The Institutionalization of the Doodle
It took many years to work out that this whole drawing process began at school, when I picked up my pencil to copy down the written words on the blackboard, most of which I could not understand. It was easier to doodle than to write a word, and in a working sense, my drawings have institutionalized the doodle as a diagrammatic art form.
That negative encounter with learning set off a need to make sense of the world through the active manipulation of the pencil line as drawing. It is therefore more meaningful to me to make a drawing, and understand its contents, than to copy down a word, and be totally perplexed by its structure and meaning.
The act of drawing connects the physicality of learning to the engagement with ideas. This is why I use the freehand drawing method as a simple way of connecting the action to the mind. The physical experience is transmitted in three different ways; it comes from the inseparable build up of words in the work, by the layering of glue which disrupts the surface, and from the blurring effect on the surface caused by reflections of light on the aluminium leaf.
An important element of the work is in the work ethic, the idea that a work requires time and effort as part of the creative process. The mass of time spent within that space creates a drawing which hangs motionless in space like the mental block I experience when reading and writing.
From a distance, my drawings give the appearance of being manufactured by a mechanical reproductive process; they posit a state of neutrality, a sense of motionlessness, and for some viewers they are totally impenetrable, but people are often surprised by their ‘actuality’ – of very basic art materials such as hand drawn pencil (graphite) and aluminium leaf on paper. In one sense there is something in that moment when a viewer feels the frustration of not understanding. It means that the work’s actuality exists outside the conceptual framework that created it, that we should consider the moment of actuality in the viewing of a work. November 2007
It took many years to work out that this whole drawing process began at school, when I picked up my pencil to copy down the written words on the blackboard, most of which I could not understand. It was easier to doodle than to write a word, and in a working sense, my drawings have institutionalized the doodle as a diagrammatic art form.
That negative encounter with learning set off a need to make sense of the world through the active manipulation of the pencil line as drawing. It is therefore more meaningful to me to make a drawing, and understand its contents, than to copy down a word, and be totally perplexed by its structure and meaning.
The act of drawing connects the physicality of learning to the engagement with ideas. This is why I use the freehand drawing method as a simple way of connecting the action to the mind. The physical experience is transmitted in three different ways; it comes from the inseparable build up of words in the work, by the layering of glue which disrupts the surface, and from the blurring effect on the surface caused by reflections of light on the aluminium leaf.
An important element of the work is in the work ethic, the idea that a work requires time and effort as part of the creative process. The mass of time spent within that space creates a drawing which hangs motionless in space like the mental block I experience when reading and writing.
From a distance, my drawings give the appearance of being manufactured by a mechanical reproductive process; they posit a state of neutrality, a sense of motionlessness, and for some viewers they are totally impenetrable, but people are often surprised by their ‘actuality’ – of very basic art materials such as hand drawn pencil (graphite) and aluminium leaf on paper. In one sense there is something in that moment when a viewer feels the frustration of not understanding. It means that the work’s actuality exists outside the conceptual framework that created it, that we should consider the moment of actuality in the viewing of a work. November 2007