Independent Drawing: the assignment is quite wide open – take inspiration from the artist research to generate large-format drawing (22″ x 30″ minimum) of any style, any media.
I got interested in William Kentridge’s dystopian landscapes and his charcoal portraits, and inspired by his political subtext. I thought of a photo my partner took in Iceland earlier this year — me in conversation with a statue titled Monument to the Unknown Bureaucrat. The scene felt Kentridgean. Initially, I just cropped the photo and did a little sketch version…
.Brainstorming / Ideation: I was calling the statue “blockhead” and started playing around with multiples — lining them up made me think of “blockchain”, which I know perishingly little about except that it relates to secure storage of immense amounts of data and consumes an amount of electricity that beggars belief. The lined-up blocks made me think of quarries. Quarries made me think of Cezanne who I’d recently done an art history project on… below see a series of images to sum up the storm in my brain…
Next steps 1) media and substrate trials… 2) ideas to class, meet with instructor. See below:
Dec 2: met with instructor Sara Vipond — she advocated for the Quarry/Blockchain version over the Origin Stories version. She suggested the option to work text into the piece (as Kentridge does in some of his work), handlettered, making some of the brainstorming visible but not spelling it out. She was particularly interested in the idea of Cezanne’s abstracted quarry leading into Cubism, hence my cubes/blocks, and working in the social commentary on the power-sucking blockchain business world… Some of the leaps are quirky but worth digging in to. Onward.
Cezanne Meets Blockchain. William Kentridge’s combination of wit and dystopian scenes recalled to me an Icelandic statue, with a quarried block of stone in place of the head and shoulders of a briefcase-toting bureaucrat. A Blockhead, really. A proliferation of blockheads brought me to Blockchain, a method of secure data storage that consumes electricity and minerals at a rate that beggars belief. In 1900, when Paul Cezanne painted his abstracted take on The Quarry at Bibemus, he might feasibly have imagined the Cubism and other Modern Art movements that his work would spawn. He is less likely to have imagined the monster eating its own tail that mining and industry and technology would someday spawn.
Post-Critique thoughts: I posted only the title, not the artist statement. Interesting to hear the reactions to this confusing piece, with only the title to go on –examples: “I haven’t a clue what this is about”; “what are the figures along the front”; “why limit the colour to the upper left section, add bits of it elsewhere”; “love the dystopian feeling”; “kind of like time travel from Cezanne’s time to the present or future”. I asked others if better to use my alternative title The Quarry (since very few identified Cezanne’s quarry) but agreement that the title as stands gives more guidance to the viewer. Feedback on composition and technique — noticing the “Z-shaped” pattern, appreciate drapery marks on figure’s clothes, appreciating the gradual transition from the yellow/orange section into the neighbouring quarry, like the contrast and shading on the B&W quarry blocks, consider atmospheric perspective to help give depth to the valley, the power poles in the foreground need to be taller, consider bringing the smoke stacks in and downwards to occupy more of the mid-ground, consider adding tiny bit of yellow-orange elsewhere in the piece, perhaps some highlights on the briefcases?
Additional thought — I need to learn more about fixative. Not sure I am using the right product or timing given that I left a bunch of charcoal on the facing page in my portfolio, thereby lessening the contrast and shadows, too bad. Look this up!
And Final Photo — from the wall in the classroom studio, different lighting from home…
