Dublin 091703
Dublin
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I got a mention at artkrush, which caught me off-guard this morning, but then later saw it reflected in my stats. It's kind of weird to link to. The main artkrush page has an embedded scrolling frame for daily news, which says:
Siegfried Holzbauer html paintings. I gleaned this from Chris Ashley's daily blog who is also a html devout.
A direct link to this embedded page can be read outside of artkrush's contextual framing. I don't know if the "I" here is Christopher Elam, Editor in Chief, or someone else.
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Lloyd writes, "Chris, this Joycean fan would love to know the story behind today's Dublin drawing!" Well, thanks for asking. By the way, don't I have a story about Inisheer to finish?
I can't say that there is exactly a story here, but there are some elements of knowledge and personal memory and vision that give the image meaning for me. In particular, it is interesting that you invoke Joyce.
Anyone who hasn't been following along -- and why should you; these drawings are just a bunch of texty code that have me hamstrung by a limited palette and lots of right angles -- should know that the long list of cities currently along the left side of this weblog are cities in which I've slept during my lifetime. This listing is something Lloyd instigated among a number of Berkeley webloggers several weeks back. After making the list it occurred to me, aha, this is content about which to make drawings for... days, even weeks. Great! I can stop thinking and just start responding. That's important- having something to respond to- a person, place, thing, time, phrase.
Here are things that was on my mind while making today's drawing, Dublin:
- Our trip to Ireland in August 2000 was one of the best bit of traveling I've done. The country, land, people, culture, and history made a deep impression on me.
- I felt a deep connection with the place because of my own Scots-Irish heritage.
- I read Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners, at a tender age, and the story "Araby" in particular is one I've re-read many times and carried with me over the years. Images of night, dull light, curtains and shades, loneliness, disappointment, and yearning are evoked for me by this story. I didn't plan this, necessarily, but the color and arrangement of two disconnected figures evokes this for me.
I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. (The entire story, the entire book, can be read at Bibliomania)
- The floor plans of cathedrals take the shape of the cross. The cross is an important figure, of course, in Ireland; the celtic cross, in particular, is a powerful shape. I wanted to subtly evoke both church shape and cross, but subvert a direct literal reading so that the shapes can be or do other things, like a figure, architecture, a landscape, a street path.
By the way, the shapes I used in the drawing I did of Quin (near Shannon, Co. Clare) the other day are very interesting to me: the image reads as a landscape with an architectural element- this shape came right out of my memory of the enormous and beautiful skeleton of an abbey, Quin Friary, just down and across the road from our B&B, but when I finished the drawing I also realized that the form looked very much like a harp, another very important Irish image. Another by the way: I just discovered a weblog called North Atlantic Skyline, which has photos of the friary. Yes, the halo on the Virgin Mary by the side of the road in that first photo is neon and lights up at night. The statue is right across the road from the very friendly and busy pub where we spent the evening drinking Guinness, scotch whiskey, and watching Simpsons reruns. I believe it was the only pub in all of Ireland in which I saw a TV.
Yesterday's drawing is about Kildare, in Co. Kildare. Besides the literalness of blue skies and green land, Kildare is set among rolling hills and is a desintation for horses and horse racing. See if that's in the drawing for you, too.
- The overlapping of the verticals and horizontals results in a darker area, as if the two shapes of the same color crossing over each other make a denser, thus darker, area. This is an effect I use now and then, but it is very easy to get carried away with it, to become illustrational, to make it an eye-catching, too-clever technique. I try to avoid this, but it's a bit seductive. It does betray an understanding of color, but it creates an artificial depth I find a bit, at times, calculating or obvious.
Something I haven't talked much about is how many versions a drawing goes through to arrive at the one I actually show. Sometimes the page I work on for the day in Dreamweaver may have several different drawings on it, some sublte variations, some quite different, but only one is used for the day. This Dublin drawing did get carried much further with a lot of this overlapping, layered, color-density build up, but I decided it had gone too far and so backed off to something far more restrained.
- I had wanted to stay away from Irish colors, orange and green, but didn't totally- it just happened. I wanted dark interior colors, colors seen through windows, under clouds. Muted colors under rain clouds. The dim light of the pub. A slight feeling of movement, a subdued but truthful energy.
- I think I wanted both the feel of looking at something and being inside of something, of an inside and outside environment feeling.
- I could do a hundred drawings about Ireland.
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Artist Steve Mumford has another installment of his Baghdad Journal at Artnet. This is a terrific series of ink wash drawings, first person accounts, and interviews from the streets of Baghdad. Previous installements include: 9/16/03; 8/27/03; 8/19/03.
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Linked from Arts Journal- lots to read at Butterflies and Wheels:
Butterflies and Wheels has been established in order to oppose a number of related phenomena. These include:
- Pseudoscience that is ideologically and politically motivated.
- Epistemic relativism in the humanities (for example, the idea that statements are only true or false relative to particular cultures, discourses or language-games).
- Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments.
Say...
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