There was a usefull article about cheap holidays for artists in the papers travel section (17.10.09) the websites mentioned were, creatorsinn.com (Gothenberg, Sweeden) mounttremperarts.org (Catskill mountains, New York) and lamuse.com i’d hazzard a guess thats somewere in France
The Rationale
I wanted to avoid doing landscapes at all cost. However, the more I thought about it, I realised there is something to be attributed to the humble landscape; as a representation of a destination.
What about the journey?
I wanted to find a way of capturing a journey in a visual context that would ultimately be a purer form of landscape drawing that a highly stylized image of a destination. Some of the principles of pinhole photography apply to the work.
I believe the pinhole technique is a ‘pure’ form of image capture simply because the light hasn’t been interfered with nearly as much.
A 35mm camera relies on sophisticated lenses, reflex mirrors, shutter release and film. That’s before one considers the human eye side of the bargain. The light that eventually reaches the film is distorted and massively interfered. A digital camera more so, what the lens captures becomes code, just a bunch of zero’s and one’s; it takes a computer to make any sense of the image.
THE RESULTING IMAGE, AN IN-ACURATE REPRESENTATION!
The pinhole camera is a light sealed box with a piece of photographic paper stuck in the back, and a microscopic pinhole in the front. The very environment embeds itself into the picture as light and air enter the box and work directly on the photo paper.
My challenge as the artists was to create an image, without working the image directly.
HOW DO YOU MAKE A MARK WITHOUT LIFTING A PENCIL?
This is quite obviously impossible! However, if I could build a tool that would move and draw independently of direct human contact, the idea for the work would ring true.
I started thinking about Newton’s idea that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I figured that if I could somehow harness the momentum generated by a moving vehicle, I would have a useful way of creating marks. However, the problem remained of how to transfer the momentum onto a drawing medium.
A number of experiments involving bits of string and pencils were conducted, all disastrous.
The eureka moment came whilst doing research at my computer and using the mouse. For a prototype I butchered a broken mouse and glued a length of tube to it, put it in the boot of my car and went for a spin. The resulting marks while not spectacular did show potential. The natural progression was to make a remote vehicle, capable of multiple variations of direction.
The Mk 1 drawing frame with Bogey became the solution to my problem.
THE WORK
Over a period of seven days the apparatus went everywhere I did, spinning around in the back of the car. During that time I catalogued the time spent in motion and distance travelled. At the end of each day the drawing field was reduced, the result being that with each subsequent journey the image would compound; automatically producing a boundary or margin. In this respect the final image is fairly sculptural; with each reduction more is revealed.
DRIFTING THOUGHT’S
As with a pinhole photograph elements of the environment have embedded themselves in the drawing. On closer inspection evidence of water splatter from an open window can be seen. Furthermore, during the seven days the image was in production thousands of people lost their jobs, through no fault of their own.
Hundreds lost their lives.
Then again many hundreds were born and thousands would have found love.
I like to think that the despair of loss could have found its way into the image. And in contrast the joy of hope.
Stuart Rose 2009
It may be that artistic creation, with all that it calls for in the way of free inventiveness, takes place at a higher pitch of tension in the nameless crowd of ordinary people, because practiced without applause or profit, for the maker’s own delight; and that the over-publicised activity of proffessionals produces merely a specious form of art, all too often watered down and doctored. If this were so, it is rather cultural art that should be described as marginal.
Michel Thevoz, Art Brut, 1975
