Thursday 30 June 2005
Wednesday 29 June 2005
After Leonardo
I enjoyed this picture so much, I decided to do it meself. I'm enjoying the Eco book "On Beauty" just now, which has the added bonus of being full of beautiful pictures.
Tuesday 28 June 2005
A Fortune at Sea
Today's work is stuff relating to the ongoing project I'm doing with Maddy. At the moment I'm calling the project "A fortune at sea", partly because of the projects' themes of transatlantic trade between us artists and the ways in which the themes and atmosphere of the work are making me think of The Merchant of Venice, though we're still working out what the work is actually about.
These drawings and figures would inform transparent sheets that would overlay the main drawings of boats and ports and waves.
Other work today has seen me hacking a couple of notes together for my presentation next Wednesday, and some reeling from the mental shock that someone has taken me at my word about producing a paper for a conference on artists' books. I must figure out my true state of affairs about this. Can I do it? Will college help me to do it? How will I get there? Etc...
Monday 27 June 2005
notes towards another new book
Some notes towards the book Maddy Rosenberg and I are working on together.
Sunday 26 June 2005
A Newton St Loe Rebus
This post is to bracket the ones showing work from my sketchbook on "A Newton St Loe Rebus". This is going to be a new book in the Whistling Copse series. I'm going to be working on material towards it regularly and posting the results here.
As you can see, I've been working in a fairly tight way on drawn material and just assembling a whole batch of thumbnails on the probable sorts of content I'll be including. After that I started thinking about the way I was going to construct the thing beyond its simply being a random, meaningless rebus matrix for what happened at Whistling Copse. I still intend to keep part of this approach, but I think I want to impose some leading constructions on the material. So as well as compartmentalising things into the seasons, I want to put in headings like "food on the table" and "traps", some of which will be illustrated fairly simply and some of which will start to pull together a cryptic retelling of the story, with objects and events- most obviously, the presence of a dead body- colluding to emplot the rebus materials in a more sinister light.
Later on, I've been reconsidering the ways in which i will represent all this, and working out the style of the book. I still haven't made my mind up about this. I think it's something that will be dictated more by working on the ideas.
Newton St Loe Rebus
In the last couple of days I've started doing some work on an idea for a new book.
I'm going to experiment with putting most of the work towardsit online
Thursday 23 June 2005
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
From East Coker (No. 2 of Four Quartets) by T.S. Eliot
I've know The Waste Land for several years, and its imagery has crept into my life. I doubt I could quote it to you, but I'd know if you were, and I've hardly walked home from work of an evening without wondering what sort of stream of the damned we must look like. Having begun to read, absolutely sight unseen, Four Quartets feels unusually like a great gift. I feel like I've discovered a new wing to the house, or a new stretch of trees in a much-loved wood.
My immediate impressions, having read Burnt Norton and East Coker now, are that they are very different from The Waste Land, with its playful and mocking acrostics. They (BN & EC) seem to be more compartmentalised at first glance, like a cabinet of curiosities rather than a palimpsest, with their varied imageries and voices set rather more squarely. My apprehensions of Eliot's riddling text are unformed though. Burnt Norton's images of time and stillness and East Coker's ones of change, rebirth and mortality seem to accumulate in drifts rather than articulating exactness: my first, swift reading here. I wonder how the poet and I will contrive to meld his clockwork into something that runs more precisely. Certainly I look forward to looking again and again. I have never felt I understood poetry, and definitely not Eliot. But The Waste Land has been part of my mental furniture long enough that I feel that I have, if not an understanding of it, then at least a way of getting inside the ideas and driving them around for myself. I wonder if I ever go where the poet intended?
Thursday 2 June 2005
Library of Celsius in Ephesus, Turkey
Looking through pictures of libraries on Flickr, I saw this. Chimes somewhat with my current book project.
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