Ars longa, umbrae longiores
I’ve been surrounded by stories of shadows lately, especially stories of people separated from their shadows. It hasn’t been intentional. I’m midway through Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, I recently found the Faust-like tale of Peter Schlemihl, and shortly before that, His Dark Materials (I guess “Peter Pan” will have to be added to the list eventually). Figuring that there must be something to this, I checked out a copy of Victor Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow for a bit of enlightenment. The writing is at times trying, full of academic language and awkward phrasing (just like my writing!), but that can be forgiven as it’s a translation. The meat of the book is worth the effort.
A Short History presents a compelling look at the development of the Western art tradition, a series of essays framed around artists’ use of shadow and simulacra as allegorical devices. Stoichita wanders from Pliny and Quintilian’s early explications of painting’s history (departing loved ones captured by silhouette traced on the wall) to the optical and philosophical experiments of the Renaissance to the modern investigative works by Kazimir Malevich, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol.
The common threads of these stories are fascinating: shadow as a powerful double of the human form; specular reflection as a evanescent ‘other’; shadows bearing the indication of a man’s true nature; the emptiness of a person bereft of their shadow. All themes I’ve been encountering in other writing lately. Shadows have always been much more than devices for the simple rendering of volumes, and this book is loaded with examples.
A fairly recent interview with Stoichita conducted by Cabinet Magazine is available on their site, summarizing many of these essays.
Opening @ CRL
Just a reminder that the Multiples show is opening tonight at the CRL, 2832 MLK Jr., from 6pm–9pm. I haven’t seen it yet, but the show sounds like a good mix of faculty, staff, alumni, and others scattered across the community, a curatorial approach that I’m seeing more of under Jade Walker’s direction. The faculty show that opened the season there at CRL even included people from the art history and design departments, a welcome addition to the fine arts mix. It’ll be up through November 10, with an artists’ talk scheduled for the 6th.
The piece that Marsha and I made for the show consists of 63 close-cropped drawings of eyes arranged in a grid, all focused on an imaginary center point. I’ve been reading lately about vision research, and this drawing was mostly inspired by the book The Moving Tablet of the Eye. The piece’s title, Saccade and Fixation, is a term that describes the short, rapid motions that our eyes make constantly when surveying a scene. The motion is almost imperceptible, and we don’t notice our own eyes making these movements as our brain compensates for them. Researchers and philosophers have been studying their effects on vision and perception for thousands of years: Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Victorian scientists all wrote on the phenomenon, and they play an important role in modern-day vision research, computer imaging, and artificial vision. This theme of one scene comprised of many discrete images seemed like an appropriate place to start for this Multiples show, and so we set to drawing. It also ties in a bit with some ideas I’ve had about surveillance and the gaze (so very Philosophy 101!). Two weeks later, the piece is hanging at the gallery, so come out and see it while it’s up!
few, some, several, many, more…
Marsha and I will be in the upcoming show at the Creative Research Lab. The opening reception is on October 13, so come out and enjoy some art + people + wine. More details about our project will be coming soon to a blog post near you.
Some short poses
Marsha and I took a very good life drawing informal class at UT this summer with Melissa Grimes. I think I got some decent drawings in, especially considering that I’m more used to three- or four-hour poses! It felt good to be forced to work so much quicker, and to work in drawing styles that are outside my comfort zone (I’m looking at you, blind contour). The longest poses were around 15–20 minutes, and most were in the 5–10 minute range. If you like, you can see some more of these short poses on my Flickr account.