John Hilliard

John Hilliard, Cause of Death?, 1974

Cropping and changing the title/caption the photo to change the way we interpret the image. Here Hilliard highlights different parts of the environment to suggest how the bird could have died.

this link has a piece of writing called- 

How does text shape the understanding of photographs?

http://www.tomashein.com/blog/2009/02/02/how-does-text-shape-the-understanding-of-photographs/

Roland Barthes

semiotics

Raymond Pettibon

We looked at the work of Raymond Pettibon in our lecture today, he was a very prolific artist and liked to almost act like a machine churning out work so that the 'artness' of his work was lost, as he was very interested in industry etc.

I really enjoy the humour and the roughness in his work.

Yet again text and image crop up! Captions very much embellish the humour of Pettibon's drawings, often the text is essential for us to understand what the drawing shows.

 "No title (It sure helps)" 2002 Ink and watercolor on paper 30 x 22 1/2 inches

Pettibon, Raymond & Josh Bayer. NEW WAVY GRAVY 2 (AS OPPOSED TO OLD WAVY GRAVY): BY RAYMOND PETTIBON. Lawndale, CA: SST Publications, 1985. First Edition 1/500. 8vo. Stapled Xeroxed Wrappers. Artists' Book

FACTS AND SACKS

...Neither will stand up unless you put something into them...

DUST.

Graphite dust on my latex canvas. I use my body to move it from underneath. The movement creates ephemeral shapes and patterns which become like a strange lunar landscape.

...I may try and investigate other powders such as spices and powder paint.

If you don't want people to look at you, wear a lot of peripherals...

 (embellishing on my notes from READING DRAWINGS- Professor Stephen Farthing)
-Eye trackers plot the movement of the eye as we observe an image- very interesting patterns result...

eyes are drawn to unusual elements in an image- we keep returning our gaze to the unusual so that we might begin to understand what it is/means etc.

Sheila Gallagher produced drawings using this technology.

http://www.shegallagher.com/work.htm#

' "Hand/Eye": Judy Ann Goldman Gallery, Boston, MA. To create this series the artist projected images of female athletes onto a large screen in the Eye Tracking Lab of Boston College. Every 20 milliseconds, two infrared sensors recorded the artist’s eye movements. The data gathered was then translated into a CAD program allowing the temporal sequence to be plotted as a single unbroken line drawing. '

Is it a bird, is it a plane? ...no it's a drawing.

 (embellishing on my notes from READING DRAWINGS- Professor Stephen Farthing)

Authorship - can we consider the author of a plane's shadow to be the pilot? 
If the shadow has no author can we even consider it a drawing?

Often in art, though less so in ordinary acts of seeing, there is a difference between shadow in general and shadows in particular. A strong or precisely-directed light source casts shadows which closely resemble a cross section of an object placed in its path. The process is itself a kind of representation. Both Pliny the Elder and Quintilian cited the outlining of a shadow as a primal artistic act ... Pliny tells how the Corinthian Maid, daughter of the potter Butades, drew around her lover's silhouette on a wall to remember him before he went abroad; for Quintilian it was a shepherd tracing his shadow on the ground with a stick. Both parables locate the origins of drawing in a kind of state of nature: domestic intimacy and romantic attachment in the former case, Arcadian pastoral in the latter. Both also feed off the transience of the shadow, its power to suggest absence as well as presence. Tomorrow his mapped shadow will be all the Maid has to remind her of her boyfriend, and the shepherd's scratched image will surely have blown away.

from The Emblem of Early Vanities, Keith Miller on Shadows

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue9/emblemearthlyvanities.htm

DUCK

(embellishing on my notes from READING DRAWINGS- Professor Stephen Farthing)

The cerebral act of drawing- we often translate the shapes of clouds into those of familiar objects

- Cognitive process of extracting information

READING DRAWINGS

Our first lecture of the term...'Reading Drawings' by - Professor Stephen Farthing... incredibly insightful comments and interesting theories discussed!

this image is the first hit in a Google image search for 'reading drawings'-

- Drawings are translations of three dimensional objects into two dimensions

- 2D marks left by 3D things

- drawings leave a trace

- Drawings are the forensic evidence of their making

- Drawing is a basic instinct, like the spoken word

- Giotto's perfect circle- gained him the position of artist in residence at the Vatican

- Maps, diagrams- different to art drawings?

what we think things look like.

what we think art looks like.

-Drawings do not readily speak for themselves unless one is aware of their narrative, the subject matter might be clear, but content needs to be ascertained. Enquiry reveals what the drawing is 'about'.

WHAT IS ART?

Farthing's rather tongue in cheek answer  'art is what you see in galleries and in art books'
' I dont think of them [drawings] as text, rather arrangements of readable matter'

TESTS

BIG FOOT.

life drawings

Large oil pastel stick

trying to make bold, carefree marks 

Graphite sticks

Trying to mimic the soft tones and shapes that are created by the bodies behind my screens.