After some reflection concerning my Unit 1 practice I decided I needed to go back to my park paintings. There were some ideas I wanted to explore further, particularly in what concerns the integration of the figure in the landscape using multiple views, or “time frames” as I started to call the grid elements I was using. What first was merely a technical tool, gradually became a deepened aspect in my practice. I became more and more interested in terminology usually associated with graphic novels such as "scenes", "zoom in and out", "angles" or "dramatic focal points". I believe my background, connected to my teenage habit of voraciously reading comic books, unconsciously never abandoned me.
I confess that there were moments when I considered this particularity of my past to be a flaw as I said to myself that comic books were considered as a "lesser" form of art when compared to painting or sculpture, the so-called fine arts. Today I see that this idea ended up being a creative cage I created for myself. Instead of contradicting that background, I felt I needed to integrate it in my practise and eventually it would add up to my work as a whole.
With that in mind, I explored other artist’s work who explored similar ideas concerning preocupations with space and time being David Hockney the most obvious one, with works on multiple canvases, and his very unique and almost obsessive idea of space. But also artists such as Wilhelm Sasnal, Nicholas Party, Anthony Green, Charlie Billingham, Bhupen Khakhar or even others with a more distant technical approach compared to mine such as Tenchig Hsieh, Alighiero Boetti or Christian Marclay ended up being important references.
These first works of Unit 2 were mainly acrylics on papern and canvas and I believe they reflect upon these previous ideas I pointed out.
If to me the grid represented an idea of time passing, with the evolution of this earlier stage of my practice I started to wonder about other aspects of my painting, in particular the format and its importance. Did the vertical or horizontal format have meaning? Traditionally, we associate the first to portraiture and the second to landscape. I felt this was a too “simple” definition, I needed to understand more about those differences. With that in mind, I decided to explore a bit further an idea that I previously touched in Unit 1, even if briefly, the scroll paintings, a tradition usually associated with oriental painting, depicting large scenes of narratives in a particular scenario.
One very famous example of this type of horizontal depiction is Along the River during the Qingming Festival by the painter Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). This work is considered to be the zenith of the Chinese painting during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) since it "achieved an exceptional development. The popularization of the hanging rolls allowed new advances in the representation of the landscape, and the shan shui (Chinese landscape painting) flourishes in the works of artists like Fan Kuan, Guo Xi or Li Cheng. In addition, the new Emperors became interested in the artistic expression, especially the Emperor Huizong of Song, painter, musician and poet, who turned his court into a paradise for artists.(...) The work itself is considered a masterpiece “It is an impressive work, both in scale (over 5 meters long) and quality. All 814 human figures –teachers, officials, peasants, carpenters…- are painted with the same care and attention to detail. The representation of architecture is meticulous and refined. And the landscape painted on the farthest right of the scroll ranks among the finest from the Song Dynasty." (Fernadez, http://www.theartwolf.com/masterworks/zhang-zeduan-river-qingming-festival.htm)
But not only in scroll painting we associate the idea of horizontal format to a narrative driven painting. The twentieth century Indian artist Bhupen Khakkhar found similar aspects when looking at medieval italian painting and reflecting upon his own practice: "The Sienese faced certain problems, which I face also as a painter: how to include the narrative aspects in a painting without destroying its structure." (Hyman, 2016, p.51)
Going back again, I believe these particularities of an horizontal structure also adress issues concerning the way we humans visualize the world. We see it as a whole, and not as a camera, through a “single moment” event, an aspect the author Roland Barthes talks about in his book Camera Lucida : "What photograph reproduced to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never trasncended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need nack to the body i see; it is the absolute Particualr, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photgraphy), in short, what Lacan call the Tuché, the occasion, the enconunter (...)." (Barthes, 1980, p.4)
At this stage, besides the many trials with horizontal formats, I also explored other technical aspects of oil painting as well as watercolour.
With the lockdown restriction lifting up, I was able to explore different areas of London and my sketchbooks started to be filled with imagery from those multiple walks and encounters. I was also exploring other authors who dealt with the act of walking such as Rececca Solnit, Mark Mason, Ian Sinclair, Xavier de Maistre, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Mcfarlane among others. I needed to understand more deeply what walking meant to me.
"Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive mean between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meaning." (Solnit, 2001, p.3)
Besides the "flaneur" and its meaning reagrding strolling and wandering, with time I understood there were equality important thinking branches shared by inumerous artists, philosophers, scientist who understood walking as of particular interest to their work. As Solnit states, "The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking(...) (Solnit, 2001, p.5). Rosseau, for example, could only meditate when (...) walking" (Rosseus p.382). Kierkegaard "chose cities - or one city, Copenhagen - as his place to walk and study, his human subjects, though he compared his urban tours to rural botanizing: human beings were the specimens he gathered." (Solnit, 2001, p.23)
London and its multiple random encounters and hidden places were my subject. But a city like London is no easy task to understand.
In the beginning of his book Londoneers, the author Craig Taylor writes: "At the bottom of the poster was the famous Samuel Johnson quote I’ve now heard repeated, mangled and paraphrased many times:”When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”. I didn't understand it at the time. The view of tower bridge looked grey and forbidding. It begged the question: “What kind of person ended up in London." (Taylor, 2011, p.I) From my still short experience living in this city, I find it hard to truly understand all its multiple contradictions. There are dozens of books who describe how differently people react to it, just for a start. There are symbols, evidently, that we imediatly associate to the city such as the underground, which "(...) was never properly planned but just sort of sprawled, and because it was built over the curse of 140 years , it is far more revealing of the history and character of the city it serves than any of the above systems." (Martin, 2012, p.4 )
Mark Mason, for exampe, tried to tame the city by following, on the surface, walking, all the underground lines: "It is not just about studying , about observing or nothing. It is about owning. About claiming the city’s greatness, or at least some small part of it, for yourself. That's why there has to be an order to the walk, some logic, a set of rules. It's almost as though those rules are a religious service, and by following them you achieve a bond with London." (Mason, p.4). Ian Sinclair, one of the authors who we most associate to London, admitted that he still found it hard to describe the city where he lived for decades: "I had waked here - and I would soon walk on, I’m not sure where - because my sense was that London , my home for fifty years, was being centrifugally challenged to the point of obliteration; of being unable to say just where, and why, it began and ended." (Ian Sinclair, 2017, p.6)
Still, I needed to undestand my place and purpose here. Walking per se was meaningful because I was moving, even if sometimes without a defined route, the act itself led me to gradually acknowledge where and how to move. Like a cartographer, I was mapping my surroundings and building my own London map. The works I was making reflected a bit of this idea of researching my place, a gradual evolution of the sketchbook practice I mentioned previously.
This interest in mapping led my research to a certain terminology I wasn't familiar with, namely “psychogeography” and “situationism”, both connected to ideas I developded earlier about the "flaneur". Defining psychogeography, as I understood it, revealed itself to be a difficult procedure.
"A term which has become strangely familiar - strange because despite the frequency of its usage no one seems quite able to pin down exactly what it means or where it comes from (...) Are we talking about a predominately literary movement or a political strategy, a series of New Age ideas or a set of avant-garde practices? The answer, of course, is that psychogeography is all of these things, rating definitions through a shifting series of interwoven themes and constantly being reshaped by its practitioners. (Coverley, 2006, p.13)
Despite these difficulties with its definition, it is possible to state that psychogeography has some of its roots grounded on the walking practice itself: "This act of walking is principally an urban affair, and in cities that are often hostile to the pedestrian, it inevitably becomes an act of subversion. The promotion of swift circulation and the street-level gaze that walking requires allows one to challenge the official representation of the city by cutting across established routes and exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the city’s inhabitants." (Coverlay, 2006, p.16)
Following this particular idea and definition, I started looking for some London maps, visiting museums and trying to identify how the city developed through the years. A project that standed out among this particular phase of my research was Charles Booth’s Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London, in particular the section Maps Descriptive of London Poverty in which "the levels of poverty and wealth found by the survey investigators was mapped out street by street."(https://booth.lse.ac.uk/learn-more/what-were-the-poverty-maps) The importance of these maps represent An early example of social cartography, each street is coloured to indicate the income and social class of its inhabitants. (https://booth.lse.ac.uk/learn-more/what-were-the-poverty-maps)
(i included further information about Charles Booth's maps in the "External Resources section)
This idea of social cartography is in my view totally connected to the psychogeography terminology. It’s a portrait of a city, of the way it is represented, a means to understand injustice and social diferences which might have helped adress those same problems.
I intend to explore these ideas during Unit 3 since I believe there is still much to explore and understand about these topics.
As my research and my work kept going I was feeling more assured of my interests and motivations. If at times my research and my work felt disconnected, finally I was feeling they had a positive symbiotic relationship.
With this in mind, once again, I was feeling the need to confront myself with other techniques besides drawing and oil and acrylic painting. And if during Unit 1 the lack of resources due to covid restrictions led me to work mainly from home, now that was not the case since I was able to use some of the workshops in Camberwell.
I tried some printmaking, sculpture, digital painting while also keeping up with previous portraiture practice. These are not intended to be final and resolved works but instead trials or starting points to future practices and eventually more finalized pieces.
Regarding my painting, however, as I was reaching Unit 2's final stages, my works were gradualy more resoled and ambitious. I worked on bigger scales, aproaching ideas of individualized and more finished paintings. They felt as a cumulative result of all the theoretical and practical research I was doing so far.
This is the point were Unit 2 was brought to its conclusion. I believe that my ideas are more clear and focused as well as my practise. There are topics I need to explore further mainly the psycogeography, mappings, and some other technical issues concerning my painting decisions.
References
Martin, A (2012) Underground Overground. London: Profile Books LTD
Coverley, M. (2006) Psycogeography. Herts: Oldcastel books
Taylor, C. (2011) Londoners. London: Granta Publications
Mason, M. (2011) Walk the Lines. London: Arrow Books
Solnit, R. (2001) Wanderlust a History of Waking. London: Granta Books
Glaeser, E. (2019) Triumph of the City. New York: Penguin Group
Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida. London: Vintage
Rosseau. J. (1931) Confessions. New York: Everyman's Library
Sinclair, I. (2017) The Last London. London: Oneworld Publications
Raza, N; Dercon, C. (2016) Bhupen Khakhar You Can't Please All. London: Tate Publishing
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