen.

ink plants

ink on paper

now i'm in amsterdam!

i've come over to europe for a break/honeymoon/research field trip. the amsterdam situation is almost entirely the first two thirds of that equation.

i arrived with only computer, cameras and a dictaphone for art making. today i bought a moleskine notebook for less than 20 australian dollars and have started some ink drawings.

this is a cactus in our apartment:

i quite like this style of dots and lines. so i tried another cactus, this time one completely invented.

 

for me, i think the way the cactus branches are formed as a collective unit works better in the first image. they are no doubt all affected, in terms of their growth pattern, by the sunlight pulling their attention toward it. the second image is made up and doesn't conform to a specific pattern of collective behaviour. this may render it somewhat abstracted from a more realistically recognised entity from the real world. 

this is not necessarily a bad thing. it is more surreal. more of the imagination.

i have a suspicion, however, that with mass expansion, an entire field of these branches would at some point achieve a kind of critical mass. a tipping point at which the collective apparent behaviour of the forms would appear to be coalescing into a sort of pattern. a pattern of the artist's working processes and of the conceptual sunlight working on the forms.