Dead Sea Scrolls, Torah, Kerouac.

Scroll (noun) continual length of parchment/paper. Images and text as potential, actual and expended. What is the nature of the material while it is potential ie in the future and unseen, actual ie present and viewed and expended ie past and seen.

Scroll (verb) participate in the act of moving data in and out of view in a linear way. Somewhere between passive and active.

When we scroll and click to like on data platforms we are behaving as hunter/collectors.

Here Im using a roll of tracing paper to rub/trace one of my sculptures (Portal (2017) 800/100/50mm Portland stone, slate chips, cement) with carved and uncarved pastels in different directions and with differing pressure.

 

 

 

 

 

Bad stone sculpture.  By what criteria are these considered not just good but great? If they had been arrived at after a long exploratory study of the female head and neck then they might be of passing interest.  However they are fine examples of a painters understanding of 3D form. Detail stuck on flatness. This is not arrival at or inclusion of the  primitive or the addition of mask to classical but basic failure of technique or understanding of anatomy forcing form. Something I deal with  when students attempt to carve or model the human head. So he tries to find movement in approaching the block from the corner or edge or by extending the length or height resulting in a kind of cod Easter island cliché. Style over content and no real form at all. No intent. Just absence of ability.

After the movement and tension of the Caryatid drawings the rest of the exhibition shows, to me, a lack of any technical ability or adventure, demonstrated by the lengths he goes to to avoid painting or drawing hands and feet, which results in curtailment and incompletion with some figures feet cut off by the frame like bad photographs- all energy bleeding out into nothingness. Where he does attempt feet and hands they’re weird and sausage like, self conscious and embarrassed. Love the eyes. Like the cylindrical necks. Interesting pallet. But where’s the fervour, energy, direction, experimentation of the world in which he was living?  A caricaturist and illustrator.

LOOK AGAIN

A ferocious Modernist mind unencumbered by academy protocols and deliberately adrift from classicism and the strictures of anatomical accuracy. Paintings about paint and sculptures about stone, and both about his own psychological involvement in the process and with the subject matter as represented by the blind but seeing eyes. The deceptively playful colours, long necks and reptilian eyes serve to expose humanity as viewed by the artist. We are seeing the subjects not through the artists eyes but from inside the artists mind.