Rodin's Essence of Motion

 "Nijinsky? 1912?" unfinished plaster cast & shadow

"To express a movement in all its character and truth, it is important that it be at once the result of the successive moments that have preceeded the moment that one has fixed, and that it announces the sensation of those that will follow."  Auguste Rodin 1911

The above quote was taken from an interview with sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1911. I encountered it during a visit to the "Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement" exhibition at the Courtauld Institute in London.

Rodin clay piece, an impression

His words have stayed with me since then. I've been fascinated with the universal nature of the artist's instruction. It has commonality with Sean Scully's description of abstract art. But also with the traditional 'living line' teachings in Japanese calligraphy. There are also similarities, I feel, with the concept of Quantum Entanglement. Or even in Buddhist teachings, where the concept of past, present and future dynamically merges into one great pulsating singular point of Now. Chop wood and dance!

Wouldn't it be wonderful if someday in the future, they discovered that the marks of an artist do actually move - on an atomic level, after being fixed into position. So much to think about. If you are able to see the show, do go, as it's quite beautiful and rich with inspiration. I could have stayed there for days, happily working in my sketchbook.  Click here to learn more from the Courtauld website..

Stone Whisperers

‘Manual of Calligraphy and Painting’ (Chinese, 1633), 

There is a strange affinity between artists and rocks. By rocks I mean anything made of stone, from the humble pebble to a mountain. "To Chinese artists, rocks are the basic building blocks of landscape painting,'' says Robert D. Mowry, curator of Chinese art at Harvard University's Arthur M. Sackler Museum. ``Magnified in scale, the rocks are mountains. Embellished with details, trees and such, they become complete landscapes.'' In this instance he is speaking of scholars' rocks.

Brice Marden in his studio   

According to "The Spirit of Gongshi", Chinese scholars' rocks, also known as scholar stones or viewing stones, are naturally occurring or shaped rocks which are traditionally appreciated by Chinese scholars. This trend towards cultivating an aesthetic appreciation of scholar rocks began in Tang Dynasty China and has spread to the present day western world. American painter Brice Marden is an avid fan of Chinese scholar rocks. His collection is a source of inspiration which he displays along the window sill of his painting studio.

‘Manual of Calligraphy and Painting’ (Chinese, 1633), 

Richard Rosenblum, sculptor and dedicated gongshi collector described scholar rocks as monuments to inner thought.  The sense of space within the rock - the perception of almost being able to look inside a world contained by the rock - is what most draws his interest. It compares more with Western painting, he says, than with Western sculpture.

‘Manual of Calligraphy and Painting’ (Chinese, 1633), 

"Rather than being solely about the solid form, and the space around it, as much conventional sculpture is,  the rocks create their own worlds,'' he explains. I would suppose it is certainly the privilege of gaining access to that inner world which drives the collectors to keep seeking ever more unique and unusual specimens to add to their collections. 

Movement   charcoal  2013l     sepia filter)    R.Allen-Sherwood

In my case, my interest remains firmly with Japanese Zen gardens, which have a presence and space all their own. But I feel there might be a kinship between us artists who get inspired by, and communicate with stone. It's almost like being in a special club of stone whisperers. Hold that thought. See you next time,  

Image Credits

http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-FH-00910-00083-00098/1

True Ink : Maaya Wakasugi

   

Calligraphers come in all shapes, sizes and types. Just like people. All of us who love and have an affinity to the fude brush and sumi ink might look different and have differing styles, but the underlying allegiance to truth in expression and spirit is the same.  Viva la unité !

Hiddip the hop it don't stop*

Sketchbook

Had a wonderful opportunity to continue my work-in-progress explorations into the human body, motion and space via breakdancing. Hopefully I will be able to investigate this topic with more depth and detail in a few months time.

Fingers tightly crossed.

*Das Efx  The Real Hiphop

AR Mark Making

When I first came across the GRAVITY tablet prototype a few years ago and posted it on the blog (here), the idea of bringing 2D concepts into 3D reality was still in its early stages . Granted, the virtual world of Second City was in full swing at the time but AR was still considered a kind of cartoonish sci-fi fantasy world, inhabited mostly by geeks and otaku types. In other words it was all still a bit weird.

But it has come along quite a bit since then. I like what artist Marc van Elburg is doing with AR in visual art and find it quite interesting. These two videos of his experiments with drawing with augmented reality gives a hint of the potential of mark making in space. Exciting!

Monastery Diaries

Mulberry paper with sumi ink and paint

Sometimes looking back at the past can help propel forward motion in the present.

These images are from a 2012 artist residency I did at the Community of the Resurrection (CR), an Anglican monastery in Mirfield. West Yorkshire.

Close up detail of hanging piece

The works were made using Chinese mulberry bark paper, which has a very light and delicate quality. This trait caused a most surprising (and wonderful) unforeseen effect with some of the pieces I installed in the final show.  

You can read more about it here in my Mirfield Monastery blog.

What an amazing experience it all was! Thank you so much to the CR Community ffor inviting me into their beautiful and special space. 

Unforgettable.
.

Google Maps 1572

Inspired by air - sketchbook work     R Allen-Sherwood 2016

I attended a very interesting event recently. "A festival of ideas: Questions of space" was a two day collaboration between Canterbury Cathedral and researchers and academics from the Faculty of Humanities Department at Kent University. 

It was the leaflet catchphrase that hooked me: "We’d like to share with you our research on how we respond to the spaces around us, and how we as artists, architects and historians are exploring Canterbury Cathedral’s hidden spaces."  

My balloon now lives on my kitchen ceiling

One of events Hot Air, was a hands-on experiment to analyse the air flow inside the cathedral crypt, using helium balloons. 

Shadows and light     photo R. Allen-Sherwood 2016

On the one hand it might sound dry and boring, but imagine seeing a bunch of adults navigating shiny floating balloons inside an semi lit ancient medieval crypt! This is the stuff of dreams for a spacenik like me! Even made drawings from it. 

Eastbridge Pilgrims Hospital

Another offering was the chance to experience how Canterbury looked in the 1500's by walking around (in our socks) on top of an enlarged medieval map placed on the floor of the Chapter House.

The hood in the Middle Ages 

Seeing the wide empty open spaces where my neighbourhood now stands made me feel like I was inside an old Google Map circa 1572

Mapping Canterbury in my sketchbook 

Thank you Canterbury Cathedral for daring to experiment and try something different  And, of course to all the researchers, academics and teachers of Kent uni for putting it all together. I thoroughly enjoyed the event!

Becket's Candle               photo R Allen-Sherwood 2016

(And please do it again next year)  (Bigger.)

To Drink the Act in Motion

I want to find myself standing on the wire of action, inside action. In the realism of motion.

After action begins, before action comes to its conclusion.

I want to be lost in the inebriety of the instant, in the giddiness of motion. 

 I need to drink the act of motion, and fall asleep drunk.

 

Excerpt from
"To Drink the Act in Motion"
by Antonio D'Alfonso 
9 June 1983   

Breakin' Convention 2016

The Ruggeds in mid flow in my sketchbook!

Last week a cutting edge hiphop dance show called "Breakin' Convention 2016" came to my area and performed at a local university to a fully packed house. The show was incredible! It all kicked off at 7pm and I sat, transfixed, in the middle of it all with trusty sketchbook in lap, drawing materials to hand and a great big ear-to-ear grin all across my ever loving face....

Hella yeah!

The video piece is from Iron Skulls, the troupe from Spain. I love how well they integrate architecture and space in their work. And this is only one example from so many good performances!

Seriously, if you get the chance, do see Breakin' Convention UK Tour. It's better than a vitamin shot! 

(A few more drawings here)

Presence & Absence

"Adam" (detail)               RAllen-Sherwood 2016

Some say absence makes the heart grow fonder. But perhaps it was written by a hopelessly romantic soul.

I've been away due to some unforeseen circumstances beyond my control.....but thankfully things are slowly getting sorted. Thus, I am grateful (and relieved!) to be back in the studio again.

Hands, detail

As a warming up exercise to stretch my creative muscles, I attended a life drawing class run by a close friend. These posted images are from that day. I wanted to document and share them because it's not often I find such strong statements of presence and absence in my work. And from life drawing, of all things!

"Adam 4"  ink & brush        RAllen-Sherwood 2016

My guardian deities of Form & Emptiness sit deep at the core of my being, quietly awaiting my next mark.

Art keeps me real.

Shoko Kanazawa

 "Together Alive"        Shoko Kanazawa 2016

In Japanese Shodo (Way of Calligraphy), there is a saying which goes: Kokoro tadashikereba sunawachi fude tadashii— which means loosely "If your mind is correct, the brush will be correct."  The Japanese word 'Kokoro' can also mean 'heart', but sometimes it can mean other things as well, such as mind, spirit and the essence of an individual. It's a big little word.

 

Shoko Kanazawa  2012

In Shodo practice, having a correct mind actually means to become free of conceptualising mind and make marks directly from our true nature. Correct mind means to stay calm, focused and be fully present so that all the brushstrokes come directly from the heart, or kokoro.

If you want to see what that really means, please take a look at acclaimed Japanese calligrapher Shoko Kanazawa in action by clicking right here. 

Images courtesy of  shoko.org/en/index.html

Étienne ét Moi

http://laurastestaardvark.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/photographing-air.html

I've been looking at the works of a nineteenth century French scientist, biomechanics engineer, inventor and motion photographer named Étienne Jules Marey. His name may not sound familiar but it was Marey's work that served as the foundation for Eadweard Muybridge‘s iconic animal locomotion studies. Marey also directly influenced the development of early cinema. (see links for info) 

Marey's smoke and aether photographs are my personal favourites. They are mysterious and haunting images. The occupation with making the invisible visible, took up the latter part of his life. He dedicated his last few years to documenting movements of air. When asked why it was so important Marey stated in  La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales (1878), "This method allows observing and measuring the "relation of space to time that is the essence of motion"  

Nereid Running  (reversed)    R Allen-Sherwood

The similarity in our interests kindles a feeling of familiarity. Of something known, even though it is unknown. But the real "aha!" moment came when, on a hunch, I reversed or inverted one of my black and white Nereid images, and placed it.next to his photo and..... voilà!  A perfect doppelgänger - aetheristically speaking, of course. 

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne-Jules_Marey
http://www.robinsonlibrary.com

Musee D'Orsay

Chinese Silence

The Relaxation Channel          You Tube 2015

The book entitled: “In Praise of Blandness” written by French sinologist and scholar Françoise Jullien is an elegant treatise on the Chinese perspective of “blandness”, as seen through the wide lenses of Daoism, Confucianism, Chinese aesthetics and the classical literature and prose of the Sung and Tang Dynasties. Although here the author chooses "blandness” as the translated term for his essay, in truth it can also be interchanged (some of the time) with similar words such as; emptiness, nothingness, void, space and so on.

Although it’s a slim manual, it’s not exactly light reading. Many times I’ve had to go back over some passage again and again, in order to get the gist of it. It can be hard work, but the rewards I’ve gained more than make up for it. The following is but one example of some of the treasures that I’ve found, in a chapter called “The Blandness of Sound”  Jullien writes: 

     “Such then, is the bland sound: an attenuated sound that retreats from the ear and is allowed to simply die out over the longest possible time. We hear it still, but just barely; and as it diminishes, it makes it all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening, then, to its extinction, to its return to the great undifferentiated Matrix. This is the sound that, in its very fading, gradually opens the way from the audible to the inaudible and causes us to experience the continuous movement from one to the other. And as it gradually sheds its aural materiality, it leads us to the threshold of silence, a silence we experience in plenitude, at the very root of all harmony”.

So, the next time you are deeply absorbed in a sublime piece of music, see if you can hear that soundless beyond that carries each audible note simultaneously in its manifestation and in its extinction. Maybe ultimately, both silence and sound are one and the same! At least on the meta meta level of all things, I guess.

 

I'll bet you John Cage knew this all along!

Cageian Space

John Cage tv interview                          Photo R. Allen-Sherwood 2014

Happy New Year everyone. With the start of the new year I've been re-organising my living spaces and came upon my university research file on artists who, like myself, were inspired or influenced by karesansui or Zen gardens. It was like finding a long lost friend!

                  John Cage tv interview  Ryoanji garden                    R Allen-Sherwood 2014                  

One artist who takes up a goodly chunk of the file is the late, great John Cage. His one-of-a-kind musings on sound, silence, space and life continue to inspire me to this very day. Cage also loved Zen gardens and they influenced his work for much of the later part of his life.

  

Ryoanji music score    www.soundstation.dk

Laura Kuhn from the John Cage Trust describes his first encounter with Ryoanji Zen Garden:

"Cage first visited the Ryoanji Temple and its early 16th-century rock garden in 1962, during a concert tour of Japan (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Sapporo) with David Tudor, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Yoko Ono.

Measuring 30 x 10 meters, the garden consists of carefully raked white pebbles with 15 rocks arranged seemingly at random.  Over a period of ten years, the last decade of his life, Cage devoted himself to drawings addressing the aesthetic order of the complex that is revered in Japan as a perfect depiction of nature".

Courtesy of John Cage Trust

I chose several of his "R= Ryoanji" drawings for my undergraduate dissertation on  Space, Form and Emptiness:The Influence of Japanese Zen Rock Gardens on Eastern andWestern Art.  It was

 a hit as many people did not know he was also a visual artist as well as music composer.

www.discogs.com

In 2016 I am looking forward finding more space/mind changers in my continuing investigations into the meaning of space, self and nothingness Hi ho Silver!