patternsthatconnect

A preliminary drawing for a history painting

Andy Parkinson — Thu, 23 May 2013 05:31:44 +0000

I have only recently started doing preliminary drawings. I used to do all my working out on the canvas. Here’s a preliminary drawing for a ‘history painting’. The landscape orientation alone, perhaps especially after working for so long with a square format, is suggestive to me of narrative.

Each colour ‘thread’ follows a different rule and reading from left to right they create a kind of history. I am interested in the colour spread that takes place within each figure, the so called “neon colour-spread effect” and between figures where the white ground takes on some of the colour, sometimes known as the “watercolour effect“. That the figures affect their environment in somewhat unpredictable ways also reminds me of history.

And then the approximate nature of the measurements kept reminding me of Kierkegaard’s assertion in Concluding Unscientific Postscript that “history is an approximation”.

Divertissement

Andy Parkinson — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:15:25 +0000

As part of the painting process, I like to mark out a chequer pattern. It goes underneath a few layers of white paint, so is unseen in the finished piece.

I cannot help liking it for its own sake. Even though I do go ahead and over-paint it, as I have already done with this one, there is always a moment or two when I want to keep it just as it is.

A composite view

Andy Parkinson — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:42:46 +0000

Here’s a quick attempt at a composite picture of the wallpaper drawing…

… the purpose being to get close up yet show the whole thing. Like history, it’s an approximation.

Wallpaper – detail

Andy Parkinson — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:53:11 +0000

Another detail from the wallpaper drawing

Philosophical Fragment (Wallpaper), detail

The Spectre of Decoration

Andy Parkinson — Thu, 16 May 2013 06:00:19 +0000

I had set out on a systematic study of the varying degrees of neon colour-spread effects achieved by different colours. My exploration was going to be rational, cerebral, technical. However, the neon colour-spread effects turn out to work best with the prettiest colours. Also, I wondered whether, by extending the design over a larger area, in addition to the neon colour- spread, I might get some of that other kind of colour-spreading that is edge induced and is not contained by subjective contours. Then my systematic investigation started to resemble wallpaper.

So, I decided to go ahead and actually draw it on a roll of wallpaper.

Andy Parkinson, Philosophical Fragment, 2013, marker pen on lining paper, 69″ x 20 3/4″

It seemed like a large area when I was doing the drawing, though in relation to the wall it is only a fragment.

Coincidentally, on the same day I was reading a section in Craig Staff’s excellent new book After Modernist Painting quoting Clement Greenberg, saying in 1948 that

the “all over picture” is the sort of painting (that) comes closest of all to decoration – to wallpaper patterns capable of being extended indefinitely

and in in 1957 referring to decoration as

the specter that haunts modernist painting.

Philosophical Fragment, detail

X I X I X I X

Andy Parkinson — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:15:49 +0000

Andy Parkinson, Drawing: Network Diagram, 2013, Permanent Marker on Paper, 16 1/2″ x 11 3/4″

Colour-spread and colour-mixing

Andy Parkinson — Tue, 14 May 2013 04:21:54 +0000

Colours on the outside of this network, along the two lower horizontal rows and the two leftmost vertical lines, are unmixed, “straight from the marker pen”. Where the horizontal and vertical lines they head meet, the nodes are a mixture of the two colours, achieved by drawing one coloured marker over the other.

If it was paint, I would do the mixing prior to application and I would also add white to keep the colour-spread effects working optimally.

I think it would be better if, instead of placing the unmixed colours on two rows at bottom and left, I had placed them all the way around the outermost edges. All would still have joined at the different nodes and the arrangement would have been more rational, at least to my mind. Oh well, another time.

Pattern formation from random distribution

Andy Parkinson — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:10:26 +0000

“You don’t form in the wet sand
You don’t form at all
You don’t form in the wet sand
I do.”

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Truth is Subjectivity

Andy Parkinson — Wed, 08 May 2013 07:00:33 +0000

Attempting to get some of the ad-hoc feel of the drawings into a little painting, here’s another network of loosely drawn figures, where, depending partly on the drawing and partly on the choice of colour, each central asterisk exhibits a greater or lesser degrees of neon colour-spread, when compared to the others.

Andy Parkinson, Truth is Subjectivity, 2013, acrylic on plastic-covered MDF, 9″ x 9″

The colour-spread effect in each figure exists inside a subjectively constructed disk, more or less circular, more or less transparent (or neon like). The colour-spread effects and the contours that contain them really exist, but only for subjectivity.

Networking and Notworking

Andy Parkinson — Sun, 05 May 2013 08:30:32 +0000

Some of the 41 different colors I happen to have in my set of pens (I have exactly 41 of non repeated colours) enhance the neon colour spread effect, whereas others inhibit it.

41 subjective circles: networking and not working, 21cm x 21cm

Placing them in a network it’s easy to see which ones work and which ones don’t.