krazy landscapes

George Herriman. Krazy Kat. Ink over pencil with scraping out and paste-on, June 8, 1941. ©1941, King Features, Gift of George Sturman to the Library of Congress

more Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud. Heart Ridge, 2011. Hard ground etching with drypoint. 12 x 9 on 17 x 13. Crown Point Press

No surprise then, that he says Krazy Kat was always an influence. 

more sandwiches

Wayne Thiebaud. Club Sandwich, from Delights, Crown Point Press, 1964. etching on paper plate: 4 x 4 7/8 in. (10.2 x 12.5 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Mr. Frank Lobdell, San Francisco

sign painting

Kenji Nakayama's hand.

Kenji Nakayama, mechanical engineer, shoe designer, artist based in Boston, here.  Detailing and lettering of great exuberance. 

And below, a vimeo trailer for a well-discussed film on American sign painters.  For something so fundamental to the look of America, the painters are a near outlaw lot. Well, maybe that is the point.  Lose the signwriters and lose that nostalgic, hand-made quality that used to characterise the States, but increasingly ceases to do so.

SIGN PAINTERS (OFFICIAL TRAILER) from samuel j macon on Vimeo.

hands, doing things

How to make Bread from The Joy of Cooking, illustrations by Ginnie Hoffman and Beverly Warner, 1931

Everyone has always heard that Andy Warhol was an illustrator, originally, of shoes and cookbooks.  I was convinced my old Joy of Cooking was done by him, but it turns out these disembodied hands in Juliet Greco sleeves were actually done in 1931.  Somehow I don't believe this date.  These hands are so like Warhol's in Amy Vanderbilt's 1961 cookbook, below.  Nonetheless, such drawings are both clear and bizarre: what the hand needs to know about making  bread, or rolled sandwiches.  Pinwheels these were called.  Just a couple of years later the Velvet Underground was formed as Warhol's house band.  

In American Masters: Lou Reed, rerun on PBS on the weekend, Reed said that Warhol had a levelling eye – politicians, stars, soup cans – all were treated the same. This determined indifference is the ultimate democracy: the line drawing of two hands cutting the side off a loaf of bread means nothing other than cutting off the side of the loaf.  It isn't a cleverly-shaped baguette or a whole grain loaf — it appears to be an unsliced wonder loaf.  These hands don't even have sleeves.  The bread board has no perspective, neither does the loaf; there are no crumbs.  The knives, the long pin and their blunt attacks on the bread are both clumsy and sinister.  I find the drawings both wry and amusing.  They are unarticulated, but not inarticulate.

How to roll sandwiches from Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook, 1961, illustrations by Andrew Warhol

Krauss, Twombly and graffiti, 2000

Coronation of Sesostris, panel 8, 2000. / Acrylic, crayon, and pencil on canvas. with erasures

A dandy piece by Rosalind Krauss on reading, or not reading, Twombly.  It was written for Artforum in 1994 about the catalogue raisonne of Twombly's works, overseen by Heiner Bastian. Krauss writes about the various projects that assign meaning to Twombly's paintings from those who take the classical references, such as Virgil scrawled across a canvas, as evidence of Twombly's classical humanism and a deep reading of the deep past, to Barthes, who throws all that out and speaks against analogy in Twombly's mark making, where 'Virgil' is a citation running against any sort of classical reference, and is instead a position, modern, cultural, irresponsible.  

Krauss writes instead about graffiti — 'performative, suspending representation in favour of action', which is what Action Painting wanted: all emotion and gesture.  She writes that 'graffiti's character is the strike against form, ensuring a field in which the only way the image of the body can survive is a part-object, a concatenation of obscene emblemata...'  There are marks, but they aren't symbols, ciphers or citations, rather they are fragments that protest the self-reflexivity of his Abstract Expressionist peer group, Pollock, de Kooning and Motherwell.

Twombly has a writing hand.  The work from the 1950s, yesterday's Poems to the Sea, is perhaps a protest against the vigorous, obliterating masculinity of Motherwell, but it became how he made his marks.  By time he had appointed Bastian to assemble essays for the catalogue raisonne, the summary of an artist's life, he quite liked the idea that he was a channel to Apollo and Dionysus.  One might, towards the end of one's career find it more noble than being a thirty-year old artist working through artistic differences with one's friends in New York.

Rosalind Krauss, always true to the work, restates the critic's responsibility to make an independent reading. I love her for this. 

I looked up Sesostris, whose coronation we are presented with, above, and found this sculpture, below.  
I would say that in Twombly's Sesostris we are looking at a crown. A fragment of a sculpture.  Sesostris III has departed.

Rosalind Krauss. 'Cy was here; Cy's up'. Artforum International Magazine, September 1994

Berger, Twombly and graffiti, 1959

Cy Twombly. Poems to the Sea, Rome 1959. Sheet 16 of 24. / Oil, crayon, pastel and coloured pencil on paper, 12 ½ x 12 1/4 in. (31.7 x 31 cm.)

Language is always an abbreviation.

John Berger, 'Post-Scriptum'. Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros.  Exhibition catalogue, Loewenbraeu-Areal in Zurich, 2002

grafitti 2

grafitti, Southbank Centre, London

I published a photo of one of these mushroom columns during my concrete discussion last year, which covered issues of formwork, brutalism and transparent construction methods.  The historic value of brutalism, erupting in England over the demolition of Peter and Alison Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens, has reached this brutalism backwater, where the only truly béton brut building we have in this small city, the Planetarium, is never discussed, but dreary copies of copies of le Corbusier are.  It is as if theoretical debates are heard as murmurings from distant stars – misheard actually and applied to completely inappropriate pre-cast concrete-panelled buildings.  

The photo above, of a kind of grafitti paradise, says nothing about the architecture, its function or ownership (so this isn't political protest) but does say something about the identification of concrete surfaces as durable canvas and about gaps in surveillance.  Elaborate wall paintings take time; time is allowed here.  It isn't the grafittiists that disrespect the buildings, but the owners of the buildings themselves who are responsible for their care. 

I learnt this from crime...

'I learnt this from crime' Soflies, Melbourne

yes, it is stylised, yes it is an elaborate tag, but it is also still writing of a kind. It reminds me of Nude Descending a Staircase, the fractured edges of each mark, the haze of intentions falling off us as we move.    

MacLean's method 2

On the list of stats for this website, a post I did on MacLean's compendiums a couple of years ago gets a surprising number of visits, every week, week after week.  I actually found a compendium in a box I was sorting through after the flood, not mine, but my brother's, from Grade 5. 

It starts with the correct way to sit, to place your arm, to angle the paper.  In fact the whole compendium is not just about the correct way to write, but how to conduct yourself as a good person, how to write nice thank you letters, get well letters, all in a beautifully smooth hand. If someone hadn't commented on MacLean himself, that he appeared at schools and did magic tricks, I would find this sort of teaching unbearable.  As it was, out in Victoria, he never came to our school and we were left with the rules.  I was an earnest student, tried hard to have perfect writing.  My brother clearly approached it all with a sense of irony.

It looks sort of asemic to me. 

Quadraat, 1992

Fred Smeijers, design sheet for Quadraat, 1992.

Fred Smeijers, Dutch graphic designer, formed a design studio called Quadraat in 1992, in Arnhem. 
Punch cutting is a 16th century way of making type that Quadraat, the typeface, is based upon. A counterpunch is a punch that makes punches.  

When making a piece of type for a letter press, the original was cut on a steel punch, then a mould was made from it, and then type was cast from the mould.  To cut the original letter, the steel had to be cut with sufficient depth into the matrix.  Internal curves and angles are extremely difficult to cut deeply, so a tempered steel counterpunch, harder than the matrix, was used to cut the negative spaces inside the letter.  The counterpunch, used for each letter gave a consistency to the corners and curves.
Smeijers wrote a book about this, Counterpunch: making Type in the 16th Century, Designing Typefaces Now. 

In terms of writing, it is always interesting to find that no matter what the historical investigation, or the mechanics of making a font today, there is this scrap of paper where the letters are drawn out by hand; where the writing of the letters, the drawings, are so delicate.

writing without meaning

Mirtha Dermisache, Asemic writing

Asemic writing: writing without easy translation into meaning, leaving one to contend with the marks themselves.  I'm not sure that marks that look like writing are, actually, writing.  I think they are drawing, and all the senses that they resemble writing are mechanical.  The hand makes marks.  Sometimes the marks are encoded, and we read them; other times the marks carry other things, and all we can do is look at them.  

This comes byway of an article by John Foster in Observatory on Michael Jacobson's website, The New Post-Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing.  Out of the long list of examples with the Observatory article, I picked this one.  It looks like something I understand, some of the others I don't.  Perhaps I understand how these marks are made, and so feel a kinship.  This is not meaning however.  I don't know what this page says, if it says anything other than that one can make such marks.  It is not text. 

Nonetheless, there are books written asemically, no doubt as magical as viewing any kind of calligraphy in a language one does not know.  It could be saying anything at all and we would never know.

Allan Fleming: CN, 1960

Allan Fleming, Sketches for the Canadian National Railway, 1960

Thinking about diagrams and Adobe Illustrator and the alleged legitimation of the handwritten scribble by transforming it into dead font and clipart arrows; thinking about this because one of our On Site contributors was fretting about not being fluent in Illustrator. There are parallels with auto-translation here: a whole lot of meaning, intelligence, emotion and sheer life can be lost from the original.  

Allan Fleming's sketches clearly informed the ultimate CN logo: it isn't an entirely intellectual exercise, this design process thing, it is largely a visual exploration, running through hundreds of ideas, relying on the eye to weed them out before they go mechanical.

The 1960s  cleaned up a lot of our national icons, gave them all a simplicity which is now mostly replaced by font selection: the Bay, for forty years a quill pen hand pressure ribbon of ink, now a font that looks like a version of Banknote. 

Hudson's Bay logo, ca 1960, designer contested but perhaps Savage Sloan.

William Pearson: planets, 1813

A drawing of a machine to illustrate the orbits of the planets.  It appears to owe much to clock and watch mechanisms, cogs and wheels: the largest system illustrated by the smallest devices at the time.

Planetary Machines, Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Vol 16. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1830

Vija Celmins: drawing, 1982

Vija Celmins. Drawing, Saturn. 1982. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 14 x 11". McKee Gallery, NY

Ellsworth Kelly: sweet peas

Must pull out of the long weekend, now that it is past.  Although the 24th of May is this Friday and our Victorian holiday usually moves to synchronise with the USA's Memorial Day, which lessens its meaning somewhat, this year it didn't.  Inexplicably, we had the 24th of May on May 20.   

Yesterday another visit to the NC 139s .

Ellsworth Kelly. Banana Leaf, 1992. graphite on paper, 28 x 22"
Ellsworth Kelly, he of the huge colour block paintings in primary colours, drew flowers and leaves in pencil on paper for most of his career.  Many are collected in a book, Plant Drawings 1948-2010 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2011) with an essay by Michael Semff and an interview with Kelly by Marla Prather.  

Kelly is quoted: 'They are not an approximation of the thing seen nor are they a personal expression or an abstraction.  Nothing is changed or added: no shading, no surface marking.  They are an impersonal observation of the form.'

This is how we, as young architects in the conceptual 1970s, were taught to draw, and I suppose by extension, to think.  The mind was put into a kind of zen-like suspension as the shape of the leaf went through the eyes directly to the hand; the hand was holding a pencil and a drawing was made.  The line was all.  Although there was a bit of Matisse knocking around in the brain, Kelly's strictures on making the drawing were tight: a pencil, a large sheet of paper, all line, or all shadow, or all shape.  The leaf above is the essence of leafness as held in this particular leaf, and all other leaves.   

Ellsworth Kelly. Sweet Pea, 1960. graphite on paper, 22 9/16 x 28"Flowers are just very beautiful things, however Kelly isn't drawing their beauty, he is drawing the lines of the plant, which we perhaps, or not, find lovely.  Remove the colour, the sunlight, the garden, the season, the history and one is left with the line, and a tremendous affection for the flower.  It is wholly itself.

Ed Ruscha's ribbons

Abel car polish can

Found this on an exciting discovery, Aaron Eiland's typetoy.com, a huge collection of graphic images.  The ribbon writing on this perhaps late 1940s French oil can, is very like Ed Ruscha's gunpowder drawings of the late 1950s.  

Last week I was early for a meeting at the Canadian Architectural Archives, located in the UofC library.  Time to kill, and a shelf of NC 139 big fat art books right by the door, I went through Margit Rowell's Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha (Steidl, 2008).  Pages of plates of drawings of words, so banal they are almost without meaning, or conversely, so banal they are loaded with meaning: Quit, Sin, Pee Pee, and so on. They start with graphite and proceed to gunpowder, then on to chalks and pencil crayons - cheap, easily found drawing materials.  It is never about money, art.  

At the time that the abstract expressionists were flinging paint all over, Ruscha was doing these painstaking drawings, rubbing powder into paper.

Ed Ruscha. Quit, 1967. gunpowder and coloured pencil on paper. 22.5 x 28.5"

Rebecca Horn: les amants, 1991

Les Amants, 1991, Photo: Attilio Maranzano © 2009 Rebecca Horn. Les Amants consists of two glass funnels, ink, wine and motors of some unspecified sort that must spray the liquids about. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin

Donald Kuspit's review of Rebecca Horn's drawings, both by hand and by machine, indicates something of his desires, found in Horn's sexual subtext: all the machines are metaphors for the coming together of bodily fluids.  Well, maybe; it is called Les Amants —is it blood, or is it wine?  However, one might also see in the desperate, cross throwing of ink in the corner of a room, the fan of a musical score there but ignored, les travails des amants.

Kuspit does say 'her drawings are written by her machines': does the machine write, or does it make the marks it is designed to make?  In Alan Storey's drawing machines, below, does he build them to literally make the marks he already has written, or does he make them to make marks as an autonomous act?  He assigned up and down to wind force, not immediately a logical choice, so he must have wanted his recordings on the paper to register elevation, rather than planarity — biblical, this, every mountain and hill made low: the crooked straight and the rough places plain.  And then comes the wind.

Alan Storey: climatic drawing machine, 1991

Alan Storey. Climatic Drawing Machine drawing, 1991. Power Plant, Harbourfront, Toronto

Hard to get a good set of images made from the Climatic Drawing Machine, unless one wants to buy one.  Part of a series of machines that make marks on paper, this one uses a wind vane to register the direction of the wind, and the strength, which moves the recording drum up and down.  This was installed at Power Plant on Lake Ontario in 1991.

In all Storey's machines the lines are lovely, they skitter across paper in a way a line made by the hand never does.  With abstract marks, which these aren't — they are evidence of a mechanical set of relationships — one almost automatically reads one's own visual desires into them.  Sorry, but these are so like storms over either water or prairie that it doesn't surprise me that they have been drawn by wind.   There is a base: land, which is actually a mild breeze, that then gets all agitated when the wind turns fierce.  Which it does in real life.  

Basquiat: Six Crimee, 1982

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Six Crimee, 1982, Acrylic and oil paintstick on masonite, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Scott D. F. Spiegel Collection, © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society, New York