Sculptor's Drawings/Sculpting in Time.

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Using the line as a graphic means to probe/navigate elementary structures and  three-dimensional frameworks.

Giacometti : Realities of Perception.

Drawings on the difficulty of the 'Figure In Space' and its representations.

The Creative Imagination.

Gaston Bachelard.

Rendering visible the essential enduring dimension of reality through energies of matter and confusion, being and becoming. 

The Radical Nude.

Transfiguration and Masking.

Egon Schiele.

Schiele's fears of death, sexuality and disease, and his ambivalence about beauty and ugliness, both his own and that of the world he was part of, all of these conflicts play out across the surface of the skin and are transformed in Schiele's radical nudes.

What mattered for both Schiele and Nietzsche was not the fact of suffering, but how it could be transformed.

The pots/surfaces of Hans Coper endure the suffering of the artist.

Confronting The Naked Human Body.

Female Nude. 1910

Everything is living-dead.

An artistic corpus of a dangerous sexuality.

This female nude embodies the sinister complicity between sex and death.

Sneering Woman. 1910

An embodiment of Nietzsche's imperious and domineering free spirit, who with a not altogether innocent readiness to deceive and to dissemble, enjoys the cunning and multiplicity of its masks.

Uneven washes of white paint applied to the surface of Gerti's skin, which give her a sickly appearance. Her sneer, 'masks' signifies her own criticism and protects her from others, as she transforms herself into something greater than negation.

Alberto Giacometti.

Drawings and Watercolours.

The Bruno Giacometti Bequest.

Kunshaus Zurich. 2014

I realised that my vision changed daily, either I saw a volume or I saw the figure as a blob, or I saw a detail or I saw the whole. Given that models only posed for a very limited period, they left even before I had begun to capture anything at all.

Giacometti was asked to put his drawings with notes into chronological order. After making several attempts the artist declared that it was impossible to give the sort of chronology that was intended, because all of these copies take their place today as if on the same plane, without any chronological order.

Drawings and their nearness, a nowness/revelation of spatial proximities.

Drawing into the deeper ecology between things/matters of concern.

Drawings that struggle at the unknowing flux of things.

Drawing, Gathering Situatedness, nesting into the process of mark-making between the indeterminacies of self and others across the domain of a surface on paper. 

The differing execution of the figures, some in heavier outline, others in a lighter stroke alludes to the appearance of the figures in space and their proximity and distance in the relationship to himself.

Views of the artist's studio executed sometimes in fleeting strokes and at other times in dense linear structures. They testify to the creative dialogues battling for artistic insight and understanding. 

Drawings characterized by a fine network or net-like structure, containing intricate connective lines of matter and the layering of visual tissue/flesh.

Drawing into the corporeality of the architectural body.

Organism-Person-Environment

Arakawa, Gins.

Reticular Drawings.

Interconnected, Interrelated, Reciprocally Connected.

Reticulate, cancellate, cancellated, clathrate, having a lattice like structure, pierced with holes or windows. 

Working/Making from within and with visual material.

Sculptor's Drawings/Sculpting in Time.

Martin Collis/Tarkovsky. 

Drawing Nomadologies between points, paths and territories, producing forms derived from the movement/relay across surfaces and things. 

Deleuze, Guattari.

Drawings on the phenomenal qualities of things and the  relations with space between things, becoming into time through movements of spatial/temporal matter.

Giacometti, drawing out perceptions from swirling and reticular strokes and breaths.

Making exteriorises and extends internal capacities and conditions

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The process of making is a magical act, organic and physiological. 

Making exteriorises and extends internal capacities and conditions.

Tim Ingold.

The new virtual social spaces are changing actual physical space.

The virtual world continues to overlap with the real one, further weakening of the boundaries between the two domains is inevitable.

Drawing Concepts/Identities.

Gathering Situatedness.

Nomadology on the relay between points, paths, territories, boundaries, borders and lines.

 

The drawing acts/re-enacts through the forces and flows of materials/matter/media and experience.

 

The Space/Situation of Art as a Sociological Phenomena.

The Drawing Class

10 Days in The Laundry

Winchester 2009.

Drawing-Traces-Bodies-Movements.

The Production of Space/Spatiality.

Line as a Graphic Inquiry.

Johannes Schreiter.

Wellbeing and Mediated Spaces within Drawing.

How I was drawing was far more important than what I was drawing. I decided to abandon figurative representation and actually focus on my own body as a producer. My interest in space mediation is materialised in site-specific works, where the combination of the performance and the specific features of the site, its architecture, history, etc of a particular context determine decisively the appearance of the work.

M. Lohrum.

Resonances/Reverberations (Bachelard) as the performativity between things and of the innate reversibility of inside and outside, such that intimate spaces loose their clarity, whilst exterior spaces loose their sense of void.

For Bachelard, inside and outside, as experienced by the imagination can no longer be taken in their simple reciprocity, consequently by choosing  more concrete, more phenomenologically exact implications/inceptions, we shall come  to realize that the dialectics of inside and outside multiply with countless diversified nuances.

All matter vibrates, causing correspondences between people, things in movement with each other.

Making/Matter/Intervening.

Drawings that are intimately tied/underpin/inquiry/situate into your emotions/sociological self.

Social Contexts Making Artistic Creation.

During the act of drawing, the artist focuses on the physicality, movement, and gesture of their body , or the bodies of others. The resultant drawings work as documentation of the performance, they retain the indexical trace of the performance that produced them.

Drawing practices that are performative, inspired by the uncertain and changeable nature of both our social context and artistic creation.

Performative Drawing explores drawing as a consequence of a residue of a performance or event, as such it is very process oriented, doing things with unknown or unfolding outcomes.

The experiences and knowledges of the body.

Drawings that remain in the  exploratory realm of drawings.

The Drawing needs to be 'read' forward into an ongoing generative movement that is once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic. 

Corporeality  in Drawing.

Situated Awareness/Attraction.

Drawing onto the openness of the resonances of bodies.

The Radical Nude, Egon Schiele.

A creative corpus of extreme representations of the human body that  show an ambivalent treatment of sexuality, creation and death.

The Nietzschean Perspective.

Nietzsche explains that ever art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the  service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers.

A Philosophy of The Body.

Schiele experimented to see how he could represent the experiences and knowledges of the body by using his own body as an object and as a tool for experimentation.

For Nietzsche, to what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question, that is the experiment. This evokes both gleaning the truths of the fleshy and making something lived corporeally, truth is now of and in the body. The body is the source of the soul and of our most valuable forms of knowing.

The naked, primal vulnerability that has been socially and culturally manipulated turning the naked into the nude. 

Marie's body was dedicated to a dance of death, masquerading as the cycle of life. By the time she bore Egon, Marie had already given birth to no fewer than four babies, only one of whom would survive beyond childhood. Egon the male heir was bought into a world in which sexuality, disease and death were not only inextricably intertwined but also oppressively omnipresent, and his art evinces this fearsome reality most memorably in his brutal treatment of the naked body.

Dioysian Ugliness and Radical Beauty in Egon Schiele's oeuvre.

Kathryn Simpson.

Vienna, was saturated both with Nietzsche's actual writings and with the multiple and various Nietzscheanisms. Every educated person was familiar with Nietzsche's Philosophy, indeed the ubiquity of Nietzschean influences can barely be overstated.

Breathing/Drawing : Inhalation and an exhalation of being.

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Situated Practice Live.

Critical Spatial Practices.

The conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event.

Making/Living in the matrices of situatedness.

Seated nude, 1958 Oil 116x89cm.

Alberto Giacometti devoted much of his career to the struggle between matter and meaning, engaging in an extended exploration of how to reduce the figures's mass as far as possible while imbuing it with essential force. Up until his death in 1966, Giacometti pushed the limits of representation, setting into motion ever-unfolding phenomenological investigations that remain at the core of art making today.

How can matter-bronze, plaster, charcoal, paint-embody truth? And how, if at all, can art preserve the essence of the living?

Nothing disappears completely.

In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.

Production of Space.

Henri Lefebvre. 1991

Spatiality-Space and the Object.

Of or relating to space, existing or occurring in space, having extension in space.

The Multiplicities and heterogeneous nature of space and spatiality.

Abstract and concrete, produced and producing, imagined and materialized, structured and lived, relational, relative and absolute.

Concetto Spaziale, Lucio Fontana.

The protean nature of space and its ability to bring the unconscious into the open. 

Merleau-Ponty.

Lived Body and Space.

Situatedness and Place, multdisciplinary perspectives on spatio-temporal contingency in human life.

Hunefeldt/Schlitte. 2018

Sites, Situations and other kinds of Situatedness.

Fields of Care.

Interactions between bodies and our habitats.

What is outside eventually comes inside.

The irreducible fact of the human condition is that we are open. The bodies we house are open bodies, dependent on interchange and communion with surrounding life. Surfaces are two-sided like the skin, we cannot touch without being touched in return, and because we are open , we need boundaries strong and flexible enough to also close. Complementarily and interdependence belong to this openness. 

Architecture is a Verb.

Sarah Robinson. 2022

The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something's site or situation.

The way we inhabit our everyday spaces, reveals the extent to which our bodies extend into and integrate with the features of our surrounding.

The Architectural Body.

Organism/Person/Environment.

Arakawa and Gins.

Making, is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following it where it leads, instead of imposing a form upon a matter. Matter so shaped informs the processes of its shaping.

Deleuze and Guattari.

Making is not a matter of imposition or a hylomorphic process. But of intervening in the fields of force and flows of material. What this understanding entails is that rather than interpreting the creative process 'backwards' from a finished object to an idea in the mind of an agent, one must rather 'read it forwards' in an ongoing generative movement, that is once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic.

Sarah Robinson, Tim Ingold. 

The mutual shaping of body and place is captured in the Greek word Choros. The root of choreography referred not only to dance, but also to the dancing place, and the group that dances.

Chora, closer to the meaning that Suzanne Langer articulates is the space of forces, a generative place that depends on participation, a territory that appears through continual remaking and reweaving. 

Topos, like its modern usage in topography suggests, was space that can be mapped.

Notion of a Place-Ballet.

The 'Spanish Steps' are not only crystallisations of movement, but generators of movement. We can navigate our living spaces in the dark, because we have already integrated the locations of our furnishings into our repertoire of movement. We create a zone of familiarity, with its integrated gestures, behaviours and actions that sustains a particular task or aim.

The reciprocity between one's body-routine and the environment supports these integrated movements, resulting in a fusion of interpersonal and communal exchange and effective attachment.

Places/Public Spaces become meaningful because they support our personal body-routines in an inter personal setting. 

David Seaman.

Place-Ballet, propositional movements of dancers around objects and the exhibition space.

10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester. 2009 

Bodies/Interchange/Communion with Surrounding Life.

Breathing, a balancing act of sustaining openness.

There really is an inhalation and an exhalation of being.

We not only breathe in and out, we breathe in a certain rhythm, our heart beats in rhythm, our perceptual experience oscillates in rhythms. Our experience of colour once again lays bare the facts of this unending rhythm.

We speak of 'inspiration' and the word should be taken literally. There really is an inspiration and expiration of being.

My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains a familiar domain round about me only as I still have 'in my legs' the main distances and directions involved, and as long as from my body intentional threads run out towards it.

Phenomenology of Perception.

Merleau-Ponty.

If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time.

Practitioners and theorists whose work overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond. 

Practices that incorporate, event scores, insertions, even banalities, and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation as well as duration. 

Projects located between Art and Architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operate. Such projects operate at a triple crossroads, between theory and practice, between art and architecture, between public and private, Jane Rendell is keen to stress three particular qualities of these works, the critical, the spatial, and the interdisciplinary.

Situatedness then is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or/and being situated.

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Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture

Organism/Person/Environment

Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.

Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.

The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.

Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.

The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.

Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.

A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.

Between Art and Information.

Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.

The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of  things.

The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.

In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.

Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.

The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.

The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.

Tactile Light.

The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.

For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph's skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.

Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.

Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency

Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.

Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.

Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints

Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.

The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.

Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.

Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis, wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.

Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.

Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light

Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.

Space for Peace : Aerial Composition (movements inside Winchester Cathedral) : Cyanotype and Sunlight.

Aerial Composition (movements inside the Cathedral) : Cyanotype and Sunlight., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

2013

Drawing Projects/Architecture is a verb : Blueprints for thinking and making.

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What we have to remember is that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our means of questioning it.

Werner Heisenberg.

Fields of Care.

The metaphor of the container and the contained that has guided Western thought with its vocabulary of inert matter, fragmentation, and frozen and petrified movement has crippled the architectural imagination for over two millennia.

Architecture Is A Verb, Sarah Robinson. 2021

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Drawing Projects.

An exploration of the language of drawing.

Mike Maslen, Jack Southern. 2011

The Eye That Feels.

We must learn to think with our feelings and feel with our thoughts.

Towards A Feeling Response.

Human beings are lumps of perceptions in a state of flux, and 'being' is a constantly changing state of infinite variety. Drawings are made by human beings and like their makers, they can be complex, somewhat vulnerable, unresolved, and imperfect. Equally, they can be confident, measured, controlled, well understood and decisive.

A drawing is a lexis of marks that represent and describe what our eyes see, and to some extent what our minds/bodies know and feel. It is made by the co-ordination of the eye/brain/hand/medium, and arranged in an organised and cohesive way to form a visual description/illusion. It is a trail of contained energy, incorporating the history of its own making, and recorded through a passage of time. It is an approximate attempt at depicting a perceived truth, and will have been made in either a confident, cautious, well seen, well understood, generalised, decisive, indecisive, 'right', or 'wrong'way.  

We live in an age when computer generated reprographic processes provide us with a world of 'technological perfection' and 'high definition'.Three-dimensional imagery offers limited, but enhanced and often 'super-real',virtual reality. It is a time in which the large flat TV screen is providing our children with replacement substitutes for what might to a previous generation have been exposed to, and an active involvement with, an experience of rich sensory pre-verbal childhood play. It is more important than ever that, in this world of 'perfect reproduction', our children do not literally get 'out of touch' with their senses, and that a drawing retains its value as a unique, hand-made object, which contains and expresses qualities that are as individual and special  as its creator.

The Body/Corporeality of Drawing.

Seeing/Becoming/Situatedness

The process of making is a magical act, organic and physiological.

The drive to create a cosmos originated in the magic structure of consciousness.

All basic physical and mechanical laws, such as leverage, traction, bearing, adhesion, all constructions such as the labyrinth, the vault, all such technical achievements or discoveries are pre-given to us. Every invention is primarily a rediscovery and an imitative construction of the organic and physiological.

The Ever Present Origin, Jean Gebser. 1984

All arts we must remember, are phases of the social mind. We are in the habit of thinking of them in terms of art products that we forget that the arts themselves are groups of ideas and acquisitions of skill, that exist in the minds, muscles and nerves of living human beings.

Franklin Henry Giddings. 1914

The earliest buildings are grown, they are woven structures. Borne of gathering around a fire and weaving walls.

Understanding Building as Weaving.

Gottfried Semper.

Architecture is a verb outlines an approach that shifts the fundamental premises of architectural design and practice. 

It acknowledges the centrality of the human organism as an active participant interdependent in its environment.

It understands human actions in terms of radical embodiment, grounding the range of human activities traditionally attributed to mind and cognition, imagining, thinking, remembering, in the body. 

It asks what a building does, that is it extends the performative functional interpretation of design to interrogate how buildings move and in turn move us, and how they shape thought and action. 

It is committed to articulating concrete situations by developing a taxonomy of human building interactions.

Sarah Robinson. 2021

Homo Faber.

Architecture shapes ideas, ideas are born through the act of forming.

Thinking and making have traditionally been relegated to two different domains and like architecture and building the former is privileged over the latter. 

Seldom do we consider the act of making as a method of knowing. For Tim Ingold, both the maker and the theorist are engaged in processes of knowledge, with the important difference that the craftsman thinks through making, while the theorist imposes thought on matter. 

The temple at once embodied the interdependent arising of craft and community, and replaced the caves and sacred  groves of earlier divine appearances, to become a place apart. 

A crafted place where divinity was revealed. The world appeared for the first time through something people made. Through building the temple, cosmos was discovered through making.

The top-down abstract knowing of the theorist verses the bottom-up embodied knowing of the craftsman has come to define our hierarchy on the valuation of knowledge.

The Origins of Architecture in Weaving.

They Wove Their Walls.

Vitruvius.

Tim Ingold comments that just as baskets are woven, so buildings are grown, not built. Their form, and its usefulness emerges from the process of growth rather than from the mandates of a preconceived design on formless raw material.

Materials are not understood in terms of their component parts, but in terms of what they do.

Making is not a matter of imposition, but of intervening in the fields of force and flows of material.

Cyanotype processing of architectural drawings.

Blackboard/Whiteboard Fragments.

Organism/Person/Environment.

DSC_2068 Structured Modalities : Rules/Individual Resources

Braking down research.

Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

Re-combinent poetics/praxis.

The Architectural Scriptorium

The Photographic Darkroom.

A Body of Relations/On The Drawing Process.

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The Process of Production

Seeing beyond concepts of looking.

The Dematerializing of the Art Object.

The process rather than art object as the primary site of the artist's creative output.

Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of The Art Object from 1966 to 1972.

 

A Body Of Relations:

Reconfiguring The Life Class.

The reconfigured life class provides a performative, discursive, social space to empower the life model to actively engage in the production of his/her own self-image. In addition the research re-frames the life class as a site in which the discourses of contemporary art as 'relational' and 'performative' can reach its apotheosis as a de-materialized performance event, whose trace exists in the dispersed materiality of the artist's body and whose silenced subject, the life model, becomes a full individual subject.

Yuen Fong Ling. 2016

2.5. Black Market, Pawel Althamer. 2007

In the artwork titled Black Market by Pawel Althamer, the exhibition sees participants making an effigy of the artist. The work neither focuses on the reference or the final outcome, but on the process of production. Polish Africans are trained in basic skills of carving and sculpting by the artist; they demonstrate their skills in a workshop environment presented as an installation in the exhibition. 

This active delegation of skills passed on by the artist to his participants, begins to fold traces of the artist in a process of transferral, where participant's subjectivities are merged with that of the artist. 

This framework for open contingent and non-scripted outcomes are rooted in Althamer's education under the tutelage of artist Grzegorz Kowalski, who was in turn influenced by Oskar Hansen's theory of 'open form' a form of architectural practice that encompassed 'collective thought' to dislocate any singular vision or use in the production of building design.

Artworks produced under these conditions meant that artworks were co-authored restrained  by time scale and the given situation. The artist in the role of teacher or tutor, to facilitate participant's ideas inflected in the production of the artwork. Althamer highlights intimate and often emotional inter-subjectivities. Rather than the distanced, silenced, objectified mode of temporary  participation.

The result is a sculpture that is a receptacle of negotiation, a choral self-portrait that depicts Althamer's as much as it captures an image of those who created him. 

Gioni, Massimiliano, The Hero with a Thousand Faces : Pawel Althamer. 2008

For Yuen Fong Ling, Althamer's image, as surrogated in figurative sculpture, through a delegated performance of participants, both united in a personal and political struggle with society and the realms of its reality.

Althamer's use of the open form methodology aims to democratize the formation of authorship in the artwork. Through the inclusion and collaboration of participants, Althamer has gradually developed the participant's active role and position. 

This 'delegated performance' as described by Claire Bishop allows Althamer to exercise his personal politics and his participants right to choose to partake in an art event, furthermore Althamer begins to physically manifest an object containing the participant's innate subjectivity. Bishop comments an agreement with the artist's own intent versus the participant's own inherent being. Participant's as active producers, influenced, even taught by the artist, potentially conditions the participant, in view of a pedagogic project of the artist.

Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art  and the Politics of Spectatorship.2012

The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn.

John Elderfield.

To reveal what has been discovered.

Subjects enlarged across a surface as a condensation of carnal knowledge.

Thinking In Drawing.

Drawing from life, at the threshold of painting.

When we talk of drawing as spontaneous, we refer not only to the sense of immediacy produced by the finest drawings, but also to how a drawing's very identity presents itself to us, to an extent beyond that of any other work of visual art, as the direct record of the movement of the artist's hand.

A drawing is intrinsically the record of movement in time. Hence, it can indeed be more purely impulsive than any other work of visual art-unless another such work partakes of drawing as its very structure. More often, of course, a drawing comprises a network of recorded movements, which tend usually to slow in their accumulation. And our appreciation of a drawing like this requires that we retrace these movements, their duration and their accumulation, from the evidence they have left behind.

Diebenkorn is always composing his subjects, ordering their shape. Forms are overlapped by other forms to weld everything together in that particular pose. If the model is shown  performing some action, she performs it very slowly indeed. Usually, she is immobile. The eroticism of the body reveals itself simply by holding a pose-in its intermittence: in the intermittence of hands brought together and held for that moment in that  particular pose: in the intermittence of that part of the body suddenly revealed by limbs as they form that particular pose.

We should notice at this point that, by and large, Diebenkorn's best figure drawings are frontally composed. He faces his subjects and enlarges them across the surface, sacrificing proportion if necessary for pattern, thereby discovering a sequence of contours-some arabesque, some geometric, that read almost autonomously as condensations of carnal knowledge. 

We should also notice that while Diebenkorn faces his subjects, they are generally do not have him. His models usually look down or away. They seem self-absorbed. Part of the reason for this is that Diebenkorn does not want to make psychological contact with the face. He wants us to grasp the meaning of the work from the whole composition and not have it filtered through the personality of the model.

This is also why he spreads a sense of corporeality beyond the contours of the model: to give the sheet as a whole living vibrancy. But there is another reason. It can be discovered in the kind of self-absorption his models display. They are not melancholy, or secretive, or brooding, or even bored. They seem quietly contented, self-assured, harmonious, at peace of mind. They may look distorted, altered from what we expect to see. But  they tell of the harmoniousness of their condition.

But drawing, unlike painting, picks out the artist's preferences at once. His means are immediately at hand and therefore his meanings are given immediately, the artist is forced to deal with the model's reality, to emotional reactions to particular things.

The drawings in question include a great series in charcoal, heavily worked and extensively revised until they comprise condensed symbols for the body of the model; some works in pencil and crayon where an almost geometric scaffold of echoing severe lines composes the body of the model and some boldly designed, extremely flattened studies of this drawing studio itself.

Each work on paper is a prolonged meditation on what drawing can accomplish at the threshold of painting. 

The drawing insistently designs or divides the field, which partakes of the density of drawing.

Firstly, something done on paper cannot be worked quite as long as something on canvas. There will be a point beyond which the surface can be bruised no more and will actually collapse in final failure. Some of the works on paper, therefore are extremely spare: the smallest possible number of notations that will suffice to realize their composition. However since the bruises do show more on paper than on canvas, perhaps the work on paper should not dodge them after all but, instead accumulate them, making such work far more explicitly a record of their accumulation than a painting can be. Diebenkorn prefers shiny, coated paper and he also uses masking devices to preserve the sections of a drawing he likes while scrubbing out others. Often this generates new imagery.

Secondarily, something done on paper, however need not be wiped clean if it is not working. Neither does it have to be painted out. It can be patched. This option is not available to painting: not Diebenkorn's painting. Some of his works on paper therefore comprise dense sandwiches of paper. But they are never collages that draw attention to the disparate character of their parts. For the point is always to adjust each fragment until the parts disappear into the whole. In the works of this kind, the artist does physically, materially, what he does more often by adjustment of linear boundaries: amalgamate a corpus of parts. At times, he will thus enlarge a work in its making, something impossible for him in painting.

Thirdly, the different scale of the small size is the scale of things close to hand. It is the scale established by the hand and the wrist and by the arm bent rather than extended. Everything is closer and more enclosed. Everything is therefore more intimate as well. And yet, the intimacy of these small works is that of research done privately but for publication, almost like scientific experiments. They do , in fact, test ideas. And while no painting will duplicate what a work on paper discovers, parts of paintings will remember parts of works on paper. Images discovered in these independent drawings are constantly cross-bred, hybridized and new drawings are grown out of them. Diebenkorn's images on paper are constantly dissected and reassembled from one work to the next, altering in the process.

Clay based inquiry around  practice led/speculative making.

Filling the Red Kiln, re-visiting/re-presentation of 'clay works'.