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Lowry/Duchamp.

It is not only the same visual motifs that haunt my artistic practice, but a much older mode of artmaking also seems to have returned.

I dreamt that I went to visit a famous artist. The artist lived in a terraced house in Manchester similar to my own home. The artist who opened the door and invited me inside was both L. S. Lowry and Marcel Duchamp, but bore a marked resemblance to the playwright Dennis Potter. The house retained wallpaper from the nineteen sixties and had not been redecorated since. Lowry/Duchamp said he had something important to show me. He pointed to a drawing in graphite that hung above the sofa in the living room. The drawing looked out of place against the mustard and brown geometric patterned wallpaper. The drawing was an astonishingly realistic depiction of a curled up sleeping dog, completely at odds with Lowry’s stick men or Duchamp’s conceptualism. Lowry/Duchamp took the drawing down off the wall and told me to look closer. It then dawned on me that the sleeping dog was an illusion created by the surrounding graphite deposits. The sleeping dog did not exist but was simply empty space.

On waking I realised that I had been given a valuable lesson concerning the nature of drawing. A drawing is simply graphite deposited on paper. The image, which does not really exist, is an illusion created by the contrast between the dark graphite and the light paper. It then made sense why the artist who gave me this lesson was both L. S. Lowry and Marcel Duchamp. Lowry was a master of suggestion and Duchamp initiated conceptualism. That Lowry/Duchamp looked more like Dennis Potter suggested that appearances can be deceptive. The face something presents to the world does not always correspond to its true nature.

The dream appeared to be telling me that images are conjured into existence by the power of suggestion. The materials exist; the graphite exists and the paper exists, but the image does not have a material existence. The image is a mental concept suggested by a particular configuration of materials. The configuration of materials in the dream bears a likeness to a sleeping dog. It resembles a sleeping dog because I have seen many sleeping dogs in my lifetime, curled up on their bean bags or in front of an open fire. This, unlike the many dogs I have seen, is not an actual existing dog but the idea of a dog. The image is an abstraction from reality. The drawing in my dream is a piece of conceptual art and recalled the phrase “let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Let sleeping dogs lie” made me think of my Gran’s rottweiler Rosie. Sometimes my Dad would try to cut her claws but he would do this when she was fast asleep. If she woke a look would appear in her eyes that would stop you in your tracks. That look also appeared if you tried to get her to relinquish an object she had stolen. Rosie was a domesticated dog but something archaic remained. The dream may also have been telling me that something archaic also remains in my artistic practice.

In many ways my artistic practice embodies an older mode of artmaking that existed in the Middle Ages up until the Baroque. Artists worked from Pattern, Copy or Model books. I realised that my larger drawings resemble the engravings in the Archetypa Studiaque Patris by Georgi I Hoefnagel II (1592), a copy book many artists drew from. Archetypa stvdiaqve patris GeorgiI HoefnageliI - Biodiversity Heritage Library 







Images from the Archetypa Studiaque Patris by Georgi I Hoefnagel II from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

I also work in a similar way, drawing from an archive of images including x-rays, anatomical and natural history illustrations, photos of scientific specimens as well as from life. I will also work from previous drawings and photographs. I repeatedly work from the same images which appear in many different artworks. It is this way of working that causes certain visual motifs to haunt my artistic practice.

I decided several years ago to create my own copy book. I found the perfect leather journal with laid, hand cut paper and then put it away in a box where it has remained for years. I would occasionally take it out and look at it, not know where to start and put it away. I have finally started drawing in it and am hoping that making a copy book is sustainable.








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