Ginny Grayson

It’s so rare to come across a ‘straight’ drawing show these days that it provokes comment for that reason alone. So my attention was drawn immediately to the invitation to Ginny Grayson’s show at Place Gallery in Richmond, which starts on 9 November.

It also helps that I am a sucker for drawing which is contingent and exploratory, an approach which is always associated in my mind with Alberto Giacometti.

Such a way of drawing, rather than making the statement “This is what I see”, continually asks itself “Is this what I see?”

I see this approach ultimately as having serious philosophical implications, about the nature of sensation and perception, about the limits of our ability to perceive the world, and maybe the ultimate question “is there a world to perceive at all?”

Some of the observations of phenomenological philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty actually have a great deal to teach practicing artists, those who face the perceptual gulf between all that is you and all that is not-you every time they front up to the white page.

Freehand wall drawing

I was diverted by this freehand drawing on a wall of a lane off Gertrude Street recently.

I was struck by how rarely you see a freehand drawing on a wall, as opposed to the kind of rarified, cultish typography that usually constitutes ‘graffiti art’, at least in Melbourne.

It isn’t rare elsewhere, though. Thanks to the Wooster Collective website, I see that everyone is not a wannabe rapper, least of all in Europe, where stunning public art of an original and even provincial kind is being made.

This is by David de la Mano.

This is by the Canadian artist OTHER.

Please forgive me, I’ve been away…

Please accept my apologies for neglecting you, most grievously. Let’s just say that my professional obligations rolled over the top of every other aspect of life (almost), but I’m happy to say that the outcome was rather positive. Like, pinch me in case I’m dreaming positive.

Anyway, that’s all outside the mission of this blog, and cultural life does not grind to a halt just because of a measly election. “On”, as Beckett might succinctly put it.

For no reason other than that I like it and I want to see it on this page, here is a stunning caricature that appeared in The Australian’s Literary Review this morning. It is of course V S Naipaul, who is called “a prig, a prick and a pig” by Peter Craven, a man not generally given to beating about the bush, as you might tell from the headline.

Anyway, it’s by Eric Lobbecke, and it is a stunningly dynamic drawing, especially the hair and the confluence of features around those doleful eyes.

Big Heads 2

Here is the next in a series of large scale drawings I’ve been a-workin’ on for some time. Last time I posted a drawing as a progressive sequence, but here is the finished article.

It started life as the top half of a toy my son likes to play with. Actually, he appears to enjoy playing with the top half more than he ever played with the complete toy.

An extraordinary thing. It’s a crude transformer-type toy which begins as a black rhino. By moving the hinged pieces about, it transforms into an extremely angry muscle-bound man with a very suggestive yellow horn on his head. I was hit between the eyes with the metaphorical significance of this bizarre thing. The man’s rage seemingly provokes his literal metamorphosis into a rhino. A depiction of raw Id if I’ve ever seen one.

The other odd thing is that he seems to have already possessed animal attributes before the transformation had begun, with this bizarre phallic horn on his bullet head, as if the first stage was taking place when this first impression was made.

Big Heads

Making good on a threat I issued some time ago, here are some more of my drawings.

This is the first of an ongoing series I’m doing in collaboration with Greg Neville, which we are tentatively calling ‘Big Heads’.

A bit different from my usual subject matter, the intention here is satirical (not exactly ripped from my very soul, if you know what I mean). It consists of a series of very large drawings in charcoal and mixed media of disposable plastic toys intended for children, some of them originally no larger than a couple of centimetres tall.

The drawings are massively expanded in scale, like the muscle-toned body of male aspiration, yet their sources are often quite tiny figures from throw away bits of consumer ware. These plastic mass-produced objects both embody and grotequely distort the classical ideal and the ideology of the Olympic stadium, which was itself a mortal echo and a tribute to the acts of the gods themselves.

The figures themselves depict rippling hyper-masculine supermen with expressions of extreme aggression and strain, in a display of extraordinary excess.

I hope the drawings will have a commanding physical presence as objects, drawn in vertiginous perspective, with an ironic nod to the tradition of classical statuary. The disposability of the objects both embodies and mocks the long tradition of Western figuration that informs them.

I thought it would be interesting to record the evolution of the drawing, so here are progressive shots of the first one under way. This is quite big, about a metre and a half high. Others I am working on will be even larger whole figures, but I thought I would start with details, see how it went, and work my way up.

The last shot is the finished article. The original for this one is a small plastic candy-dispenser, with a ring at the top. It has a hinge at the back and you flip it open to get the little candies. It would be about six or seven centimetres high.

Ana Pollak wins the Dobell

Ana Pollack has won the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Dobell Prize for Drawing. It is difficult to find a decent photo of the winning drawing, but there is a beautiful gallery of images from the same series at her gallery, Sara Roney.

I’ve not encountered her work before, but the drawing has a large scale, whole-body sweep to it. It enfolds the viewer’s field of vision like a distant daughter of Monet’s late waterlillies, with a stripped-back, stark quality. The marks are free, spontaneous but concentrated; the result of real looking at a certain place in all its particularity.

Close up, the architecture of the work across the picture plane might not be immediately obvious, but it is there nonetheless. Her strategy becomes more obvious looking at a whole gallery of pictures of the same motif, the variety of different approaches: in one, perspective shifts across a clear receding horizontal; in another, she simply varies the size of the oyster poles jutting out of the surface of the shiny late afternoon water, anchoring the whole thing around a central, dark vertical in the foreground.

In a similar way Jackson Pollock anchored his own kind of chaos those many years ago.

Portrait of Greg

Having a look at several artists’ blogs lately, I got the feeling that I might be maintaining modesty to my own cost. So I think why the hell not put my own pictures up here?

Greg recently asked me to participate in an elaborate portrait project he is planning. I would love to outline the idea, but it belongs to him, not to me.

Suffice to say that he has an interest in images of men that possess a profound sense of unease, of uncertainty or unresolved emotion. I think this picture works in that light, even though it wasn’t what I was explicitly setting out to do.

I thought this might be a one-off, but I was so happy with the result that I’m planning a whole series of these. They are quite large, about a metre across. The next one will be almost twice the size.

I think the in-between-ness is to some extend captured in the axis of light and shade that runs down the face from forehead to chin. It’s almost a hinge between one choice and another. I also like the eye on the right. It seems to open up in a way as to suggest vulnerability or receptiveness.

I’m getting excited thinking about a whole room of these.

The photo is fairly poor, but I think the sense of the drawing is still there.

Giacometti at the AGNSW

Imagine my excitement when I heard that the Art Gallery of New South Wales, only 712.35 kilometres away, was about to present the only major exhibition of Alberto Giacometti’s work ever held in this country. Earlier this year I travelled to Zurich, a distance of 16,333.77 kilometres to see the Giacometti collection, which gives you an idea how much the monkish Swiss artist means to me.

I have done a lot of work on Giacometti over the years, to postgraduate level, and attempting to understand his insights into the phenomenology of perception, especially with regards to drawing the human figure, has inspired me and inspires me still. So I did have high expectations of the show in Sydney, and I have to admit that they were only partially fulfilled.

I really should have known something was a bit crook when the curator Edmund Capon was opinionising before the opening of the show in various papers:

“I’ve always had this feeling about the graphics and the sculptures being completely harmonious and the paintings being a kind of parallel journey. I had a feeling that the wonderful austerity – the rich austerity – of the sculptures and the graphics might be disturbed by the paintings.”

This should give any reader the idea that he does know what he’s talking about. Disturbed by the paintings? As anyone who has ever seen a Giacometti painting would know, they are merely extensions and elaborations of the theoretical concerns he explored in all his work, especially in the drawings and graphics, but in the sculptures as well.

The agitated, pullulating surfaces of the late sculptures are physical manifestations of the idea that the figure confronting the artist (engaged in rendering what Giacometti called a “likeness”), is fundamentally unknowable, a phenomenological appearance without certain boundaries. This is what he meant when he was describing what occurred when his brother Diego sat for him: “He’s posed for me ten thousand times. When he poses I no longer recognize him.”

This understanding is the foundation of his drawing style, with its constantly searching, interrogating line. The presupposition of a drawing or painting by Giacometti is not “This is what I see”, but “Is this what I see?”

This was not adopted deliberately, but arrived at over a great deal of time, the essential product of his exploratory attitude to perceiving. Similarly, the faces in the figure paintings emerge out of an agitated architecture of gestural marks, which are the exact corollary of the pencil or etched line in the drawings.

Capon has also complained about the lack of recognition Giacometti has received in this country, almost alone among the twentieth century masters. He’s right, so it is precisely the paintings that we need to see.

This appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Capon, who has curated the show himself, explains why he hasn’t included any of Giacometti’s paintings. “You put one of his spindly, emasculated figures into a room and suddenly it defines the space,” he says. “The drawings do that, too, but the paintings don’t. I’m probably completely alone in thinking that, but that’s OK.”

Yes, I think you are Edmund.

This essential misunderstanding has left its mark on the show in other ways. The inclusion of several large standing figures, both male and female, and the prominent place they have been given is unfortunate, as these are some of the weakest works Giacometti ever completed. The reason is related to their theoretical underpinning, or lack of one. Several of them were done as commissions to furnish architechtural spaces and they are larger than life-size. The figures had to be that big in order to register within the dimensions of the outdoor space they would occupy. Unfortunately, this also undermined their reason for existing in the first place, which was as a record of a specific perception of a figure in space, its relation to the space around it and its distance from the perceiver.

This is why many of the other figures are so small, and why they perch from various stands, plinths, steles, and so on. The platforms serve as distancing devices, their angled edges often mimicking the abstraction of perspective lines, indicating distance. The scale of a tiny figure balanced atop a massive broze platform is to approximate the sensation of beholding a figure from a distance, say, from across the street.

The large figures in the show don’t function like this. Your eyes (the artist’s eyes) don’t have the same relationship to the sculpture, with the result that they look mannered, their stylistic conventions forced. When the figures are larger than life-size, your eye-lines no longer match and the sense of perspective, as the space rushes away the further from the eye you get, is lost. The experience is therefore secondary, like the reproduction of a painting compared with the original.

It was also probably a waste of time to include the surrealist period sculptures, since this era is so rich and complex, that to have a few of the greatest hits belittles their importance to the history of surrealism and sells the artist short. Why not simply concentrate on the 1940s to the 60s, since this is where the show’s heart obviously is?

I was excited to be able to see all of the ‘Women of Venice’ reunited. The gallery has owned one for some time, but to my knowledge, I’ve never seen them all lined up together, like whores on parade, which is what they are.

‘Study of Apples’ (1952) – unmistakeably the son of Cezanne. They reveal a sculptor’s preoccupation with structure.

‘Standing Nude’ (1960) – a delicate pencil drawing. A female figure, like an apparition.

The various studies of rooms in pencil. These are images of the house of his mother and father, in Stampa, Switzerland. Heavy, rustic furniture. His mother sewing. Domestic objects never to be found in his studio, which was more like a monk’s cell. These drawings always look like a breath of fresh mountain air to me. It has always been my impression that on these trips back home, Giacometti took his bearings, spent some time in a caring, supportive domestic environment, re-energising his art in the process. It seems to me that his art always made real progress during, or just after, trips home. An eraser cuts through the line, like shafts of light falling on the tables, the heavy chandelier. Time slowed down. The products of intense scrutinising.

“Bust of a Man” (1950), “Head of Diego with Rolled Collar” (1951-52), “Bust of Diego” (1954), “Bust of a Woman [Diane Bataille]” (1945) – Surely nothing is as familiar as the human face, and yet here it is as if seen for the first time. Raw phenomena, nothing but an open confrontation with the living subject, an exchange, in the knowledge of impending death. I think of his friend Beckett’s lines: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”