| A forest as a wall of noise |
[Jun. 11th, 2008|01:25 am] |
This took four sittings, and the result is about 4"x7". I draw with a fine pen, which means that I have to blow up the image for computer display. My lines are too fine and pixels are too chunky and as such this style is not particularly suited to the Internet, but what can I do?
I called it "A forest as a wall of noise", borrowing from something Warren said who knows how long ago and who knows where (The Engine maybe? Fell backmatter?). He was contemplating super-dense comic pages, but I am referring to the sensation I had when first looking at the forest with intent to draw.
I went out into the Galician countryside (off a trail off a dirt road behind a small cemetery off a country road) planning to draw Nature, something I hadn't really ever done before. The density and complexity was staggering. I sat down in front of two trees and as I sketched with my pencil it occurred to me that I could hardly see the trees for all the leaves and vines growing on and off of them; indeed, I couldn't see the trees for the forest.
But here was a leaf, here was a vine, here was a blade of grass; I found I could isolate individual items in the raw verdant noise I was faced with, there were specific structures that I could focus upon and draw even as the rest faded into the peripheral static. And I was left drawing, dare I say it, organically (and hardly referencing my original skeletal sketch), drawing an object and then drawing the objects that touched that first object, slowly spreading out by finding discrete bits I could comprehend, jotting them down, and moving on. No definite reference, no grid or frame, only the relationships between things (as I could perceive them).
So although I thought of Huxley's claims in The Doors of Perception that art was not fit to render life, that it could never be as beautiful or complete as Suchness, I began to think that perhaps for me the final product—the 4-by-7-inch slip of paper or its digital equivalent—was not the art, but that the art was in the rendering (verb) itself. Figuring out relationships, marking them down—the learning process itself was the art, the document a mere byproduct. This is after all, merely a part of a broader attempt to improve my skills.
But I do hope it is enjoyable to look at (to paraphrase Zak Smith, good art is just stuff you'd rather look at than not). And I hope that it reproduces in some rudimentary way the sensation I had of looking into the forest and seeing it as beautiful but overwhelming and having to really concentrate to pick out the recognizable forms of this or that leaf or branch. I hope too that some parts of it are incomprehensible, as there were many intractable nests of branches and clumps of leaves which I merely did the best I could to draw.
And anyway, this slushy writing serves a similar purpose to the drawing itself: to work my mind around something such that later I may be better at working my mind around things.
Crits welcome. |
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| Comments: |
Wall of noise... hmmm yes, there is that feeling. The little random dots really add to that. There are spaces that look like I could push through - it's less dense and there's more of a feeling of space/depth. The flatter the space, the more wall like it'll seem I think. The large and small versions have completely different feelings. I wonder if I was looking at the original the closeness to the actual piece and how it was affect the view/feeling. The smaller one has more depth, the larger version I feel like I'm standing/sitting closer to it and it is flatter. Hmmm... if I lean away from the computer, the larger one has more depth. Interesting.
The dots really add to the "noise" feeling. Perhaps because of noise in digital photography? Noise as a sound is unstructured and unclear... so it does make some sense.
It's very good, I generally don't have the patience for these kinds of things. (Well, perhaps when there are figures and they're in poses I really like.)
The actual piece is quite small, and the effect I get from it is closer to the small image, though of course there is more information on the paper than in the image. It's interesting that the higher resolution image actually makes its features (like depth, as you said) less clear in some ways.
...and thanks! | |
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