pattern generation

the drawings continue apace. i'm in the habit now of powering out 2 or 3 every day, which is generating a nice collection after nearly four weeks in berlin. another four weeks still remain, so plenty of time to continue this spurt of creative output. after i complete my little moleskine book of 100 pages, i'll be able to select the most effective drawings and make a series of larger scale drawings. hopefully, a couple of different series.

also, i discovered that my newly favourite pen for these drawings - staedtler pigment liner 0.3 and 0.5 - are german-made and thus, cheaper in berlin than home. i picked up a new 0.3 today, and yes, i'm chuffed about it! 

again, i'm trying to approach each blank page without any preconception and just start with a mark - leading to lines and patterns. the drawings feel as if they conjure themselves on to the page. as always, certain trends appear and lately it's been more abstract patterns, flora mutating with tools (or vice versa) and invented plants/flowers. the last drawing above takes from scientific botanical illustration, articulating the component parts of the imagined flower and seed casing.

using economic or financial data as the catalyst for generating the patterns of the flowers and/or leaves is still on my mind and i'll need to find a way of establishing the rules for that pattern generation. i'm thinking here of, for example, the share price fluctuation of, say, resource companies in a given period. volume of stocks traded, increase and decrease in value, and comparative performance against competitors in the same sector could act as the parameters or the triggers for the variation in tone, colour, direction of line etc etc.

new extinctions

some more drawings of invented flora. they feel as if they are discovered plates from a long lost explorer's botanical records. plants witnessed on colonial voyages, now extinct and never to be seen again, except on the pages of yellowed and flimsy diary pages recovered from someone's attic.

 the legendary floating trifern of the Lypernicus Islands

oh, and another triptych 'photo-phrase' for treetags_twingos_sparrows

i was planning that this collected series of photo-phrases could be amalgamated into a book and it dawned on me today that i could also produce that book digitally, as well as (or rather than) physically.

from dip to trip

treetags_twingos_sparrows

it's funny watching sparrows in berlin, thinking that they are native animals here. in australia, the concept of 'native animals' carries with it such a variety of loaded implications - the exotic, the colonised, the endangered.

this set is the first variation on the diptychs i've been working on. sets of 4 and 5 images will also follow at some point.

with this particular group, it's become more obvious that i'm drawn to subjects that occupy threshold territory between nature and culture. the twingo, however, sits a little less comfortably into that category, being exclusively a cultural object. but as a car not sold in australia, and thus exotic to me, it does now bear relationship with my comments about sparrows. is there such thing as a flock of twingos...?

flowers of intuition

stumps and knobs

i'm going to collate these photo diptychs into a body of photo-'poems' and present them as a book i think.

there'll also be sets of three, four and possibly five images, hopefully evoking some sense of 'phrasing' in their composition.

the selection for couplings (or 'triplings' etc) is fairly intuitive. there is no rule or premise to either the single image selection, or which type of subject gets paired with another. really, they are things in my day-to-day travelling that spring out as something of curiosity. matching, say for example the tree stumps and the door knobs in the above images, comes down to a simple intuitive arrangement, something similar to the duchampian process for selecting ready-mades, in which selections are based on those that, at first, elicit neither excitement nor contempt, but rather ambivalence. 

once coupled, however, they do ultimately begin to trigger a scrambling for meaning, like all half-way intriguing artistic catalysts should.

tethering

fastening?
confining?

as well as sculptural potential, i'm also thinking that the tethered trees could be part of a filmed performance work.

the reconfiguration of tools

tethered, floating plants still birth themselves into my drawings.
tools associated with gardening, like shovels/spades and pitchforks are ever present.
and i continue to remind myself, through action, that working consistently is strengthening the stamina of production.

also, these drawings are stimulating sculptural options. some of them clearly appear as if they are drawings of sculptures, although they are only drawn out from additions of line to paper, always evolving into their final form only as they are committed to page. never pre-planned. often starting as a plant, or as a spade, certainly only a single object, then connected to the next element, whatever springs to mind at the time of the drawing.

just as an example:
the second picture began as the form of honeycomb to the upper right. i started with this as i was recently invited to be involved with an exhibition of works-on-textile based on scientists. i was thinking about buckminster fuller, who is technically an engineer more than a scientist, but nevertheless seems to fit the same bill to my mind. anyway, that's where the drawing started. following the form, i wanted to make it more sculptural in appearance, so i thought something inside of it, or running through it, would evoke that. so i drew in a plant. i used a pattern based on feathers for the 'leaves' at the top, then drew down to a rope tied to its trunk. i completed the root system, which i wanted to be out of the ground, to show that the plant was floating in the air. i then followed the rope and thought i'd make it attach to a pitchfork. something about the plant being bound to the tools that are used to control/birth/manipulate it feels of interest. and then, rather than the pitchfork being in the ground, which was where i was expecting it to go, i decided to actually draw a pot for the soil into which it sits. finally, as this felt somehow stagnant or static, i put wheels on the pot to heighten a sense of dynamism or potential action.

buds and bollards

second series of diptych photographs.

berlin is proving to be a rather stimulating environment for productivity. today, just for example, i've pumped out two ink drawings and concocted this photo series.

mutant nature

more drawings keep pouring on to the page.
lately i've been thinking about mutated plant forms, tethered and guided.
and also emerging like giant arboreal demi-gods in a feudal-era landscape of walled cities and pastoral activities.

harvesting future funds

was thinking about my intention to pursue gardening instructional drawings as a source of inspiration, and how i feel like i need some additional element to accompany/modify it. for some time i was thinking about an increase in scale, translation into different materials such as embroidered onto artificial grass, or animating the drawings.

today i was considering changing the flowers in the drawings from actual plant species into imagined future mutations of plant species. hence the post title - harvesting future funds.

in the background to this is a consideration of including some sort of economic content into my work. perhaps financial data or economic data can provide the impetus for the pattern generation of these projected mutated botanicals.

why non- (cont'd)

 

why non-

started working on an idea for a set of photographic works.

the title above, why non-, comes from the window text of one of the images, as you'll see below.

obviously, placing them one atop the other like this is not going to work. perhaps they need to be strung out in a line, alternating between nest and smashed glass.

anyway, something intriguing i think...

cut, stored and drawn

again, i'm liking the refraction into the water. i need to resolve a way to express variances in colour and material better. notably, on the tulip at top, the flower is a bit rough. the dots i use are great for leaves, just need an alternative effect for flowers i think.

bringing the outside in

finally made some time to get back into the drawing, after much travelling. being in berlin is definitely a motivating force for creativity. most of the trees here are still in their dormant winter states but with spring clearly on the horizon there's a palpable sense of change in the air. i plucked a branch from a creeper growing on the ground in our building's courtyard, popped it into a glass bottle and set to work drawing it. these are great fun to do actually. i love that little light refraction effect on the stem as it goes into the water.

apologies on the image quality, i'm taking photos of these drawings rather than scanning them, due to the limitations of living out of a suitcase.