WORK
ONE HOUR BEFORE OPENING....
Convicted criminals are sometimes asked ‘why did you do it?’ and I sometime feel this question rumble in me when I have to write a statement. Why did I do it? A simple murderers answer does not seem to crack it in a world of Postmodernism, where the statement is often the art. ‘I dunno’ will not survive the furrowed brow of Foucault or Derrida. Too bad.
Strange as it may seem, I am not the faintest interested in fantasy. It leaves me unsatisfied, like some people feel after they accidentally drink decaf instead of a full bodied brew. Fantasy avoids reality; it would rather look the other way. I am fascinated by the imagination, and the way it will look directly into the fire of reality, and transform it in some way or another. It sums it up, without making it smaller. It can put life experience in a nutshell and the cosmos in there too. The ideas behind these drawings and the tapestries made from them, started as sculptures of tools back in 1974. Shovels and the like. The shovels became animated through drawings, and they eventually dug trenches out of which these large primal forms came. Temples capped the trenches, and then the whole image became inverted, as if the temples are now hanging onto the earth, rather than sat on top of it. The crust of the earth is seen as only a meter thick, with black liquid? ink? energy? falling out and splashing off the upturned eaves.
I do not edit the imagination. You might have noticed. As I tell my students....’It is ONLY paper’....My work continues to be refining my response to worldly experience, through the imagination and presenting my findings whatever they are.
Trust a poet to describe the imagination so well....Here is David Whyte talking about the imagination.
“The primary imagination is the ability of a human being to form a central image inside of themselves, that makes sense of all the besieging images that they are surrounded by. And your ability to identify this internal focus, which holds all of these disperate foci out in the world; all of these disperate qualities, and the ability to put language to that internal focus, gives you the ability to belong to even the most complex circumstances. There is part of a human being that knows whats going on, knows where to place itself at the center of the pattern, knows exactly what to say, to exactly the right person, at exactly the right time in their life, thats poetry.”
Damn, I would have liked to have said that!
C F Gray Nov 7th 2014
Signed, limited edition prints available. contact colingraay1@mac.com for sizes and prices.
There is a wonderful documentary called ‘Twenty Feet from Stardom’ that came out a year or so ago that caught both my ear and my eye. It is all about the backup singers to the rock stars over the last 30 or 40 years. We have known these people inti- mately through their voices for a long time, but for the most part have never known their names, or for that matter, cared. The attention is never on them, but on the lead singer prancing around in the spotlight out front. The documentary forever changed that for me, and now, through some internal rewiring, I have more ears, more receptors for these folk, who enhance and frame the main singer, and who, at best, make the music transcendent.
There is a parallel universe of exhibition designers in the visual art world, and they inhabit that same realm of invisibility back- stage, but they can make even marginal artwork feel good for the duration of ones tour around a room. I have seen it done.
This new work at FOCA was preceded by installations of drawings, that were mounted on painted walls, like a mashup of color field painting with framed pen and ink drawings mounted on top. I was making a single entity out of a kind of miniature exhibition design, and the artwork itself.
I was looking at Christian Boltanski, as well as the photographs of Berndt and Hilla Becher when I wondered if it were possible to do a Becher type piece but with a series of black and white drawings, instead of photographs. I wanted the eye to jump around, and see all the differing permutations, making the relationship between the drawings and the sense of infinite possibility the content of the work. I have always been interested in creative possibilities, trying it one way and then another, and then another...There is something inherently positive and life affirming about our ability to think of new things out of seemingly nowhere.
Now one would have thought that I had enough on my plate just working in this way, but I started to miss a sense of the absurd. Not just any absurd, but the absurd that is actually sensible, in the light of the fact that we have no idea why we are here on the planet, yet we behave as if we do. This is the absurd, that shows we have things in perspective, like the absurd that shows up in the existentialism of Camus.
Hence I added shelves, with a built in wine glass holder, and a half bottle of wine. This, in the realm of the Museum for One, is for the opening. Yes...true, its slightly melancholy with but one glass and all, but MOCA has not called recently.
Anyhow, going back to exhibition design, and by extension exhibition space, and in particular the architecture of Frank Gehry. I have noted over the years that his work is art, and ‘regular’ art looks vaguely daft next to it, or even in it. I was perusing his amazing Brain Center in Las Vegas a year or so ago, and inside the majestic central room was a giant rectangular painting. It looked IMHO, a little odd, like something from another era.
Now I have to be Frank with you Frank, I thought, - you have set visual artists up with a huge challenge; everything was going along swimmingly, and now you come along, and build windows all over the place even on the ceilings. WTF? So the challenge we are faced with, is how can you make art that is as good as the museum that houses it when the museum happens to be the Bilbao? Can we? Is it possible? Or perhaps the art is a vehicle for us to experience the architecture? A good reason to gather at a particular place. ‘Museum for One’ (Red) and ‘Museum for One’ (Blue) are my first forays into exploring the idea of a miniature personal museum, and different ways of exhibiting artwork in non regular buildings and circumstances. If Bilbao ever call me, I am damn well going to be ready.
Colin F. Gray May 2016
There is something special about drawing.
Much as I love photography, I see the camera as something that takes things in from the outside. It is a consumer. The strange thing about a pencil, - the primary instrument of drawing, is that all kinds of things come out of it even when people draw something from the exact same point of view.
The pencil lead makes a unique story all of its own, and that little solid core of graphite running down the center of a pencil contains pure potential. At best, there is a kind of equation, and it goes something like this: One moving pencil, with time, and an exploring mind, produces things that were inconceivable before. Not always, not predictable even, because that would leave us a lifeline, but if we trust the process; trust setting out into the unknown more and more….things previously invisible to our minds eye can reveal themselves.
CFG Jan 2015
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Images provided by Ákos Major (http://akosmajor.com). All rights reserved.
People who have taken the time to draw communicate to us through the centuries, and it gives me pleasure to think that beyond the cultural, economic and political squabbles, somehow this silent common language can be appreciated, and touch all manner of people. Outside of all kinds of grand art isms, drawing survives, and changes, but much as it changes with every new hand that draws, it also in part stays the same.
Drawing is as fundamental to humans as is every other basic expression. Drawing has an enduring quality that takes time to appreciate, but once we are opened and attuned to its nuances and pleasures, there is no going back; the poetry of marks made on simple paper - art unplugged - makes the utter delight that passes through the eyes, so worth the effort of looking.
April 2012 Colin F. Gray
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Images provided by Ákos Major (http://akosmajor.com). All rights reserved.
The classifications for odd balls is quite a tricky affair to be sure, and with out too much technical jargon I hope to show how they are divided. There are over twenty main types of incised tennis balls, the most common being the tab cut, easily recognized by a long thin tab cut free from the main body of the ball. A bi-lateral tab has two such cuts side by side and a polar bi –lateral tab cut has them on opposite sides. Do you follow? Good. Any ball suspended by its tabs is called a hanger, one suspended without its tabs is called a floater. O.K.? Good. Five other basic types are bifurcated, spiraled, segmented, woven and inverted. An example of a basic type might be an inverted polar-bi-lateral tab hanger. A wee bit of a mouthful and hence the need for abbreviations- the last example being an inpobitaha. O.K.? Good, fine.
Secondly we have the auxiliary incisions –too many to mention here but a good example might be a the slubb cut, a slubb cut is where three sides are cut leaving a small piece connected, then it is pushed inside the ball, making an indentation. Still with us? Good. Here we can have quadro slubb cuts, quadro slubb cuts with bi-polar hangers, etc, etc. Again we abbreviate. Now the combined abbreviation of the basic and auxiliary type cuts make up the general name. O.K.? Super. We have examples such as Quogen Wokwok, Goulab Swanki and Quuqweeb Squibboyo – interesting names – but even these are normally shortened, in this case to Quogwok, Gwikkii…Gwuki…now there’s a hell of a name.
CFG 1984
Life drawing. An odd activity when you think about it. Adults scratching clean surfaces with fancy dirt; a nude human being nearby. Odd though it is, it is still done by numerous people all over the planet, all after something that is quite elusive. The visual information coming towards us from the model, on a collision course with our idea about what humans look like. If we can subdue our end of this equation, and let the visual information come to us without interference from all our ideas, we begin to truly see. We rarely see anything much of the time. We note where things are so we do not bump into them, but very often as adults we do not engage in observing anything closely for any length of time. We live out of our ‘cache’ to use a computer term. Life drawing is a form of meditation in some ways,- with philosophical overtones. It is like truly listening without interrupting. A study. The drawing produced is evidence of how our eyes listened. Something well observed. Then there are the dilemmas. We are mere mortals, and the trillions of bits of information that come towards us like a huge cargo of light, overwhelm our abilities and often in my case, my imagination. Ten thousand hairs on a human head, and thousands more scattered over the rest of a body. We cannot possibly draw them all! And the model’s pose is over in another 12 minutes… Dang! Now what? We re-enter the picture, we make choices, we abbreviate, we suggest, we draw on our imaginations to help us out. 6 minutes left… A struggle ensues. How this struggle plays out is of the essence. The quality of our observation brings credence to our work, but too much care can make the drawing stiff and academic. The imagination brings delight, mystery, nuance and play, but too much may erode a sense of rigor. Some artists are really good at this sweet balance. I struggle with it every time.
When I draw the model, I am not thinking about making art, I just enjoy the discipline of trying to tune up my sensibilities. Just like in meditation, you sit just to sit, not to become enlightened. So both enlightenment and art are the happy byproducts of odd activities! Sitting just to sit, and scratching just to scratch!
Keeping one eye on the goal, leaves only one eye left to follow the path.
Keep on sitting…keep on scratching.
If the imagination were a person, I would see them as a deeply focused goofball. In the polite communities we live in, we might say they have a thirst for something, but saying that suggests we can quench that thirst by something that is. I say it is more a desire, almost a greed, a visceral need to consume something that in this moment, isn’t. I see the imagination as our own human version of the creative force of the universe, which makes us all a kind of Universe ‘Mini-Me'. There is no point about us getting all puffed up about it. I think all living creatures have creativity somewhere, usually and most literally in their bones. They mutate into something that is much more reflective as to their new circumstances, just as we do making art. That's the charm of us humans; that we also have it outside of our bones too. We can project it onto stuff other than ourselves.
There is great joy in this, and great optimism. It is the heroin of my life. Every problem can become an opportunity to indulge, to get that fix, to feel the exhilaration of finding what I call the ‘sweet solution’. If only it were that easy; I wish it were. This is where the 'deeply focused' part of the equation comes in. Creativity is as addictive as real heroin, and if you are not careful, can do just as much damage. It diverts your life. it gets you involved. This is the part that most folk are afraid of. Fear of being consumed by something that now controls you. It disrupts the ‘regular ‘ life, and in its place leaves a package of passion in place of where your Amazon purchase used to be.
‘Oddballs', 1984 was a fairly early expression of a multiple part sculpture, where the eye jumps around from ball to ball to take in all the variations, rather than having some central point of focus. It is a celebration of the creative process, and was made by challenging myself to "just see if you can do 20, then 40, then 60" and so on until I stopped at about 200. That just seemed like enough. I have no idea why.
My work before and since has often involved multiple parts, all informing and comparing themselves with one another. My most recent work has been trying to incorporate everything I have ever made into one piece, like my own version of Einsteins Unified Field Theory. My personal ‘Unified Field' comes from the desire to include everything I love into one artwork, even opposites; - from color field painting to illusionism, formality to absurdity, color to black and white, old work to new, practical and aesthetic, etc, etc. Pretty much everything that I like rolled into one. Einstein never quite figured out his baby, this Unified Field Theory, but no matter, I am hoping that with mine, like making all babies, there is plenty of joy in trying.
Colin F. Gray 2015
The drawings in this book take on the Wikipedia notion of many people, contributing together, "building" a fact. These works bring the visions of several drawing class regulars along with some newbies to create a single artwork.
Originally these pencil drawings weren't intended to go together. But one day I noticed how great a couple of them made by different people looked side-by-side. It struck me that different drawings, made by graphically incompatible ways of working, happily enhanced one another when placed "cheek to jowl." They actually started to look diminished on their own after enjoying these drawings sitting next to one another for a while. Being paired together reveals their contrasts and similarities and through this greater input we are thus able to gather a greater sense about the sitter as well – not to mention the artists. The most successful combinations also seem to uncannily mirror one another.
The real interest in the revealed sides and front of the sitters does not derive from a “cubist” sort of structural analysis. Rather the interest seems to arise from the differing atmospheres of each representation, ranging from almost comic to melancholy. Some of us have been drawing for some years and some represented here are showing only their first or second attempts at portraiture. With these, I put on the hat of the educator, and show the way I make a drawing, with a very special emphasis on observation. It must get a little monotonous hearing my verbal drumbeat...notice this... notice that, yet in noticing, there comes a kind of appreciation of the nuances of life, and I sometimes wonder if this is why nobody has yet complained.
It is my personal opinion that drawings are interesting when the artist has struggled to record something intently observed. Children's drawings often have this quality of observation. Youth and little experience leave them brave enough to tackle almost anything, and in so doing invite us to see with fresh eyes.
