Like I said, less words and more pictures

Had a good day blocking in the first of the two panoramas I’ve got planned. So good to be slopping the wet stuff around at last. From now on less words and more pictures:  

I also had a really wonderful meeting with Bill Brody last night, his woodcuts are gobsmackingly good. Taut and robust markmaking, really big and on lovely crispy Japanese paper.  He prints them by hand using some kind of home made baren that he made out of elk bone. What else would it be in this amazing country ? I hope we can show and work together soon. We also talked about looking and painting, thinking and drawing and had a really good Thai meal with a couple of his friends, Gwen and Jenny.

They told me about a couple of Anchorage characters Linnie and Susan Pacillo who fought an aggressive campaign to use parking tickets to raise revenue by direct action. They dressed as Parking Fairies, and went round Anchorage topping up people’s meters. How perfect is that ? Try arresting a fairy for giving away money. The ticket thing was discredited and now they have built a car park and named it for Linnie Pacillo. I like the way these people think, reminded me of the time Ed Burman dressed up as father Christmas and started giving children presents direct off the shelves in a big London toy store. But that was a long time ago ..     

Just back from two days kayaking at Humpy Cove, Resurrection Bay, near Seward. For the first time since setting off I felt I was travelling in the right kit at the right speed for this place.

Quarter inch (if that) of plastic skin under me, then there’s the cold dark pacific fingertips that reach in to grip the mountains. Sometimes these fjords are over 2000′ deep. At last I wasn’t going past, I was properly in the landscape. But mostly it’s the COLDNESS of the water that got my attention. I felt afraid of falling in without a wetsuit, calculating just how far away from the shore I would be when my higher brain functions started to shut down. Then I recalled that the tiny part of this place that has ever been discovered  was first reached by people who walked or paddled in boats made of skin and laths. I dearly wished I had their knowledge of weather signs. I know what an incoming front looks like on the other side of the Atlantic, but here : no idea. Apparently south winds are the biters, and on the last day we got a near gale from the NW which trebled our return time through a head sea in a small boat. All of that out of a clear sky. I just found out a kayaker was drowned near us over the weekend. There is nothing picturesque about this place, and nothing quaint or simple about the native people who got here first. 

This place has such a thin covering of human occupation, most of it remains untouched. It has an even thinner weaving of names, descriptions, pictures and history. Such a contrast from the place where I come from where every place is named and recorded many times. Every place name carries the DNA of the invaders, traders and farmers who have worked and reworked the place and left intelligible marks for us to see.    

The people who got here first had no recourse to printed records or other monuments so you can feel their presence but rarely see it. The cultural threads in this landscape are thin and vibrate on the edge of hearing. In England however, history is woven into a heavy blanket that lays over the rock, a rich topsoil of culture that obscures the landscape. We don’t stand on the bridge at Dedham, we see John Constables painting. I lived in London for fifty five years before I realised the River Fleet wasn’t just a line in Shakespeare but also a real river that still flows under the streets, around the last college I taught at in Clerkenwell and on past Fleet Street to Blackfriars Bridge and the Thames.  

I’ve set up a drawing position on the deck of my friends house and have actually started work, which makes me feel a lot better. I’m also meeting a really interesting Alaskan artist called Bill Brody tomorrow in Anchorage. He knows this landscape and goes to great lengths to be in it when he works.  What an amazing journey this is.   

Started work at last. Working up a series of studies of the fluid landscape. Sun, water and air, three out of the four alchemists elements.

On reflection this seems perverse in a landscape so dominated by the presence of such vast scale and weight. As a kid I used to imagine that cloud shapes were really mountains, just outside London. You don’t have to do that here, there are real mountains on every edge of town.  But all this mass is deceptive, and far from static. We are sitting right on the most seismically active area in the N America. This is a subduction zone where one continental land mass slides under another. There are over 23,000 earthquakes a year here, 150 since 4 pm. yesterday afternoon.

The mountains here are as fluid as the sea and the air, if you watch them for long enough. That’s enough words. Here’s the pictures.    

What is is about airports and aeroplanes ? I’m trying to gather myself after a  first ever long haul flight. Two days in the paraffin powered dreamtime : three legs, sleeping in Newark airport, wide awake in Seattle.

There is something about crossing over to airside that means not all of you comes back. Days that were the same as nights in the blur of 24 hour shopping and surveillance. Everywhere that paraffin smell of jet fuel that reminds me unsettlingly of the stove that used to heat our flat in Manor Park and make petal flame shapes dance on the ceiling when I was a kid.     

Maybe it’s also to to with stretching of time, which can’t be stretched so it’s us that get pulled taut  instead. We are here, we wait, we wait more and then we are suddenly there, which is almost exactly like here was.  Most of us are anxious, except the shark suited business people who are all focus but no actual presence, like laser pointers. The only people who are familiar with the airside world are either bored or exploited. They sweep, sanitise toilets, wish a thousand strangers well every day or they check our shoes for explosives.    A really interesting  artist working in Alaska,  Bill Brody has a good word for arriving after a journey : decompression. I’ve been corresponding with him and hope to meet up and see his big panoramic woodcuts in their proper paper form. But most of all I want to stop feeling spaced out and get on with my work.  

I also will be asking him and the friend who I am staying with what in the world can eat the bark off a tree six foot above ground level in the yard outside. Needless to say this city boy that went on holiday by mistake stayed indoors for the first day.   

Abdullah Ibraihim is doing a concert tonight at the Barbican in London. He just said something beautiful on the radio : 

“Once you strike the note there’s nothing more that you can do about it.”     

  Such a helpful thought  when so much of this job is spent  trying to grapple with instransigent stuff that dries too quick,  goes too dark, moves too easily or just doesn’t look like what I thought I wanted. His compositions have such grace and heart, like so many of the pianist composers in Jazz. Breathe in and breathe out, it’s all improvisation. It’s good to get past what I think I want out of making this stuff and try to see what there actually is after a day at work. Sometimes there’s comfort in whatever  marks there are and you are so tired you can’t be arsed to scrape them off. 

So far today all I’ve got is some rather beautiful primed cotton duck, glowing gently as it dries in the studio.   

Finished the last carnival project late last night so now it looks like I might finally be on approaches for the Alaska job. Three days to get my seals in a circle.  Time for last minute decisions and planning (is there any other kind ?) : 

Support : fine cotton duck. I’m planning to pre stretch, prime and the roll up for the journey. This makes showing simpler than paper which needs frames and glass. Will experiment with getting a gesso like surface without making it so brittle it cracks when I roll it up.  

Media : Charcoal. No time for anything clever so back to cave man burnt sticks. I also want to use bodycolour so will put together a tight palette of acrylic based colours. Like the ones for the Orford Bomb Ballistics building panorama or the new Orford 360 panorama  I’ll use paper and sketchbooks for the rapid studies of weather and other changes. Have made some special sketchbooks that take letterbox format paper. Probably with watercolour.   

Off to watch paint dry now.  

Been thinking more about different ways of looking at a landscape, as part of the preparation for the Alaska job. The traditional concerns are about rendering volume and distance. Completely explained in the fabulous  Father Ted Series 2 Part 1 : Hell written by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan. Ted tries to explain the difference between a real cow and a toy one :

Ted : (Holding a toy cow in front of Dougal) ”Dougal, this cow is small. (points out of the window) Those ones are far away. Small … Far away.”             

 Genius. And everything you ever needed to know about linear perspective. Rendering distance by modulating tones (lighter = far away) and bending contours (converging on the horizon = far away). These are the obvious problems but not the most interesting ones. Let’s see if we can find drawn marks or descriptors for the moving, fluid and unstable bits of the landscape :

• Change (multiple alterations through time)
• Flow (soft through soft or soft around hard)
• Abrasion (hard into soft)

It’s lucky that change, flow and abrasion are also built into the uncertain process of drawing itself,  whether you want them to be or not. 

• Change by erasing and moving a mark but leaving the trace, pentimenti
• Flow by changes in direction and weighting of mark
• Abrasion by attacking the actual drawn surface, giving it a history

I’m rather uncomfortable with this kind of theoretical stuff, but I so often have no idea what I’m doing till I hear myself telling somebody about it. It’s also been partly provoked by a really interesting book about painting that I read and re read just now :  ”What painting is” by James Elkins. A lot of it confused me, which is no bad thing, but it did a wonderful job of trying to talk in the language of paint. I’m trying to ask similar questions here about drawing I suppose. Drawing is the most accurate and sensitive way of recording look-decisions. Often it’s too accurate when the looks aren’t careful and the drawing is going badly. The limitation is that these decisions can only be recorded a a sequence, basically because I can’t think and draw more than one thing at a time. I want to know if I can wire up the drawing process differently - wire it up in parallel instead of in series.  

Numbers can do that. Can a drawing ?   

I’ve got a rather scary commission coming up in four weeks time: to make a panorama of the Cook Inlet in Alaska, two and a half weeks to complete and show the work. 

My basic idea is to do another paper based panorama, with a lot of quick studies of dynamic components in the landscape like wind, light, cloud, tide, moon, snow/rain etc. But, while I love the working qualities of paper, charcoal and paint, work on paper is static and the landscape never is. This time I’d really like to make a drawing that tries to describe the changes,  the dynamic agents in the landscape itself. 

I have no idea how we are going to achieve this which is why I’m lucky to be collaborating with someone who works in Anchorage. He has a science background, but we seem to have the trick of listening to each other carefully, so our differences of viewpoint don’t seem to matter at all. His idea is that we make up a layered view across Fire Island which can eventually be web based and somehow related to live shots. One of his jobs was to develop ways of displaying complex underground geology that could only ever be measured indirectly. We both realised that these surfaces were just like a landscape drawing except I use eye/hand instead of a seismograph. His language is mathematics and mine definitely isn’t. The only maths that ever made sense to me were pictures and patterns (tesselations, platonic solids, magic squares).  Numbers have never had an abstract life for me and neither have words - I can only write this stuff if I believe I’m talking to somebody. My dear friend and collaborator can use mathematics as a speculative and descriptive tool that I can only understand by telling myself it’s “like drawing”. He’d call that that activity “visualising data”. 

So this commission will try to find out how much “like drawing” visualising data actually is. Time for some lists :

Drawing on paper : Good for simply and quickly recording subtle and emotional responses to the felt and the seen moment. Bad for accurate description of changes in observer and observed, unless you do an animation. 

Numerical arrays (values for light direction and intensity, wind speed and direction ) THese columns of figures are good, as all lists are, for recording change, for accurately spotting trends and cyclical changes. They are bad for getting any complete picture unless you are trained to read numbers. Any list of numbers, however accurate, struggles to convey a sense of place or moment, which is very bad if you are trying to visualise a landscape.  

I listen to a lot of BBC Radio4. There was a recent In Our Time about about Greek Myths where somebody (either Nick Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London or Richard Buxton, Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Bristol) described a really  interesting difference between oral culture and print culture.

 One of the professors said ‘the identity of the author has worn away’ and as usual Magic Melvyn got me thinking. Oral culture is promiscuous, we just pass it on. There’s more pleasure and less ownership and it is so different from visual culture which is branded, curated and always has provenance. It’s like the difference between DNA and a love letter. The Greek myths may have started as somebody’s story but now they are everybody’s. This abrasive point of contact between ‘mine’ and ‘everybody’s’ is an interesting but uncomfortable place to work. For me it’s making work that doesn’t have too much of me so everybody else get bored, not too much of everything else so they get bored by the lack of an individual voice.  You can probably tell that I haven’t sorted this out yet. But for me this thing about human authorship is also the the interesting bit of the landscape.

That’s how I feel about landscape - I’m drawn to the hard residuals of human occupation, and have never been interested the prettiness of light and gardening. 

  This is a big drawing (over 3 metres long) of Orford Ness in Suffolk.  I’m only really interested in the hardness of landscape, that shows the human footprint, residue and wrack. Like myth and storytelling original purposes and authorships are wearing away.

For a city boy like me there is something unsettling about big spaces. East Anglia, which is where I now live and work, is open and windswept. My daughter said she liked my panoramas because she didn’t know where to look first. I feel the same way about being out in the open when I’m not in line of sight to Canary Wharf. Somehow that girl is always right on the money.

 This work connects with my long term collaborator Steve Mansfield-Devine. He’s working on a landscape photography project he’s calling called Modern Megaliths.  His work is also about 20th century residual stuff but facing the opposite way on the French coast. He is also interested in the letterbox format and says : “Using a vertical panoramic format tightly constrains our tendency to scan horizontally and creates tension by forcing us into an unusual and unnatural vertical scanning mode. Knowing that your attention has been directed in this way, you cannot avoid concluding that there is a significant association between the tower at the top of the image and the objects beneath it.

Here’s the link to the Panoramas bit of my portfolio.

 This all started with Radio 4 and the thought that a lot of these coastal defences are turning into Greek temples - erected to gods and assuaging anxieties that most people have long since forgotten.