Tumblr

Blogspot seems to keep being very temperamental (ie, impossibly difficult and not working at all) so I've started posting on the tumblr account I made ages ago and never used. O Blogspot /dreary sigh.
But, tumblr seems to be working well, so I may just migrate there and keep a very large link to my NEW work and thoughts etc on this post (if this posts...) at the top of this page and keep this for early archival of my unit one work.

Byebye, Blogspot....
http://the-holon.tumblr.com/

Hole - Doll Parts

❤

The Lolita Project

In the summer I started a side-line project about Lolita (that I was talking about in my last post) and since then I've added some new drawings to it & thought I would upload it in its entirety since it's actually becoming more than vaguely relevant.

With thoughts of fairy tales and iconoclasm, the cult of the virgin, Courtney Love, dolls etc etc etc.

I still don't know how to rotate things.

The crayon face isn't new but the picture of the women & police ontop is, and all that follows is new:

Here's a picture of me for good measure.

[Loading the other pictures was a lengthy and dull process...]

Byebye, blog.

X

Dirt, work & the Kelp-Girl.

This is my mud-paint image of the kelp girl (rephotographed because my personal camera is broken and it came out like so...)

Working with reference to Michel Nedjar's dolls :

Gormley's fluid drawings:

And Antoni Tapies beautiful dirt:

Anselm Kiefer's hair & lead:  

And images of snow white & king arthur &c post-mortem:    

Collecting textures and painting with objects (more than just mud) - flowers, sticks, relevant fairytale seeming fragments.

Shavings from a muddy stick - in glue and emulsion:

Emulsion print of dry leaf:

Pollen in glue & emulsion & emulsion coated leaf:

Looking at making abstracted collages from the above with my evening class drawings:

Attempts at balancing by eye -  pleasant clumps of mess.

This one I like very much or, rather, I liked very much the act of making it. It was one of the more happy instances of work (and I've been feeling quite low lately, so this was extra fun). It was less about trying to force the image of the life model into the mass of filth, more playing and making the hands happy. I feel I was too liberal with the emulsion, earlier in the making it looked a lot more 'balanced' and 'right'. I keep thinking about what John was telling us about the rule of thirds in art and cinema and how that feeds into the 'rightness' of the look of expressionism & abstract art etc. I'll look into it more formally when I'm ready to make a more formal, final looking image. At the moment, it's all play. Like little kids playing shop :)

These a twin images I made BEFORE the collecting of twigs and pollen... done with thinking about the dirt and the flotsam and jetsam and little bits of trash you find bound around corals and deep in the belly of the ocean. I laid the two sheets of paper on the floor side by side (of equal size, one black and one white) using the same brushes and materials (I suppose a bit like a 'fair test' science experiment). They were painted very much like the above messy collages where I was finding the body amid the garbage and dead flowers. I used my Puck dolly as a model (I sat him atop the table where all my pots and brushes were... he doesn't mind being used for pictures of girlies...) I deliberately placed them down low, slightly out of reach, so my marks would be altered and warped. I quite liked the effort in bending down low over my work, I felt very much like when I was a child and I would try to 'help' my mother when decorating and what have you. My thinking was it would help it look more loose and abstract, trying to give it the same kind of larger, bending illusion you get when you dunk your hands into clear water and they look much bigger and stranger than they really are. I guess it might be vaguely the same kind of concept as Therrien's size distortion we saw in Tate Liverpool: 

  

and operate on the same heavily manipulated object lacking autonomy like my dolls' house references:

Puck <3 :

The Light Twin:

The Dark Twin:

Refering to the same images (my cardboard life class images), I wanted to make a more defininative image for the kelp girl, based on the high romance tragedy of Snow White's eating the apple and Arthur's passage to avalon, with hints of Anselm Kiefer's iconoclastic myth making and Michel Nedjar's more earnest, sombre and, I suppose, sentimental approach to things. As always, I return to the pithy irony of Courtney Love and kinderwhore and babydoll dresses and Japanese gothic lolita.

I'll just link to my first post to save repeating everything, just keep it in mind that these things are on my mind a lot. (My working soundtrack sees Courtney Love on heavy rotation while I'm at college.)

First post : http://hankandtheromantics.blogspot.com/2011/09/odyssey.html

I feel at this point in might be useful or in some way productive to say that my two favourite books are Lolita and Peter Pan. I think this love of two very contrasting novels shows the basic, overall way I see things. They both feed into the way I approach art and literature. In the first lines of my first section rewrite it says: 'Skeleton leaves shock / with their frailty.' Skeleton leaves, for those that don't recall, are what Peter Pan's ethereal garb were woven from. I think it pitches the images in the appropriate area of the childlike and dreamy that borders on the adult and grotesque. There seems to be a fine line in myth, folklore and fairy tale between the cute images we bundle together to give to children and what seems to be the actuality of the events therein...

Following the collage dead plants etc, I wanted to come up with a more definate image to work from for the kelp girl. In Gormley's fluid drawings, the body is a solid shape with little definition. Working from the cardboard drawings from the life class I blocked in the body by painting in the negative space with dirt and emulsion:

Thinking now about the romantic tragic images of Snow White on her bier and King Arthur on the boat to Avalon following his 'death', I clouded up the ink in glue and emulsion and laid flowers out in the figure's hair:

The final image of this series (alas, not the FINAL image...) I tried to work more of a human looking shape into the misted dirt and used unthreaded coarse yellow string as a collage medium to create clumps of hair or generic seabed wiry garbage. Hitting it with the string and dragging the string through it I think worked quite well. I like the look of it without actually liking the piece. We're getting closer. I find all this work keeps me entertained.

[I would suggest looking at this full view to see what I mean.]

X