Painting Between The Words

Jenny Holzer's solo exhibition at Hauser and Wirth, Somerset is predominantly about sex, war and death; a potent and often harrowing combination that the artist seems to treat somewhat at a distance with her trademark text-based work and minimalist aesthetic. Nevertheless, as you walk through the five galleries of this mini retrospective, there are heart-stopping and gut-wrenching  moments everywhere. A small bench is engraved with the words "Die fast and quiet when they interrogate you or live so long that they are ashamed to hurt you anymore." Arranged neatly on two tables are human bones, each one ringed with a silver band, as you might a bird's leg, inscribed with the imagined words of rape victims. Declassified FBI documents are displayed on LEDs or painstakingly reproduced on large canvases. One, taken from a heavily-redacted statement, bears only a single word: "Waterboard."

Holzer always uses upper case text in her work as the important thing here, is not the way the words look, but how their bare meaning can gain a startling resonance in a different setting; be that on a bench or a canvas, or even on a t-shirt. For my Hauser & Wirth workshop, however, we we worked with words in an entirely different way; stripping them of their meaning by privileging the formal construction of the letters themselves and looking at the way that words can divide the picture plane.

By working on a fairly large scale, we could also play with the singular dynamic that is implicit in every letter. An N, for example, requires an entirely different movement of the writer to that of a B. Its expression on the canvas can be one of stability or movement; aggression or lyricism. In this way, we can create our own formal, abstract language that stands apart from the banal meaning of the words themselves.

"To lay bare the elements and group them into assembled subdivisions, to dissect and reconstruct into a whole simultaneously at various places, to create a visual polyphony and to bring about stillness by balancing movement, all these are aspects of form and are of great importance for the knowledge of form, but they are not yet art. In the uppermost circle, beyond ambiguity, there lies a final mystery, which the light of our meagre intellect fails to penetrate." Paul Klee (1879 - 1940)

The Grammar of Drawing at Dillington House

This course seeks to re-establish the centrality of drawing to art practise. Using everyday objects and the landscape around us, we will learn how to measure and to accurately depict our world.

We will learn which marks to use when we wish to evoke light and shade, for example, or when we wish to create texture or movement. 

We will learn how to create spatial depth using the rules of perspective and discover what is meant by chiaroscuro and nōtan. 

We will come to understand the difference between line and tone, and study the fine difference between reality and abstraction.  

But we will also play, for in play, we may discover how drawing can help us to create a language that is uniquely our own.  No previous art experience is necessary, only an enthusiastic an open mind.

The Grammar of Drawing is a four day residential course in a superb country house setting and runs from 21 February to 25 February 2011. 

For more information visit www.dillington.com

Journey Without Maps

At the life-class, Gail is baffled because I've praised her drawing. It isn't accurate, by any means; the proportions are all wrong and her line is erratic and sometimes awkward. At the table next to her is Howard, whose work is praiseworthy for more obvious reasons. It is consummately skillful; faithful to the model's pose and executed to within a hair's-breadth of realism. But what does that realism amount to? The model is flesh and blood and skin and bone; an infinitely complex mass of tissue and microbes. Can Howard draw pores on the skin or every hair on the model's head? And what about spatial depth? How can Howard show that when all he's got is a stick of graphite and a sheet of flattened cellulose to rub it on? Gail, who intuits the limitations of the exercise, uses the life class as a springboard. For her, the model is an opportunity to make a picture from the collision of person, pencil and paper.

Call what Gail does 'abstract', if you like. Howard is uneasy with the term (although he may be quite happy listening to Bruckner ) and attempts to depict what he sees with as little margin for error as possible. With that in mind, it seems to me that while Gail is going on a journey, Howard is content with making maps.

At every life class, whether we realise it or not, we make a decision about what we're going to do with reality. But what is that reality? When Picasso was challenged on the subject, he asked his interrogator what he meant by 'reality' and for answer, the man produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet.

'Why is she so small?' asked Picasso.

If we want to get a grip on realism, perhaps we should look at what really happens when we gaze at the model.

Light from the sun strikes the naked body and some frequencies are absorbed by the pigment of the skin while others are reflected into our eyes. At the back of our eyes, on the retinas, a total of 126 million 'rods' and 'cones', laced with millions of photosensitive cells, convert the sensation of yellow, green and violet light into a chemical that creates electrical impulses in the brain.

Sounds pretty abstract to me.

Back at the life-class and without a map, Gail is constantly getting into one scrape or another. Howard, on the other hand, is never lost but one day, when he's made the perfect map, perhaps he'll go on a journey too.