full moon idea for 100th post

yes! new scanner is now in play. sorry, the image is uncropped and uncleaned, just entered raw.

so, i started playing with these concentric circles of stippling. just simple patterns. now that i've completed two i'm thinking that they might work really well with an extra conceptual element. for example, i could draw one on the night of every full moon. perhaps for a year, or for a particular period of time, and have them as a collective record of drawings, all actioned on a specific natural event.
 

back to base

first drawing back in melbourne

it's been quite hectic, locating a new home, buying a car and catching up with family and friends, so the work flow has started to splutter out a bit. the impetus is still there though, i can feel it gnawing at me.

anyway, i only just realised, as i was loading this image up, that it has some resemblance with my current situation - finding a new home to live with lucy, our first home as a married couple, bound together as a unit, so to speak.

i'm about to move out to the country now, so some of these drawings may begin to emerge as sculptural and performative works in the forests of victoria.

penultimate berlin drawing

drawing variants of medium

not very impressed with this one, but underneath it, or inside of it, seems to be a recurring/returning cuboid fascination. stemming from a quote by goethe, regarding the vertical and horizontal drives of growth, my drawings occasionally render that concept as cubes. in this pattern there is also an alternating vertical and horizontal mark making going on.

this has sculptural potential as a form of drawing apparatus. i'm thinking that maybe the hanging branch on the bottom could have the lower, pointed end burnt into charcoal, so that it marks the paper on the ground. the wind or vibration from the upper branch could generate the motion and create the drawing. this could form just one part of the work, the next step could be to then add my own drawing overlaid onto the charcoal markings. perhaps something more graphic, using ink and refined lines, or curves, as a counterbalance to the organic markings of the branch.

bikes have been a recurring motif lately too. surely as a result of the bicycle culture in europe. this drawing is supposed to be from a bird's eye view, looking down on two tree stumps that would still be in the ground (so the bike would actually be horizontal to the ground). might look good as a photograph.

tethered networks

there's definitely something going on with the suppressed growth of plants in my drawings. a lot of controlled or inhibited growth seems to be implied by holding down branches. bringing the upward trajectory of the growth drive down toward the earth or back toward the origin of the expansion. what that means for the intrinsic concept of the work, is yet to be fully articulated. but the notion of combative forces at play is clearly driving some of these drawings.

some networked nodes have also been appearing in the drawings. networks form a common body of work in my output. the mapping of the centres of the nodes has something of interest for me here, especially the way in which the geometry couples with the organic elements. something worth exploring more. the pulsating nature of the nodes reminds me of growth rings or rippled water. waves, oscillations, binary.

moon butts shrooms bikes

another sequences of photo-phrases for the collection.

'let's have an exhibition at my house', curated by renee cosgrave

exhibited my drawings as part of a group show in kreuzberg, berlin, curated by melbourne artist renee cosgrave.

other artists on show included renee herself, lucy james, carly fischer, and devon atkins. it was a very spontaneous show, with random people coming in off the street to look and some ex-pat friends too.

one of the random loclas who popped in for a look

more info here at anecdote

posterisation

so i was thinking i might collate the drawings i have been doing here in berlin and make myself a nice little poster. maybe a limited edition of 5 or 10, just a nice memento of the work i've done here and something pretty to shove on a wall at home or the studio.

here's a very very rough mock-up i threw together just as a reminder to myself really. i'll obviously need to scan the drawings in, probably change it all to greyscale and include far more drawings. i'll have close to 100 to pick from, so i might use as many as i can to make the poster look good.

it's still my intention to pick out the drawings that worked best and reproduce them on a larger scale, probably in different series. some of them will end up as preparatory sketches for sculptures, photos and video works.

twig geysers and more

these are throwbacks to some of my earliest drawings at the start of my postgrad. the earlier drawings usually had these branch/twig geyser things piercing through chairs mostly. here they are erupting from the ground and either swallowing up spheres or possibly projecting them out. for some reason i see the spheres as those exercise balls.

on the latter image, i can actually see the forms making some pretty fun outdoor lamps, with glowing spheres of colour.

this time the geysers are sort of interacting with trees. this makes me think about how my work sometimes shows nature or natural symbols that mutate and come alive to act/interact. there's something philosophical inside that concept, i'm sure of it.

another invented plant / speculative flora.

this is a random pattern arrangement of cumulative mark making. this sort of arrangement comes out quite regularly in my work. it's almost always just a build up of massed shapes, intuitively composed, to evoke the structure or pattern of chaos. or something. 

this one takes the leaf patterns i have been using lately as the units of form. i'm thinking that, rather than intuitive composition, i could use a mapping configuration, where each circular mass denotes a particular tree, perhaps from a park, from a walk that i take or some other territory.

more tethering, this time a sort of inward constriction of self control.

compulsive drawing

a few of these structures made their way into the sketchbook lately. i'm imagining that the hanging log is pierced by a copper rod. for what purpose, or for what potential meaning, i'm not sure yet. but i do like the idea of building a few of these in parks and just leaving them there.

with this one i'm thinking about the performance of pulling against trees. i can see it being just people, like some sort of tug-of-war. otherwise cars could be interesting too, with mud flicked up and smoke and a generally failed attempt at moving the tree.

just a random, proposition for a sculptural form. i think i was considering the idea of a circulated growth or cycle of movement.

so, this started off as an unplanned random pattern that turned into a kinda ugly web. i kept pushing it and it slowly evolved into a kinda ugly flower.