Balla, a sketch study for a new animated drawing
A 24 second animated sequence derived from 900 individual graphite marks, scanned and animated to create a series of studies for a new drawing and print edition.
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I've got a few sketches of work in progress to share here. These are early days sketches of a new process I'm developing, partially although not entirely in response to the RWA's Paper Work Biennial. I wanted to revert back to using graphite and pencil as the basis for a study, which I pretty much always do, but instead of abandoning that work at what I might call the 'fag packet' stage, I wanted to push through and complete a fully realised drawing as a more complex understudy for a new work, Balla.
As ever, I also wanted to create the drawing with some of the benefits of digital working, and felt from the outset that the drawing should be partially digital. A test to see if the hybridity between the graphite and the digital could bring something new to my drawing process. The resulting study is a new methodology for my practice, and certainly one I will be continuing to pursue.
Effectively I decided to work with a geometry that I've been thinking about for quite a long time. I encountered it as an unresolved sketch in the drawings of Giacomo Balla, the Italian Futurist, and highly regarded exponent of C20th colour abstraction.
The pencil drawings I've made for this study are however expressed as modular components, each drawn to fit a particular part of the overall geometry, but on individual sheets of layout paper, so that each component has it's own unique modularity. These drawings were then scanned at high resolution, and composited digitally to create the underlying graphite study, the digital allowing me to fine tune the position of each component, but with a set of rules in play that effectively forbid the idea of retouching anything. The marks must have the integrity and quality of the original hand work.
I then drew the whole thing a second time, which gave me a near identical study, that I could use as an underdrawing, or as a second set of marks which could be overlaid, potentially shifting tonal and hue variations.
At this point I had a nine hundred component layered pencil drawing, with the ability to influence any one of the myriad components that make up the geometry, and the ability to do that an unlimited number of times. Here the digital comes into it's own, offering a wide set of chromatic and tonal variations to be experimented with, without destroying the original mark making.
I've been influenced from the earliest days by the sheer pleasure of viewing artists' sketches, working drawings rapidly made, and often with construction marks and notes that add massively to one's understanding of what has come into play in the construction of a new work. It's that energy that I wanted to capture in this study, and the idea that it might exist as a complete work, or series of works, in its own right. I'm particularly fond of two recent publications I’ve bought featuring Bridget Riley's drawings and sketches, which are absolutely packed with interest, to some extent they offer a peek behind the curtain, a look under the bonnet. They are in short revelatory, if you study them carefully.
So what's new to me here. The idea that the pencil line can be multilayered whilst keeping its integral qualities. The idea of allowing the marks to sit, unedited, on the page. The idea that the drawing can be manipulated in very particular ways, to produce colour studies in which the hue combinations can be tested out, mixed and edited over a longer period, and honed in a way that couldn't be achieved in the pre digital era.
I think, perhaps, there is also some recoil from recent advances in AI, and a desire to strip back the methods I use to engender more 'real' qualities in the digital works I'm making. A move towards the haptic, the hand made mark and the unending pleasure of maths and colour. Increasingly I find myself drawn to the sheer beauty of works by people like Matisse, who seems able to capture the joy and thrills of the mundane everyday world we all inhabit as we travel through our days.
I'm going to work up the geometry digitally next, and then perhaps seek out some further hybridisation between the pencil and the digital. I'm quietly excited to see where it may go next. I'm also going to print one or maybe two of these initial studies as Print Club editions. They seem to me to have the essence of the kind of experimentation that the club was designed to foster. An opportunity to try out new methods away from the glare of the gallery or the fair.
