Evaluation: Mark Making
Something that hasn’t left me since the L4 year, where we had a class once a week with our lecturer, professor and artist Bob and Roberta Smith, is a phrase he always drew emphasis to, “Mark Making”. Since those formative days in my degree, i’ve never really seen the act of looking or the physicality within my own practice the same again. There have been many occasions since those days where I find myself in a contemplation of brush strokes, watching how the bristles of the brush bend and weave in amongst the curves and lines that make up the various paintings i’ve made since Lockdown.
But its not only in the studio do I find myself noticing. Take this video below for example (fig. a) Filmed in Hoxton Street, a road I’ve crossed a thousand times, on a street i’ve grown up on, I found myself arrested by the process of a form of mark making. When watching the film, you see the team making arbitrary decisions as where to mark next. This intrigued me more. As I felt a correlate between where it is I make marks on a canvas. Certain decisions are guided by a few key elements, some being, access, need and material surplus. Combined, these marks stand for deliberate acts, as part of a process, a sign of human presence. I stopped to ask two members of the team Casey and Robbie, what they felt was needed to work in such a deliberate way. I first asked Casey, if he felt he made such decisions intuitively, he smiled at me and said, “what does that mean”, we both laughed and I simplified it by saying when your making those decisions where to mark on the tarmac is there a sense of auto pilot? He immediately replied, “oh my, yes, totally” we continued to talk about the material they work with the speed in which it dries, and what was more intriguing, was, and this was Robbie who offered this, how he worries more about getting it wrong than than what it is he is doing.
In some ways, the anxiety that accompanies his actions in the moment, sharpen his commitment to each mark. Again I could align myself with certain elements of trepidation when marking a surface, we spoke about the daunting prospect of a pristen “canvas” as it were. Something else to point out in the video is how they switch between using tools to make initial mark outs and then switch to pacing out measurements.
See 03:30 and 04:30 especially in relation to differing ways measurements are done.
Not only is a great skill at work here, but the arbitrary decision making as where to mark next is evident in the physicality of body movements that seem to gravitate to a next spot as the markers traverse the working plain.
Fig. a, Watching Street markers Casey and Robbie from Marlborough Highways UK Limited.
The purpose of this entry is to look into the decisions we make as artists. Unless I were to film myself, I don’t really see myself making marks. This doesn’t stop me thinking in an orbital way though. Ever since the dawn of man, and most definitely ever since Marcel Ravidat discovered the seventeen thousand year old cave paintings in Lascaux, (fig 1 & 2) we have seem human kinds propensity to document. What made these paintings significant we can only guess, but we can definitely say that the history of the mark has been well recorded ever since.
Fig. 1, Left to right: Léon Laval, Marcel Ravidat and Jacques Marsal , Some of the first discoverers of the Lascaux caves
Fig. 2, Lascaux Caves
Upon starting this entry, I wanted to investigate my approach to painting over this last year and also how my latest painting, a portrait has returned to a stricter more controlled style again, after spending most of the year in a wider brush style that hasn’t been so exact.
Earlier in February 2021 I had finished an extremely large self portrait. No big surprise there really, its what I’ve done for years and the practice sits well within a comfort zone that does stretch me, but not beyond any bounds of my abilities to produce a mimesys. So how does watching guys in the street, marking the road run parallel with my own practice? Hal Foster in his Book Bad New Days notes how Cindy Sherman, in her formative years portrays the “subject under the gaze, the subject as picture […] Sherman points to the gap between the imagined and actual bodies…”
In an interview on the BBC’s Arena show, Sherman makes a clear distinction between the word ‘self’ and ‘portrait’ that easily become terms given to over to the outcome of Sherman’s way of looking at the face we get to see as result of her process and practice. For Foster, and this is where my own work differs, something that Sherman does exists in the gap, something I have been exploring more, especially under the influence of Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology. Sherman uses herself as a medium where as I use a medium to recreate that which already exists. Sherman elaborates on her process by stating:
“One of the things that I say when people think that i’m trying to do self portraits, and show more of myself, or hidden sides of my self, its more that I’m trying to lose myself, to really, totally disappear [..’] i’m basically concentrating on trying to transform that reflection that I see into this other person” [1]
It’s obvious that in my own process, there may be something hidden but that’s not what I think i’m setting out to achieve. The parallel I’d draw with Sherman’s quote is the part where she states that the self portrait can be a way to show more of oneself. Yet the self as object within my own process takes on a similar transformation, but only as the result of making marks. Whether thought out, practiced or tried, each decision I make on a canvas leads to something that marks a moment, an evidence of presence. Its only whilst writing this that this seems apparent to me.
Mimesis or revelation?
An example of 2021 latest
painting from home in Lockdown.
Its evident in to two paintings below (fig. 3 & 4) from early 2020, to see they are influenced by an attempt to make marks as opposed to create an exact truth as the photo gallery above demonstrates. Thinking back to last year I can remember a completely different approach to this looser painting style, all the way down to how I even held the brush or ‘moved’ my arm.
Fig. 3
After Lucian,
Oil on Canvas,
2020
From early 2020, where a wider hogs hair brush was used. Notice the less controlled style.
Fig. 4
Self portrait
Oil on canvas
2020
From early 2020, again a much looser stroke is evident.
This got me thinking about mark making, something I read too, highlighted to me that this is something painters do go though. As pointed out in a previous blog post, there is a correlate between my painting style and that of Lucian Freud. It is no secret that he is the reason I started painting. Yet even Freud himself stated that he was frustrated with this tight, restricted way of working [2] A way, that when he broke away from the fine detailed strokes of the sable brush, he is quoted saying “When I stood up, I never sat down again” [3]
What this statement does, is remind me that the earlier decisions in the year to walk away from an exactitude, a mimesis, has served me well. But, exploring other avenues of making is where I think I will find that place where And to quote Arthur C. Danto, and this is important, “the image embodied in the medium is, strictly speaking, supposed to have no properties of its own.” [4], If we think of oil paint like light, we can explore this way of looking at what we use to make marks, with Marshall McLuhan’s famous essay “The Medium is the Message” and we find McLuhan stating “For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium. Then it is not the light but the “content” (or what is really another medium) that is noticed.” [5]
Fig. 5, A sample version of using collage, data and an application as a medium.
Fig. 6, The electronic self portrait allows an extra dimension of light in to be be considered.
So, in summery, we can say that what is used as a medium, whether that be light, and I make reference here to fig. 5 & 6 (above)constitutes towards something that is (and again I refer to Danto) ‘of’ something.
These are ‘of’ faces, they are ‘of’ Stuart. They cannot ‘be’ Stuart, as I have explored in other blog post and adopting the OOO way of thinking, there is enough surplus between the beholder of the image of Stuart and the image of Stuart itself that is mediated by the electronic quantum world of photons and bytes of information, electromagnetic forces and actual machinery that give an illusion that Stuart exists. But where this is is never settled. If you did not know of the existence of Stuart Lee in any way at all, could the content within the medium be accessed so as to ‘give you’ Stuart Lee?
Fig. 7, Studio Work by Stuart Lee.
Untitled Sculpture.
November 2020
Examples of another consideration of what could be seen as a self portrait. Figs. 7 – 9
Fig. 8, Experimental studio work of Stuart Lee, Siting the sculpture amongst other works.
Untitled Sculpture.
November 2020
Fig. 9, Studio Work by Stuart Lee, which lead to a tutorial discussion about seeing this work as a self portrait.
Untitled Sculpture.
November 2020
There is a lot to consider as my practice unfolds. In a recent tutorial, tutor Ben Cain and myself started to consider a work I made at the beginning of this year. (fig. 7, 8 and 9) as a potential self portrait. This concept did excite me. To be given licence to see sculpture as a way of abstracting elements of the figure, tall, upright, standing, go to proving what I just previously demarcated when I stated that you don’t have to know Stuart to be given Stuart. When talking about metaphor, Graham Harman likens how descriptive sensual qualities “stand in” for the real object. [6] We as the beholder, create the inaccessible by using the sensual (cognitive understanding) as a medium (that which carries understanding) to the content (a point in time) .
All these considerations put my work in a place which now has me questioning the difference between content and message, cause and effect, process and outcome. Once I sit down, I may never get up again!
[1] Cindy Sherman, ‘Cindy Sherman #Untitled’, Arena, BBC4, Sun 28 July 2019, 21:05. 04:45sec.
[2] Sarah Howgate, Michael Auping and John Richardson, Lucian Freud Portraits, (London: NPG Publications, 2012), p. 12.
[3] William Feaver, Lucian Freud, (London: Tate Publishing, 2002), p. 28.
[4] Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 156.
[5] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1964), p. 2.
[6] Graham Harman, Object Oriented Ontology, (London: Penguin, 2018), p. 84.