June 12, 2004
June 11, 2004
Birds and Flags 1-9, June 2004
Nine drawings: pencil, colored pencil, watercolor, and ink on 100% cotton fiber acid free archival thesis paper, 11 X 8 1/2" each, scanned (see notes below; click each for a larger view)
Nothing conclusive here; an exercise in line, color, brushwork, gesture, movement with variations on a triangle motif. Did the top three on Saturday, June 5, the middle three on Sunday morning, and the bottom three Sunday afternoon. No do-overs. Usually to get nine drawings like this I'd easily do 20-25 drawings. This time I settled for what came out, awkwardness and all; I want to look at that, think about what makes something right or wrong.
Each drawing started with a simple freehand drawing in pencil over which are laid three roughly-ruled colored pencil lines. The watercolor is laid in with a small flat brush in short strokes, forming an area that surrounds the triangles but doesn't make a real background, trying to find an incomplete completeness. The final act is the free-hand ink outline that anchors but doesn't encompass the central painted field.
Each drawing has three colors, plus black and graphite. After doing the first three I re-used the same color combinations for the next two sets of three. I rotated the sequence of the color combinations in each row without a lot of thought.
This is smooth paper, easy to draw on, and comes in boxes of 100 sheets for around $12.00; I bought it at the UC Berkeley student store. The watercolor goes nicely on this paper, allowing long enough to move the paint a bit before it kind of sucks up the water, which helps retain the look of the brush strokes.
There are a lot of birds flying across and in and out of our backyard. A branch hanging over our fence holds a nest in which we can watch parent robins land with big juicy worms to feed two shaky, wide-open, triangle-shaped baby mouths. Neighbors down the street have Tibetan prayer flags and another string of peace flags hanging above their long porch. Leaves are fluttering from branches, loads of apples and plums are growing and hanging. Telephone wires are diagrams across the sky, drawings from pole to pole zigzagging down the street. Large and small planes fly over to and from Oakland Airport.
These drawings were originally going to have a different format; behind each drawing would be another piece of paper turned horizontally, centered and aligned with the top sheet at the bottom edge. For an idea of what I mean see the recent HTML drawings "Three Edges." Once I did the drawings though I realized as I made them that I'd completely ignored this idea, and so each drawing just didn't sit well. I'm doing another set with that format fully integral to the entire process.
Group Material and Reaganism
Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes lists some links, "because it's been a week of remembering one life more than 21,000 deaths." I add the work of Group Material, a democratic art collaborative working at the height of Reaganism whose are practice was, simply but essentially, curation.
From Franklin Furnace
In the Democracy project for the DIA foundation, 1988, installations on education, electoral politics, cultural participation, and AIDS were tied closely to round table and town meeting discussions which were later compiled with other writings into a book. After this project, Group Material work on AIDS continued in the development of the AIDS Timeline first installed at Berkeley in 1989.
See the Berkeley link; the AIDS Timeline was installed at BAMPFA as MATRIX/Berkeley 132, 11/1/1989 - 1/20/1990:
The AIDS Timeline, a mixed-media installation by the artists' collective Group Material, reconstructs the history of AIDS as embedded within a web of cultural and political relations, primary among them the federal government's response to the syndrome. According to Group Material, the timeline, "indicts the government's inaction [on AIDS] and society's complicity in that inaction."2
The exhibition calls upon a variety of art objects as well as cultural artifacts, including images and texts from the popular media, the government, and grassroots political activists, to create a chronology of the syndrome. Using this breadth of representational materials, the timeline suggests that AIDS has been constructed through both a bio-medical discourse of infection, incubation, and transmission as well as a cultural vocabulary of innocence and guilt, dominance and deviance, threat and threatened, self and other.
It was a powerful and memorable exhibition and event in the Bay Area at that time.
Preview: Clyfford Still
I am currently writing about this Clyfford Still painting at the Berkeley Art Museum:
June 10, 2004
I was born June 10, 1957 at 3:12 p.m.
Forty-seven Birthday Drawings (and one to grow on)
June 09, 2004
June 08, 2004
Three Edges I-IX
The title refers to three sets of edges surrounding the central image: the square outer framing line, the edges of the vertical and horizontal rectangles, and the darker square formed by the overlap of these two rectangles.
