Part Three Outdoors Project 2 Landscape Research Point

It has been extremely difficult for me to get excited about drawing clouds, as they are not a part of my regular everyday landscape. I lived for ten years in Kazakhstan where for at least nine months of the year the sky was predominantly covered with a dreary heat inversion layer, shrouding the sun with a dismal sheet of grey. I have now lived in Cotonou, Benin, where I also fail to see the contrasts evoked by cloud formations. Most of the year, the humidity is such that there is a continuous grey sheet masking the sun. Then for about four months, we experience what is known as the “hamatan.” During this period, fine dust blows in from the Sahara, leaving a kaki haze over the entire sky, also blocking out the sun. The benefit of this is that it cools the weather down, but it leaves the sky a continuous yellowy grey sheet. I remember when we stayed for a month in the United Kingdom that clouds were a very important part of the landscape as you constantly had clouds blowing in and out of the sky, bringing sporadic rain and sunshine. I remember enjoying it!

So, to try to motivate myself I did the Research Point before attempting cloud formation. I first read up about Jeanette Barnes in Drawing Projects (Mick Maslen and Jack Southern, 2014). What I love about her work is that she has a sense of transience, almost as if it is a slow-shutter speed photograph revealing the traces of movements of faster moving objects. What impressed me also is that she does not see her drawings as being complete. She will regularly erase and rework sections, allowing the work to morph and become something that she had not previously envisioned. This impressed me because I tend to be more inclined to set out to achieve what I have envisioned, not allowing the flexibility of seeing the “drawing as a whole, not to get sucked into small details and to be prepared to erase a part of it, in order to help the whole piece, even if it was the best bit of the drawing.” (Southern, 2014)

I was fascinated by the work of Adele Underwood during a workshop, April 2000. The series of photographs showed how dramatically she reworked her drawing. Her final piece had traces of her previous lines, simply as it was impossible to erase all trace of previous sketches, but looked entirely different from the commencement. This also challenges my more static approach to drawing.

As suggested in my course materials, I looked at the work of Vija Celmin. In Vija Celmins’s video she states the following: 

Copying implies something fast. What I considered it, was like I was redescribing what I see. And I left…I left all of the evidence here: the found object and the imagined object. You know the object that I have described myself. And always imperfectly, because the point is not to mimic it, but the point was to show a kind of attention span and…a sort of thoroughness of putting the paint down and like looking at the found object and picking this tiny, tiny area, remembering it and putting it on another object which I have made…and I want you to look at it without thinking too much. You can think about it later.

(Institut für Kunstdokumentation, 2011)

She too has the ability to hold on loosely to the idea of mimicry. If I understand her correctly, she sees her drawing as being an imagined response to a found object. I am not sure how to interpret this into drawing clouds, as suggested by the brief, but I will give it a try.

Works Cited

Institut für Kunstdokumentation, 2011. Vija Celmins: Desert, Sea and Stars. [Online]
Available at: https://vimeo.com/22299024
[Accessed 6 February 2016].

Maslen, Mick and Jack Southern, 2014. Drawing Projects. In: London: Black Dog Publishing, pp. 148 - 151.

Maslen, Mick and Jack Southern, 2014. Drawing Projects. In: London : Black Dog Publishing, p. 150.