Back up

Was thinking, while Blogger wasn't playing...

Us art blogs are kind of okay, all the stuff we post does exist elsewhere. I have most of the sketches somewhere or other. But all the writing blogs, do they keep back ups of what they write ? If Blogger went away for ever, that is a huge amount of thought and humour, and work, to loose.

Hmmmm.

The Audience is important II - The Validation

Of course by drawing I am the cause of that specific interaction, but you provide the effect, and is the effect not more valid ? ( You burn wood for heat and light ) I don't control how you see, what you see, what you decide to look at. Maybe the question should be why does the viewer ascribe more recognitional import to, say, this sketch...

 ...than your front door key, or that blessed Mongoose. George said I 'provide the stimulus, regardless of our response'. REGARDLESS.  Not so sure about that. Do you give the same heed to the person who sliced the tomato in your supermarket sandwich ? Which, on a basic level, is far more important to you. And Steve said I make you see the face I want you to see. But why do I want you to see a face ? And why do you want to see it as well ?

Not sure what I am rooting around for, but I think Timbo has it. ( And forgive the grandiose Tom Cruise / Renee Zellwegery of this ) You make me. Without you I am - in this context - nothing.

What I mean is I can only make what I make, but you have the choice to look at anything you want. There is nothing stopping you from going off and looking at the Mongoose instead.

I HATE that Mongoose now.

Which makes you more important. Or is this all about potential ? Is it this potential that we create between us that's the most important thing ? Are there three people in this marriage ? You, me and potential.

Please keep up your side and leave more thoughts. Enjoying this rummaging.

Co-incidentaly, Magpie's nest posted a piece about art being an exchange of energy.

The Audience is important.

In one of his comments, Peter got me thinking the other day. Who is more important in the contract of "ART" ? The Artist or the Viewer ?

Look at this...

Okay. This is, at the end of the day, just a load of dark marks on a lighter surface. They mean nothing in themselves. They are inert. They can be easily destroyed. They offer no life, no resistance, no fight.

Without your eyes and brain they are nothing. It is your skill as a sophisticated information processor that gives them any hope of validity at all. My camera has an amazingly good face recognition thingy, and can even pick out the happy people on advertising billboards, ( it sometimes even wants to read electric sockets and things as "faces" - like that Two Ronnie's optician sketch "No Sir, you're just reading the furniture now") but it just looks blank at me when I point the lens at my sketchbook. So, by my camera's estimation, I am not doing faces properly.

So who decides that the sketch above is a face ? More than that, a male face, wearing glasses and an open collared shirt ? ( which is what it's supposed to be by the way... just in case you are seeing a mongoose licking an oil drum or something !!! ) You do. The viewer. And as I have no control over how you see things, that makes my part in the interaction between you and it negligible. Yes ? No ?

What do you think ?

Sketch 3

This is the kind of sketch I enjoy doing, when you simply draw a continuous line around the page, following the subject with your eyes as you do so, and trying to catch as much as possible with as few lines.

This sketch is from a few years back, it was a hot summer morning on the Docklands light railway, heading towards Greenwich. ( I was working there at the time. ) I think I can even be accurate enough to say it was draw between Limehouse and West India Quay stations. I can still see the guy leaning on the seat division by the door as the light passed behind him. Sketch books are great for that, they can capture the whole moment of drawing in your memory, not just the subject, but where you were, how you felt, the weather, the light...

Elbows are brilliant things to draw. There is such a specific curve and weight to them, that swell of forearm muscle leading up to the dual points made by the head of the humerus. Very satisfying.