head over to Through The Haze Unnoticed

I’ve also just designed a poster for the next fatout show (not including the one tonight, which everyone should go to), featuring the rather thundering Taint, with support from Manatees and Loss Leader.

Here’s the pencil sketch I used to make this:

Currently listening to:  Miles Davis – Aura

The immaterial enters the impenetrable

This one was done as a monoprint on a zinc etching plate. It’s quite hard to capture the colour and texture on the paper but still it looks good to me.

~

What’s softest in the world

rushes and runs

over what’s hardest in the world.

The immaterial

enters

the impenetrable.

So I know the good in not doing.

The wordless teaching,

the profit in not doing -

not many people understand it.

from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, translation by Ursula K. Le Guin

Currently listening to: Scuba – Triangulation

We’ve finally finished putting together the third issue of Fatzine, which has the theme of politics, for obvious reasons. The last few days I’ve been at Hot Bed Press in Salford, screenprinting this 4 colour (3 separation) design on the front of every fresh copy… that’s 150 copies, so yeah, it took a while.

It looks so good though.

Polly wanted some graffiti done for the front cover to tie in with our interview with Manchester-based street artist kElzO, and the graffiti theme we ran with inside, so she got in touch with Nathan Thoday, one of our friends from school, who whipped up this amazing design for us:

Nathan’s always been so good at lettering and this is no exception, I love it. You should also definitely check out his new enterprise, ATD Apparel (Attention To Detail), which has a group on facebook, and I think he’s making a website soon.

we wanted to spray the front covers, so Nathan also made this intricate stencil:

unfortunately polly forgot to mention it had to be small enough to fit on the A5 front cover, and this one was more like A3 in length. We decided that it was gonna be too hard to cut out a stencil at A5 size, so I went about preparing some separations so I could screen-print it instead.

First I photocopied the stencil and reduced it..

Then I drew three separations from this on bits of tracing paper:

I wanted to use the gradient shading from the original drawing but you have to do it as little dots, which works with screen-printing.

I decided to go for red, yellow and blue, seeing as it’s the politics issue after all, but then when I was setting up the last drop shadow layer, I couldn’t resist getting some green in there, so the shadow has a green to blue gradient.

I really like the texture of it, it looks kinda rough but it’s a hand drawn design and it suits that;  it works without needing to be polished and graphic.

Here’s a little preview of what you will see in this issue:

You’ll be able to order one of these for £1 (to cover postage) or download a pdf version at fatout.co.uk

Also I’ve got a few of those Master Musicians posters left for only 7 quid at mjfchance.co.uk

Currently listening to: Gonjasufi – A Sufi and a Killer

thought I’d better get a couple pictures of these up. This first one was done for the ala muerte show on april fools day, which was awesome. I managed to sell a couple of prints and swap a few for various albums and other things on the night.

This next one was a bit trickier, and it took a couple of goes to get the exposure right for the line work. The print outs I had weren’t good enough so I just drew over all the linework on the positive with a sharpie, which worked brilliantly, although it meant the lines were a little thicker than I wanted them to be. I started out printing a yellow-ish skin colour which covers the legs and snakes, then mixed the blue with more medium than usual so it was more transparent, and printed that over the background and snakes. This means the snakes come out a greenish blue colour where the blue ink has semi-covered the yellow. I started out printing the linework in black, but because the lines were slightly thicker than intended they were a bit overpowering, so I mixed it down to a softer slate grey, which works well with the blue also I think.

I apologise for the slightly poor images, it’s hard to capture colours of course, but you get a good idea. Unfortunately, although the night was amazing in musical terms, it was a Sunday and there weren’t many people there, so I only got to sell a couple of posters, but I did also manage to swap one with Bill Horist for his album Covelant Lodge, which is a beautiful collaborative chamber piece with some pretty fancy finger pickin’.

To do both these prints I’ve been going to Hot Bed Press, an open-access print studio in Salford. It’s a really friendly place and they’ve got equipment for almost any kind of printmaking, and it costs £1.50 an hour (excl. materials) which isn’t too bad.I’m really excited to start printing the wolves in the throne room posters; I think tickets are selling fast and it looks like it’s gonna be quite a night.

I’ve got a couple of the ala muerte ones left and about 8 of the master musicians ones, so I’ll be putting them up in my shop on my website soon for dirt cheap! If you’re interested, they’re printed on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge paper, and measure, at a guess, about 80 x 30cm.

Currently listening to: Bill Horist – Covalent Lodge (North Pole Records)

Remember Remember has been playing elaborately staged shows in and around the city for the past few years and has been producing some of the most epic-sounding and ambitious music we’ve heard in a long time.

If you’re a fan of the likes of Mice Parade, Animal Collective or Bjork along with artists such as Philip Glass, Brian Eno and Yann Tiersen then you really should take the time to check out his work.

Expect to hear new music from him in 2010 following on from his critically acclaimed self-titled debut album. He is one of the most talented and imaginitive artists we’ve had the pleasure to work with and are really excited at the prospect of getting new material off him.

It’s looking like a good show already, but more bands are to be confirmed soon.

It actually looks pretty sweet just with block colours as well:

Having done minimal amounts of research, I noticed that ink is basically just a pigment (coloured powder) mixed with oil. Ink can then be thickened using wax I believe. Making a pigment is fairly easy, so I started this with some soil from the garden.

Spreading the soil onto a tray, I grilled it for a while to try and remove as much moisture as I could.

I then ground some of this in a pestle and mortar, and heaped it onto a pane of glass to be mixed with a bit of vegetable oil.

Unfortunately this makes quite a gritty paste rather than a smooth ink, as you can see:

This means that the particles of soil are too big to mix properly with the oil, so that if painted on a page the oil stains the page while most of the soil separates into clumps:

the problem is not necessarily the method but the materials. The soil is much too sandy and granular, so that even after I’d put it through a seive, you could still see lots of tiny lumps of glass and rock within it if you looked very closely:

I tried mixing some spreadable butter into it, making a fairly smooth paste that could be rolled and used for simple monoprints:

Next I tried making some water based paint using some old onion skins. These were boiled in a small amount of water for 20 mins

After being boiled, they’d taken on a rich red colour, and the reduced water looked pretty awesome.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite like that on the page, but it still makes some nice yellow/sepia-ish washes like zis.

The darker patches on this picture also have some paprika and butter paint layered over the onion skin wash, tasty.

Next I tried grass, deciding to grind some fresh leaves with some vegetable oil.

The grass can then be clumped together and used to apply the grass oil onto the paper:

I was pretty pleased with this one

Some, like this one, had thick soil paint spread on the back and drawn into, which shows through the oily translucent paper:

Next I ordered a bottle of cold-pressed linseed oil, which is the best kind to mix oil paints.  I burned a few old envelopes to get a pile of ash, which was then ground in the pestle and mortar to form a fine, smooth grey pigment.

When mixed with the linseed oil it makes a really good syrupy paint

which can be painted on with ease. This one’s backlit by the way:

I’ve also used the ash paint for a bit of life painting with drawing over the top. The paint works really well, you can loosen it with more oil or turpentine and it dries with a really nice charcoal finish that works well with the added pencil patternation.

Currently listening to: Jah Wobble & The Chinese Dub Orchestra – Chinese Dub

Look at it: nothing to see.

Call it colorless.

Listen to it: nothing to hear.

Call it soundless.

Reach for it: nothing to hold.

Call it intangible.

Triply undifferentiated,

it merges into oneness.

not bright above,

not dark below.

Never, oh! never

can it be named.

It reverts, it returns

to unbeing.

Call it form of the unformed,

the image of no image.

Call it unthinkable thought.

Face it: no face.

Follow it: no end.

Holding fast to the old Way,

we can live in the present.

Mindful of the ancient beginnings,

we hold the thread of the Tao.

From Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, translation by Ursula K. Le Guin.

This and other words from the approximately 2600 year old Chinese text we know as the Tao Te Ching have been inspiring to me in many ways for a while now, but this body of work is the first that really responds to its ideas in a direct manner. I was originally developing this work with the view to applying to a residency at a conference centre called Green and Away. It’s a unique place, built entirely under canvas every year in some idyllic Worcestershire fields.

I was drawn to the residency because it would involve living outside in a rural location for a couple of months, using natural materials to respond to the immediate environment, and would certainly have been an amazing experience. I didn’t apply in the end because I realised they wanted someone to create a permanent artwork on the site, whilst my  idea was largely centred around an extremely impermanent proposition, as you will see later on.  Of course when I realised this I felt quite the buffoon, but actually I don’t mind at all because it’s led me to do some interesting new art, the background to which I will try and explain below.

~

I think that one of the most important things to learn – especially while studying subjects in depth at university – is to always be aware that everything you learn is to be questioned, mistrusted, and compared with alternative perspectives. Being able to apply this approach is more difficult than it may seem, because its very easy to get wrapped up in what some academic or philosopher or journalist is telling you and suddenly feel like your mind is made up on a subject. While at uni I became interested in questioning histories and myths through learning about post-modern theory, mainly in relation to music and film, and most fully through studying the work of Peter Greenaway. Forgive me the indulgence of quoting from my own dissertation, but studying Greenaway’s multi-disciplined Tulse Luper project allowed me to present him as:

“an artist working with the medium of cinema, whilst simultaneously existing within the tradition of fine art. This conclusion is made possible through the understanding of postmodernism as a discourse that allows the acceptance of paradoxes as a satisfactory method of understanding; that the notion of simultaneity allows us reconcile seemingly inharmonious aspects of contemporary culture.”

This notion of simultaneity and the acceptance of paradox applies not only to art and culture, but to society, economics, philosophy and science. For example:

“twentieth century advances in quantum mechanics led scientists to accept that, although it seems contradictory, we can satisfactorily conceive of light as both a particle and a wave”.

Gene Youngblood, author of the wonderful, thought-provoking and influential 1970 book Expanded Cinema, theorised this change as as a move from the age of  “bistable logic” (yes/no, either/or) to one of “triadic logic” (yes/no/maybe, both/and), a significant shift in thinking that applies across all spheres of life.

Of course doubting everything could probably lead you into some spiral of despair, so the challenge is to develop a way to combine a questioning mind with a peaceful acceptance of uncertainty. This has been an important process for me because I have been uncertain about my own path for the last few years and when leaving university  that feeling is ever-presently pertinent.

The most important thing to realise when it comes to this kind of post-modern thinking is that accepting uncertainty does not mean everything is fragmentary and directionless; it is, I believe, the role of an artist to piece together discrete and distinct elements of thought into an harmonious whole. Art happens when sustained ideas meet practised processes, and this union may, to borrow terms from the Soviet Realists, be characterised as atomic; a meeting of collision, or rather, more melodius, a meeting of linkage. Whether conceptual or figurative, aesthetically pleasing or not, for art to work it must synthesize concept and process in a harmonious way, even if that means accepting the third way, the happy paradox. In film terms, the modernists had montage, and the post-modernists have what Youngblood describes as ‘synaesthetic collage’. When applied to film, this results in:

“no obvious moments of collision or linkage, since it cannot be read linearly, and is “conceived and edited as one continuous perceptual experience… [it] is, in effect, one image continually transforming into other images: metamorphosis”.

You should probably read his book, its got some great language in it, like this, where he describes Synaesthetic Cinema as:

“the only aesthetic language suited to the post-­industrial, post-­literate, man-­made environment with its multi­dimensional simulsensory network of information sources. It’s the only aesthetic tool that even approaches the reality continuum of conscious existence in the nonuniform, nonlinear, nonconnected electronic atmosphere of the Paleocybernetic age” (1970: 77).

I think that Synaesthetic Cinema and the work of Peter Greenaway represent one way in which an artist can respond to the contemporary mode of thought, that is to reflect the paradoxically fragmentary simultaneity of society in the art work’s  structural and formalistic approach. While these artists embody the zeitgeist in order to reveal its contradictions, I believe it is also possible to comment upon common modes of thought by embodying alternative realities that are shocking simply by the way in which they achieve a sense of complete peace and wholeness from the acceptance of uncertainty.

What’s amazing about Taoist thought is that it kinda prefigured all this by a good couple of thousand years, and it even goes further: beyond acceptance of uncertainty, is celebration of it. This is where we go back to the poem at the beginning, which of course, is all about celebrating mystery.

Lao Tzu (Laozi by another name) had the pretty profound insight that the natural ‘way’ (Tao) of things was chaos, contradiction, uncertainty and mystery, and yet, in the natural world, everything kinda seems to work out, and has done for a really long time. This does not mean we should deny our human characteristics at all, but rather that we use them in a way that sits harmoniously with our surroundings. To do this, we must first accept uncertainty as the natural order and look with minds unclouded by any faith in supposedly established knowledge.

This all boils down to the fact that in order to find some sort of peace within all this chaos, you have to basically not worry about what anyone tells you and to look beyond any certainties you may have had about the way the world works and what you are expected to do in it, and do whatever compels you, as long as it is done with compassion, open-mindedness and integrity. For me, the meeting between ancient Chinese philosophy and Western post-modern thought as two discrete yet harmoniously related ways of thinking provides a space in which I can situate my work.

These pictures I have been doing recently are primarily about celebrating mystery, by describing very ambiguous landscapes that are deliberately left undefined. Their compositions emphasise the landscape as simply a planetary surface, and could be depicting such surfaces as existing on any other planetary object in the universe, reminding us that in their infinite variety, the planets of our universe are simultaneously related to one another. This is implied spatially by the presence of another object hanging in the sky in many of these pictures. Whether they represent suns, moons, or planets is again non-defined, yet they are there to remind us that nothing exists within a void; everything is related and inter-connected whilst remaining mysterious and infinitely beguiling.

These images needed a technique which was germane to the concept, and thus, with the Taoist notion of the uncarved block in mind, it was important for me to remove definite control from the process, at least in the formative stage of creating images. By stepping out of my comfort zone and using unpredictable but everyday substances such as soil, ash, onion skins, grass and spices to make my own paints, I was able to insert an element of mystery into the process whilst also providing an interesting link to the natural world in a direct way. It is important that these landscapes, whether Earthbound or not, have all, in a simple way, themselves been made from the dust of our world, the dust that we and everything in existence is made of.

The initial simple daubs of oily paint were then worked into with pencil, which is made of graphite, a form of carbon, an especially significant element in our relationship with our planet in human past and future. The idea was to work into the images, so that patterned mark-making celebrates the mystery of the accidental tones of paint and hints at volumes, textures, surfaces, strata, atmospheres, whilst refusing to absolutely define anything in solid terms. The framing of images is something I am conscious of, and I like to emphatically force a frame upon these images in order to draw attention to the fact that they continue outside of the frame, they are images arbitrarily chosen from the infinite possible number that exist at every moment, everywhere.

The plan was to create a series of prints, paintings and drawings made entirely from materials found in the natural environment and then present these by laying them flat on the ground in one of the fields on the Green and Away site, a method of exhibition which references Leo Steinberg’s notion of the ‘flatbed picture plane‘ whilst also allowing the works to be exposed to environmental effects that would further obscure their already-ambiguous content and gradually return the materials used to make the artworks back into the earth of their origin. Letting go of the work in this manner is an important part of the process, and relates to the act of letting go of belief in any notion of permanent truths.

“The things of this world

exist, they are;

you can’t refuse them.

To bear and not to own;

to act and not lay claim,

to do the work and let it go:

for just letting it go

is what makes it stay”

- Lao Tzu

~

I hope that this has served to explain the following images somewhat. It is really difficult to try and get all these thoughts down in a coherent manner, so perhaps I should stop using words and just put some pictures up.

There will be more images and lots of explanation of the paint-making process to follow shortly, but for now, that’s enough words.

Currently listening to: Bleeding Heart Narrative – Tongue Tangled Hair

Bleeding Heart Narrative – Colours Turn Colours from Tartaruga Records on Vimeo.

Bleeding Heart Narrative soundtracking Maya Deren’s ‘The Very Eye of Night’ from Tartaruga Records on Vimeo.

Should be an epic and immersive night! You can get cheaper advance tickets at http://www.wegottickets.com/event/75894

here’s the flyer, this will be available as a big and beautiful screenprint on the night and off my website in due time:

Currently Listening to: Grails

Currently listening to: Yeasayer – Odd Blood