Athens Playthlon..
Drawing up a game for Athens x
Life-Drawing Classes, Drawing Choreography, Drawing Club with Tomoko Takahashi & Sebastian Lowsley- Williams and Performance
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Hendrick’s Lecture Series
I am honoured to be teaching Life-drawing as part of the 2012 Hendrick’s Lecture Series at The Last Tuesday Society from February until July. This is because it is a composite of high nutrition for many of us who feel nurtured by the details they leave out on the naturalization exams for those applying for Englishness (myself included)- but also simply details. Podcast’s may be discovered on The Last Tuesday Society’s Website including In Search Of The English Eccentric, Bataille, Haiti and Vodou, City of Sin - London And It’s Vices
Tickets can be purchased at Ticket Master
Thank you,
Mia
This is how important mustaches are to people.
Quoted from The Art Of Being A Gentleman With Gustav Temple - Hendrick’s Lecture Series, February 2011
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We moved
Similarities between birds and miniatures
*Small drawings have a history of movement such as miniatures in lockets, medical illustrations of identifiable diseases- each were used in war- as were carrier pigeons
*miniatures may be fragmentary manias & for a birdwatcher birds may be fragmentary manias…A metaphysical poet described birds as incarnations of forgotten pieces of people (much like a miniature), the current definition of a bird is Any of various warm-blooded, egg-laying, feathered vertebrates of the class Aves, having forelimbs modified to form wings. An isolated, post-modernist definition with very little relation to the human apetite to eat birds ( like a miniature)
*To conjoin all birds and miniatures would create an unflappable cape of small heads in promised lockets- a community of flightless birds who have given the individual natures of their bodies- who have seen so much- to the realm of object and a questioning of history through anomoly. (just like the portrait artist)
Drawing club is moving either side of a project which is about to hatch. .
@ 8 Andrew’s Road, Regent’s Studios
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Here is a noise - strobe light experiment that happened there this week:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUP4GoKShKU
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The Salma Pages
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What is this project?It is a series of sessions in which isometric drawings will be made by former asylum seekers from Kurdish territory in Turkey and Northern Iraq. The drawings will represent places, buildings and, homes as they remember them.More information on this project is growing in a form more like a thesis than a blog post. For this reason I am posting it online as The Salma PagesIn case you don’t already knowAn Isometric drawing is a drawing which uses 60 and 30 degree angles to imply a 3 dimensional object. although it looks more convincing than other methods of representing 3d, such as an oblique perspective, it is less useful as all faces are distorted as opposed to the oblique or axonometric which will have one non distorted face….for example
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A Life Drawing Room Based On Drawing a Drawing of an Ear
Ursula Blackwell’s Studio, The home of Ursula and Erno Goldfinger. 2 Willow Road NW3
A Stage| that invokes the natural intention/ to stage
Warmth rises up from the parquet floor. Oak slats weave horizontally, diagonally inlayed they open vertically to reveal hot pipes and spaces to store canvasses.
:-)
Drawing holds a stillness of vision which moves only as we are moved by our acknowledgment of the space which grows as we contain it, but with every understanding comes the very surprise of it (!) so that in containing the image we finally open.
This criss-crossing assemblage of floor forms a concise aesthetic and functional code as a quantified version of the larger space which is construcuted in accordance with Adolf Loos’ Raum plan-
*” For me, there is no ground floor, first floor, etc…For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces, etc. Storeys merge and spaces relate to each other..”
- Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos
The first time I sat inside Ursula Blackwell’s Studio I began to draw. I didn’t know it was a life-drawing stage yet felt poised, framed in the surrealist tradition of deep architraves and a sense of valves opening, visual and material challenges that created spaces within spaces through complications that functioned.
I would not want to complicate the present with ideals, yet hold valuable this experience- it evoked an openness which flapped as the colours of the wood evolved with the light that passed through the photobolic screen to the north- to the heath-totally bare and without curtain, only cold gusts of wind through open brass vents lining the gorge of a windowsill pattered, so as to draw in sensual recognition, myself drawing, delineating the subject in the space that accentuated the matter- and as a matter of engineering, prevented the steel rims along the 70 year old glass from buckling- it was the creation of a legible heterotopia.
“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time…”
- Helene Cixous
to hurry through for the purpose of stripping the house of drawings-
The back of the stage can be opened out at any moment, so that it is no longer a stage, but an extension of the living room, which can thrice be opened to the balcony so that the whole space could possibly also be outside and, spun around in a fixture of important things to do, essential to the character of the ‘inwohner’ one could embark through a door to the right leading to a spiral- built with an intrigue into the vestages of shells, that echo Le Corbusier’s architectural ammendment to the Fibernacci code- a stairwell, which is the main support of the house yet has no support at its centre- stairs that are cantilevered out from the wall so as to be supportive to that structure which it also relies upon- it’s painted red at the level of these three rooms- a glistening landing which guides that subject and their ever rarified matter- that which only belongs to them- as it is here that we scratch the bare essence of materials (wood, pigment, concrete and one single block of marble)- then, matters aside, stepping down - but- one -step- onto the landing of this august spiral- our most essential friend would have arrived in a dining room, covered in drawings- with ply-wood room divides that fold snuggly (as legs) to reveal again the studio- and an excellent life drawing stage, which invokes drawing as a bodily function onto itself- a house- an anatomy, and an observation of anatomy- reflected and codified.
Giving a tour of the drawings at the house of Erno Goldfinger-
Collage by Roland Penrose; Real Woman | Sculpture by Matthew Freyer-Smith
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Hosting Life-Drawing At Danse Macabre
Above; Drawing after a performance by The Borscht Vegetable theatre
(But Where was Romeo Castellucci?)
- If each piece of paper beheld the possibility of a newly formed room the architectonic flow snapped it up again creating a highly charged environment for those who concentrated.
At some stage very late in the evening I lifted my eyes to a tall man who was presenting me with a drawing he had made in a singular motion. He told me that his art teacher had picked on him when he was at school. How unfortunate.
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Two /drawing\ classes/
A few months ago I was offered a position teaching at the National Trust’s 17th Century apple orchard at Fenton house in the London borough of Hampstead.
(It is situated snugly on a hill, sunken into an excavated furrow, divided into two plots linked in the middle by a beleafed augmentation of ground flora that branch about in eyeless circles, reitterating the shadows of those larger curves cast by old and thus more detailed trees baring discovery apples- which are bright white inside but upon biting bleed the pigments of their blush, tracing the direction of your teeth.)
Prior to the event I visited the orchard and house in moments that were so blissful I could not foresee or begin to recount, but simply lay and learnt from the landscape as an ideal presented to me and which, I allowed myself to enter under the pretense of work. There you are, I said to myself- a way of being that’s deeply thoughtful, sensual and expressive- opened for you to experience and study and eventully to extrapolate upon through providing a botanical illustration class- This is education.
The new curator, Joseph Watson previously of the V&A had discussed the issue of the house’s potential as a museum harbouring the largest collections of boer war weaponry in the UK, and a significant porfolio of maps; the presentation of which was questionable given the Trust’s interest in diversifying its audience …
Botanical illustration, lesson plan..
To what extent are apples life-models? (looking at apples)
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Drawing Club with Tomoko and Sebastian utilized spaces that were interesting and accessible. On many occasions squatted residences became fascinating places to draw. I remember the old London Symphonia home on Drum Street which on the fourth floor yeilded the wooden ex residence of a chinese restaurant which had been cleanly stripped so that what was left was a cavernous painters studio with a small kitchen with little white chairs and an open stairwell leading to a mezzanine where georgian mattresses were lain out with oils and marbled folders filled with pink erasers…. a churchhouse with seemingly endless rooms and unexpected doors - .. .. a restaurant on Goodge street loved by the surrounding amenities whose owners would pop in for chats and tea whilst people drew into the night .. and the great church/club on Tottenham court road which thousands attended to draw and dance….
For this reason drawing club attended the protest to protect squatters rights. The protest itself was displaced. Squatters did not appear to have a home for a voice which shifted - !
From Kensington, South and then again to Westminster, they were soon surrounded by police threatening arrest for the reason that it is illegal to protest opposite parliament.
A microcosm of the larger cause, people were tired and, instead of another relocation which could possibly have helped legitimize the flexible sound of free housing the voice diminished into that of a false picnic.
A drawing club with Tomoko Takahashi and Sebastian Lowsley-Williams, 2008. With Thanks to Basement Arts!
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Wyndstock take two/ A life-drawing class by the Isle of White
Bronte Dow and Mia Gubbay after the drawing had been lifted from the page so that its measurement seeped into the practice of their movement. Films were made of this in the method of moving painting as presented by Hilary Lawson of the Open Gallery.
Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani
