Sake cups and small bottle
Drawing
by
Peter Davidson 2016
The aim:
To draw the motif strictly as observed from its public surfaces
(meaning only what the eye can see)
To draw the motif strictly as observed from its public surfaces
(meaning only what the eye can see)
Over the many decades of one's drawing studio praxis there has been a focus on
constructing images from the public surfaces of a chosen motif, just like the above sake cups with the
influence of delay (the period between the initial drawing beginnings of the image to the final end common standpoint, being the completed artwork) and human optical flux.
Whilst drawing from the motifs public surfaces in the studio, the realization that these small drawn pencil markings or traces, were almost as if one was using a internal navigating system, going back and forth
across the given picture plane from optical analysis then externalizing it in real time as an artistic mark, this methodology was
gleaned from the British artist William Coldstream who was Head of the Slade
School of Art, University of London in the sixties and seventies.
These drawing and painting praxis traces which I might call aesthetic navigation marks have been going on for three decades. More particularliy these aestethic navigational traces began in1986 after reading a book published by the Tate called; The Hard Won image with Coldstream's painting in it titled; Reclining Nude 1976 this image and his artistic praxis idea of
measured exactitude in painting and drawing has continued to nag my curiousity. On The Tate Galleries website there is good coverage of Coldstream's painting ideas here;
Coldstream had employed a rigorous measuring method since his
return to painting in 1937. The small vertical and horizontal marks, with which
he marked the relative size and position of different elements, began to
perform a denotative role in such wartime portraits as that of Havildar Ajmer Singh (Tate N05687). They became increasingly dominant in his subsequent
work and could be said to reach a climax in Reclining Nude, 1974-6. The artist
described the practice to Sylvester as ‘the old idea: you look at what you’re
painting and you hold your pencil or brush out in the ... picture plane ... your arm
straight out and the brush up vertically and you mark off with one eye shut’.[9] He acknowledged the various flaws in the system:
the discrepancy between the flat picture plane and the three-dimensional world
and the difference between viewing the world with one eye and the painting with
two. However, Coldstream was not ‘in the least discontented with this nucleus
of unreason in his style’,[10] and he, himself, described his measuring
processes as ‘simply rituals and methods of somehow getting one going’.[11]
Now it may be reasonably true to say that Coldstream’s
intentionality's of studio praxis in lead pencil or oil traces, on canvas or paper did
not equal his utterances by his own admission.
Nonetheless, recent
scientific discoveries being the human "inner GPS" by John
O’Keefe May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser (Mapping the brain’s GPS system has earned three neuroscientists the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. John O’Keefe of University
College London shares the prize with husband-and-wife duo May-Britt Moser and
Edvard Moser of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in
Trondheim) caught my attention and it is my belief that Coldstream, like myself were both very
interested in unity and the diversity of this kind of painting/drawing navigational/mapping from the optics. But unlike
Coldstream, one has had the luxury of knowing partially how the inner GPS works, whereas he didn’t, so it was very hard for him to articulate a formal theory, hard for me to actually!
Not being a medical scientist of any sort this is just a hunch that
Coldstream like myself was interested in how this human navigational mapping or "inner GPS" through optics reveals itself within his studio praxis in painting/drawing with its subsequent delay in transferral from observation onto canvas or paper.
Whether the human "inner GPS" effects the artist praxis is true or not, I don’t know but looking at Coldstream's praxis over fifty years and mine going on thirty years, there appears on the face of it, to be some relationship one might suggest between painting/drawing and the artist's "inner GPS" but then again I might be
completely wrong.
Tate Gallery Coldstream Link;
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/coldstream-reclining-nude-t02079/text-catalogue-entry
The human inner GPS
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neuroscientists-garner-nobel-discovering-brain%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98inner-gps%E2%80%99
