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The Underwater Death Trap (c.1978)

The small schooner chugged away at sea. We had to go carefully because of the great Barrier reef up the eastern side of Queensland, New South Wales and more parts of Australia the largest Island in the world. Suddenly we struck the reef itself then we got our diving kit and dived 10ft down. We clung on, I saw great big thick pieces of seaweed that looked like tentackles We both grabbed one piece each and pulled as hard as we could. The "seaweed" as to our horror turned into an angry octopus we turned tail and swam for our lives. to the boat. We jumped in to the boat which immediately started to sink faster than ever so we hopped on to the coral which the Octopus was using to climb out. He got Jims (My Friend) legs and arms so I got an air tank and whacked the octopus on the Head. The Octopus looked dizzy and it sank slowly back to its tropical home in the sea.

When we had dived down in to the deep I saw a giant pole about sixteen cms or eight inches wide we found it was the mast of a ship we went lower down we swam to an old door it opened without much difficulty. The ship was near a chasm. In the room where the old Oak door was opened it looked like the Captains cabin some clothes had been parted to shreds lower down we found some more cabins and the kitchen we both opened an Old Oak door which was quite hard to do so. giant containers when we prised them open to our surprise contained gold! Some bars as long as our arms or legs but mostly they were about 22cms long we went to the surface and found we were about quarter of a mile away from an island I reckoned to be about a good mile long.

Soon we were getting quite used to living on the island we caught shellfish to eat and sometimes even octopus or eel. There was shark-bay at the bottom which was rather unusual and lookout-point at the top of the Island and quite a few rivers near to the middle and to the bottom and forest right across the top of the Island. I had made a tree-house  near the top on the eastern side of the Island. I liked the treehouse so did Jim. One day we were attacked by Pirates they swarmed up on the bottom  of the island so we dug traps which were covered  with leaves brittle bamboo sticks. And then we bombarded them with logs After they had been "logged" we bombarded them with boulders and then they fled and never came back. Then a few days later a container ship appeared over the horizon. We set a fire to attract them then the ship came to the island and we all helped to bring the gold up and we all went back to England.

(This is somewhere between 1978 and 1979 I think, and the Willard Price/underwater/adventure/danger theme continues - previously: The Deadly Battle. Jim is perhaps borrowed from Jim Hawkins.)

The Deadly Battle (c.1978)

The old Octopus came from his cave and fish swam away. But the great eel waited to become king of the coral old killer the octopus saw the great eel. He darted to one side and attacked a tentackle then old killer turned around and deceided to squeeze the great eel. I in my diving sauser found it Interesting then I saw the two fighting deceided to creep up to them.

I slid up behind a big rock or was it? My rock the old giant turtle moved off in to darkness. I had to move quickly now the pirhanas joined in on the fun. The Octopus got a bite and was bleeding he did not give up. The eel was flatter but wide he was struggling. In a few minutes I was behind a large clump of seaweed as two killer whales and some sharks moved in to it.

The eel had been devoured and the pirhanas, sharks and Octopus went away.

(This is somewhere between 1978 and 1979 I think, and I must have been putting Willard Price books together with Commando comics. Posted to remind myself that I need to find the ability to write without burying plot underneath layers of performative ornament. See also The Underwater Death Trap.)

"the miasma theory" - profiles and hands at Brian Eno and Steven Johnson

Out with the London twitterati to see a good-natured discussion between Brian Eno and Steven Johnson on John Snow, cholera, maps, cities, urbanism, the long now, the appropriate scale for addressing population and envionmental problems (global and city, rather than nation-state), simulation and Second Life. Matt Jones, hunkered down in the front row, was namechecked.

There was some frisky questioning from the floor on first-world/middle-class elites vs developing-world/favelas, dismissed by Eno as an over-simplification. Russell Davies has good notes, as does Matt, and Joe Lee has photos.

City flags were mentioned, and here's the City of London's flag (and described in more detail here).

And here are ten drawings of Steven Johnson's hands, ten drawings of Brian Eno's hands, and some profiles of the audience.

(More drawings at events: haircuts, hairlines, and noses.)

Abbey Among Oak Trees (Northern Line), 2006

The movement of the tube is a giant invisible hand that pulls and pushes everything and everybody around. Since 2003 I have regularly sat on the tube, working with the train to make some drawings. I am an unreliable meat accelerometer recording the train's movement. I take the scribbled drawings that the train makes, and composite them in the computer into landscapes and other images. These ones are from the Northern Line, and the composite image is a transcription of Caspar David Friedrich's Abbey Among Oak Trees, 1809-10.

Friedrich's Romantic memento mori becomes an ambiguous vision of open skies, of landscapes and scale, dreamt by tube trains rattling underground. What other landscapes might an urban transit system day-dream of? Something with no sign of either man or his makings? Or abandoned cities reclaimed by nature? - Joseph Gandy's or Gustave Doré's visions of London. Or people outside of the cities? - Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe perhaps.

Starting to put the ground in. Friedrich's painting is a ghostly layer. The seven tube drawings I'm using are the ones floating in the air - I'll be copying them many times. We're going for a deliberately random-esque organic look - it doesn't wanted to look "tiled" or copy-and-pastey.

Friedrich's Abbey Among Oak Trees, 1809-10, in the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin. It is a wonderfully gloomy and desolate scene: a cortege of monks slowly bear a coffin through the doorway in a facade that's the only standing remnant of a ruined abbey. About the abbey are shattered, leafless oaks and gravestones, none standing vertically. A horizontal band of light sky silhouettes the black oaks, the rest of the picture seems shrouded in a murky fog.

More of the ground is in, and the darker horizontal band is making progress. This time there are some "composite" blocks floating in the air - I'm combining drawings into larger blocks in order to make slightly quicker progress, and to keep Photoshop happy. You can see here that the picture is slightly too symmetrical in the vertical axis.

(Fr 13 Januar 2006:) The next morning I walked from Reinickendorfer Strasse on the U6 down into Mitte, shivering in the cold but determined to dutifully see the things that a first-time visitor needs to see. At the Alte Nationalgalerie on Museum island, I wander the rooms, drifting past Schinkel's romantic city-landscapes, Blechen's Tower Ruins, and Bocklin's Landscape with Castle Ruins 1847 and Island of the Dead 1883, searching for hidden truths. I tried to avoid the Friedrich paintings for as long as possible, wanting to see them last. I knew which room they were in, and often had to cut my eyes away to avoid getting a premature glance.

(Schinkel saw Friedrich's Monk by the Sea in 1810 and was so impressed that he gave up painting and took up architecture, much to the benefit of German and world architecture.)

The Friedrich room has several paintings with a figure in them. Often solitary, this figure is Rückenfigur, the wanderer.

My copy of Joseph Leo Koerner's Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape 1990 is in storage, inconveniently hidden from view. But Nancy Thuleen rescues us:

This Rückenfigur, though, deserves further consideration, and Koerner fortuitously obliges, tracing older uses of the figure as mere ornamentation or as a portrayal of the artist himself up to Friedrich's innovative placement of the figure: no longer witnessed in the act of making or even casually observing, Friedrich's Rückenfigur takes on the vital role of experiencing, partaking in the scene and in the art itself. Unlike his predecessors', Friedrich's figure is integral to an understanding of the work and plays an active role in it. One need only imagine the landscape in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog without the critical position of the Rückenfigur, who not only directs our gaze but changes it, makes it unstable. Koerner's exquisitely detailed reading of Friedrich's great painting culminates in the contention that the figure, "as figure of self," is in fact "Nature, man, and human history together," and that the "experiencing self is both foregrounded and concealed." [Koerner, p194] [...] It is in view of these later works that Koerner also senses the Rückenfigur to be a marker of "pastness" -- a moment of déjà vu , the sight of the Other, a Doppelgänger who both sees and is seen, or even, as Friedrich himself indicated, the political 'demagogues' whose moment had passed. Friedrich's Wanderer , as indeed his art, travels in the purgatory between the infinite and the bounded, the timely and the timeless, the past and the future.

The sky is going in - I considered knocking the black back to grey to get the lighter tone but decided against in the end. Trying to achieve it with white space instead, and hope that it won't draw too much attention to itself. Some working layers in between sky and ground.

(Sa 14 Januar 2006:) The next day I took the U6 down to Friedrichstrasse to the Pergamon museum, which sits across from the Alte Nationalgalerie on Museumsinsel. The Pergamon contains original-size, reconstructed monumental buildings, and is curiously enigmatic on which items are reconstructions and are which original. But by now the distinction is beginning to blur: the reconstructions, many from the 1920s and 30s, now need conservation themselves. The gates of Ishtar from Babylon are rightly impressive, but scarier was the market gate of Milet, a lurching stack of columns held together with restraining straps.

Fellow artists and friends described Friedrich as a mysterious and mystic character, with an almost monkish lifestyle. His studio was bare and kept only the essential tools for work. He needed solitude and introspection to achieve his visions as he wrote: "Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react on others from the outside inwards."

Later, Alex told me that during the 1980s, if you crossed the Wall from West Berlin to visit the Pergamon museum, you might be the only visitor in it. And I imagine that solitary visitor as Friedrich's rückenfigur, wandering alone, observing the world the other side of the wall.

(Some time later.) We now have hundreds of layers, and Photoshop is getting very sluggish. Taken some of the sky out. The abbey facade, some monks and the leafless oaks are going in. Very hard to do the small branches with the drawings from the tube without making them smaller, which I'm not doing at the moment. Instead, trying to hint at the branches, rather than represent them directly. I test this by repeatedly zooming in to work and then out to check the effect, like a painter stepping back from the easel with narrowed eyes (This is partly what Derrida was getting at in Memories of the Blind).

Nancy Thuleen again:

Landscape in Friedrich's paintings takes on, under Koerner's discerning eye, the character of a journey, of the search for that which is hidden and may never be found. Thus the great spires of the floating cathedral of the Winter Landscape with Church (1811), while clear to the viewer, remain hidden to the exhausted figure in the snow, dwarfed by the branches of the fir tree and its wooden cross. The importance of the almost hidden for Friedrich's landscapes -- that which is 'sensed' without being known -- leads Koerner into a succinct review of Romanticism's greatest tenets: the importance of becoming rather than being, the paradoxical need to discover an 'original' truth, the subjectivity of personal experience.

A kind of presence-place: always already, here and now, screened (shown/hidden), almost not quite.

More tree and abbey action. The trees look like they're festooned with vines, which isn't true to Friedrich's painting, but seems appropriate. The left hand side of the abbey looks a bit copy-and-paste still. Instead we want a flat alloverness (Pollock), something with no seams... I remember reading something about the appearance of randomness requiring non-random means, because the truly random doesn't look random.

Friedrich received a religious education from his candle-maker father, which presumably influenced his work. Another possible influence was witnessing the death of one of his brothers while ice skating in the frozen Baltic Sea - the brother was attempting to save Caspar from falling through the ice when he fell through himself. Friedrich's mother died when he was seven, and two of his sisters died before he was 18.

(So 15 Januar 2006:) The hotel's external shape is the facsimile of a water mill, and the canal around it is covered in a thin layer of ice, a milder recalling of Friedrich's tangled The Sea of Ice 1824.

We are getting there, but it's not finished. I'm not sure about the sky. And a couple of the trees have a weird blur effect because I have a double-hit of a drawing which is now offset by a few pixels - it looks smudged.  must press on, drawing the picture out.

So: Friedrich suggests a kind of unstable history-presence-place, here and now, almost not quite. (I am thinking too of the unstable Glider in Duchamp's Large Glass). And correspondingly, we perform a scanning, a finding-losing, a constant revising in this city of lines, of points of measurement and of light, of memorials in stone and metal as both remembrance (mahnmal) and as admonition (denkmal), and of wall traces. Berlin's wall traces are unstable too: there are sufficient different ways of marking the trace of The Wall that any perceived local difference on the ground - of one tile to those that surround it - immediately becomes a possible Wall-trace. A city of drawn lines, running between measured measuring points, marking removed and imaginary walls.

Friedrich: "The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him."

*

Related:
Some examples of the tube drawings. A first draft for this Friedrich piece. The Friedrich painting itself. A Berlin U6 drawing (2006) - 15 drawings made on Berlin's U6 line, from Alt Tegel to Friedrichstrasse, and an earlier untitled composition (2004).

Refs:
Nancy Thuleen's review of Joseph Leo Koerner: Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape  and Wikipedia: Caspar David Friedrich.

Giotto's circles on the underground

Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects tells the story of how Giotto drew a perfect circle to prove his skill. One day in April I tried to draw perfect circles whilst standing on the tube, leaning with a shoulder on the glass. There are five drawn between each of three stops on the Northern line (one, two, three), then the Victoria line (one, two, three), and then the Bakerloo line (one, two, three). In the choice of tube lines a pun about the Circle line has gone begging - perhaps next time.

And one morning going into the workshop of Giotto, who was at his labours, [Pope Benedict's courtier] showed him the mind of the Pope, and at last asked him to give him a little drawing to send to his Holiness. Giotto, who was a man of courteous manners, immediately took a sheet of paper, and with a pen dipped in red, fixing his arm firmly against his side to make a compass of it, with a turn of his hand he made a circle so perfect that it was a marvel to see it. Having done it, he turned smiling to the courtier and said, "Here is the drawing." But he, thinking he was being laughed at, asked, "Am I to have no other drawing than this?" "This is enough and too much," replied Giotto, "send it with the others and see if it will be understood." The messenger, seeing that he could get nothing else, departed ill pleased, not doubting that he had been made a fool of. However, sending the other drawings to the Pope with the names of those who had made them, he sent also Giotto's, relating how he had made the circle without moving his arm and without compasses, which when the Pope and many of his courtiers understood, they saw that Giotto must surpass greatly all the other painters of his time.

More on Giotto and the circle, and others who demonstrated skill with a simple gesture.

More drawings on the tube: Berlin U6 drawing: circle; a transcription of Caspar David Friedrich's The Abbey in the Oak Forest 1809-10; and Underground train drawings one and two - the artist and tube train making the drawing together.

Checkerboarded notebooks, c 1981-2

Among a dozen or so of us at school there was briefly a craze of taking squared school notebooks and pencilling in alternate squares like a chess board. One or two filled a whole book, page after page of grey and white squares - something that took a commitment of many days - but most achieved a handful of pages only.

Progress was a slow and laborious, and its essential pointlessness somehow excited us and drove us on. After we'd done a page or two the pencil would have worn nicely to a flat diagonal, optimal for quickly covering a square. We'd keep these pencils carefully in our pencil cases, reserving them for the notebook.

But soon the teachers confiscated the books because they represented a waste of our time, particularly in the classroom, and of school material. The practice immediately went underground, but it was hard to keep up, and the checkerboard craze soon fizzled out.

The image is a replica from last week, the original notebooks are sadly long-lost.

See also: pixel portraits and Things Mag's 1160 found dots.

(More personal history of drawing to follow!)

Berlin U6 drawing: circle

15 drawings of the journeys between 15 stations - Alt Tegel to Friedrichstrasse - on Berlin's U6 line in January 2006. They will eventually be composed very differently for a project on Casper David Friedrich, but for now here's a circle. In response to a raised eyebrow from a fellow passenger I exhausted my German and said "er... kunst...".

Drawing, descending, snowing, clouding

The cables stretch up into the sky, down into the valley, a perspective drawing in black and blue. The sky is bisected with cable-trail and con-. An infrastructural skeleton carries the cable-car line to a trunk with legs and a shadow.

Light is refracted through the cable car's plastic canopy; the marks etched and bashed into the surface are a cloud chamber snapshot, a delay in plastic.

The snow surface shows footprints and ski and snowboard marks. Northern mountains are shot through green netting. The wearing of wrist guards is considered as an aid in sketching.

There and then: people transfixed, frozen on a wide piste; here and now: snow traversed by swift skiers. The cable car shadows wobble across the snow on an off-piste slope, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther away. Seen from above, the snow and trees and ski-tracks are like a Wayne Thiebaud painting.

My car is a leaf on an endless, looping branch. In the lee of the sun distance is flattened. The snow is paper for drawing with skis and boards.

*

The camera packed away, we leave the resort, and drive back down the mountains through some cloud.

Five, ten, fifteen feet off the ground there are chock stones here and there, caught under the netting that prevents rocks falling into the road. These are the size of footballs, and have slipped, rolled and dropped down the mountain-side, falling in the gap between netting and rock-face until the gap narrows and arrests them. They have then caught other smaller pebbles, resulting in gravity-piled cairns of stones held tight, up in the air.

Only the near-vertical surfaces are free of snow. Streams and water drops have slowed and solidified into ice stalactites. The roads switches back on itself, descending into the valley.

In the distance there is a band of green-black conifers. The top of the band is a serrated silhouette, the bottom fades through grey into white. The band itself is flecked with a billion dots of white, as if it were a picture that had been pin-pricked and held over a light.

It starts to snow lightly as we drop into the valley, and the taxi driver frowns and switches the meter to the night/snow/ice conditions tariff. Black tarmac tracks indicate the modal route that other tyres have swept clear, and the taxi follows these, and takes the corners on tiptoes.

*

We are flying back across France, above a thick and seemingly endless layer of cloud that looks like snow. Blue-grey shadows in it look like footprints on the piste-edge. The plane rushes slowly forward over it. Instead of a line, the horizon is a saturated fill from white snow cloud layer up into blue sky.

Occasionally we fly over a gap in the cloud, and our apparent height appears to contra-zoom suddenly as the gap reveals a patchwork of fields far below through the cloud window.

As we descend, it looks less like snow and more like a layer of wispy cotton wool, marked and lumped up into momentary images, like landscapes from Botticelli's thrown sponge. Speed lines drawn in the sky, in the glass, in the cloud, in the snow.

Looping circle/spiral, 2005

Looping circle and spiral, both pencil, c.11cm in diameter on two sheets of A3, 1 Dec 2005.

1. 12 concentric circles of 777 loops. Afterwards, kneading a sore hand and elbow, a thought: would the number of loops follow a progression - say, Fibonacci - from one circle to the next? Perhaps not: 12, 16, 29, 41, 55, 66, 82, 91, 98, 114, 127, 144.

2. A spiral of wobbly loops. No idea how many loops.

And a couple of warm-ups.

See also: Fully Articulated (2002-3), similar attempts to sustain a regular pattern with the eye and hand, eg dotting the largest circular disc possible in an hour.

Sketching experiment with camera lucida

One big difficulty is that whilst you draw, with the image super-imposed by the camera lucida, your drawing seems true and firm. With the lens out of the way, the inkpen linework seems shaky, amateurish. Setting aside the lens to eyeball it (as Hockney would say) directly, the sketch has been finished off with the Pentel brush pen, a tool that Jack wields so much better. More experiments required!

The camera lucida was invented by William Wollaston in 1807. In Secret Knowledge, David Hockney controversially suggests that the camera lucida, or similar advanced optical techniques, could have been used by artists such as Ingres, Holbein, Da Vinci and so on. Others are skeptical.