Final week (plus 2 days) of Abstract Advent challenge, which I completed on Christmas Eve – it’s been a blast, writing this on Christmas Day – hope you all are having a good one however your celebrate it (or not). First up was Day 15, with a shape like a hole (rather than a head) which I did an ink painting and a wax resist painting on opposite pages as a two page piece. Sadly this got nuked by the next work leaking through the page, so this is the only copy, really. The perils of working in sketchbooks!
Day 16 was a sort of upside down lightbulb shape, which made me think of a Xmas bauble, a skull and a head – so I combined the first two in ‘Black Christmas’ (look at the reflection upside down, yes a very Goth Xmas) and ‘Lost in the Crowd’ felt like almost a self-portrait, a very personal piece using the Markal B Paintstiks on black paper and sgraffito.
Day 17 was this square fork/trident shape, which made me think of candlesticks/menorah, a cactus and a few other shapes – I did four pieces but I think these two are the most successful. I write as I’m about to go for my Christmas Dinner, and so the combination of candlestick and cutlery in ‘The Meal’ seems very apt at this moment – the ritual of a meal on Xmas Eve or Day….and the desert cactuses of ‘Tridentusi’. I usually wish to be somewhere warmer at this time of year.
Day 18 was a spiral – a common shape in my abstract work, but I was reminded of classic abstract piece Henri Matisse’s Snail, something I’ve seen many times at the Tate. I had the idea to combine it as a mashup with another work, Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images. Hence I translated ‘This is not a pipe’ to ‘This is not a snail’. Because like the Magritte work, it isn’t a snail, it’s an abstraction of a snail….and even it if was a perfectly painted snail like the Magritte pipe, it would still not be a snail. It’s always an image of a snail.
It was quite hard to work with the Woody pencils to try and get them flat (and crisp) and even.
I also did an ink spiral piece with the Pilot V7 Hi-Tecpoint pen and wash, a very fluid one like fronds of ferns or quarks from a split atom on the A4 acrylic pad. Day 19 was several marks or vertical dashes, which reminded me of grass poking out from snow – an early memory as a kid, and a sign the snows are over and maybe spring is starting or getting warmer. I tried to create this memory with Kuretake brush pen, overlaid with wax candle to create the ‘holes’ and then Jackson’s ink wash over the top.
Day 20 was a triangular wedge shape, like a cheese slice or a Trivial Pursuit wedge. Now triangles are a popular shape in my abstract work, I do a lot of drawings with fractured lines and impossible geometries, like faces of a diamond or cut glass. So this was an easy one for me working in vintage fountain pen and graphitint. Although weirdly when I drew ‘The Eye’ I actually saw like a waking dream the eye as part of the image, and then it was gone. So I added it back in.
There was an upside down cup shape for Day 21, which I had fun with creating another useless game, the idea of a ‘find the ball’ using transparent glass cups! Made by scratching into white ink on black, a technique I’d not used before. Also a potted plant appeared in another drawing, strangely flying or levitating hence the name – a nod to Orwell. And also a dig at Michael Craig-Martin’s exceedingly pretentious conceptual piece ‘An Oak Tree’ which is a glass of water on a glass shelf. He taught a lot of the 90’s Brat/Brit Art pack, so I hold him totally responsible for what came after.
So I took his glass of water, turned it upside down and empty and called it ‘A Dead Oak Tree’. For if in a silly semiological game a glass of water is a tree (Ceci est un arbre) then surely an empty one is a dead one?
Day 22 and the end was in sight, with the antenna/twig shape that eventually became ‘Fossil Forest’, a cubist forest named after the stone primeval forest in Dorset.
After the success of the Markal pieces I ordered some Sennelier Oil Sticks, thinking they would arrive after Xmas but they actually arrived a few days before. So Day 23 was some cashew/bean like shapes which I drew with the oil sticks like jelly beans or magic beans. This piece was chosen as a highlight of Day 23 – my second such accolade! I had to take a photo since the oil sticks take ages to dry. The second piece was on the acrylic paper, using a limited colour set of the Caran D’ache Neocolor 2 crayons.
And for the final piece on Xmas Eve is a speech bubble or santa sack shape – so I signed off with a message to everyone in the oil sticks. Happy Xmas everyone!
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