Art Erotica Exhibition
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- Category: Images
- Published on Friday, 20 January 2012 16:03
- Written by Loz
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I entered this drawing, "Fragrance" for the inaugural Art Erotica Exhibition which takes place
Thursday 19th – Friday 27th January 2012. 10am – 6pm daily
in The Gallery in Cork Street, 28 Cork Street, London, W1S 3NG
http://www.arteroticaexhibition.com/
I'm delighted to find that the drawing has been awarded a prize donated by one of the exhibition sponsors, A C Art and Framing.
http://www.arteroticaexhibition.com/artist-prizes.asp
People have been asking me why on earth would I draw such a thing.
It's because I started thinking what sort of person would do that. (I had heard about Monsanto, met someone in France who had shockingly peed on his girlfriend's television, and I thought that's a good way to water a cactus. I had been thinking about Grunewald's crucifixion: an advert for salvation, so since the GM industry is offering salvation as well, I thought they might like an equivalent image. As far as it being erotic goes, love makes you blind and pain can be alluring, so they have an excuse. Perhaps the main reason is that I like cacti, identify with the sensitive inside that needs such a protective interface with the world, and very occasionally they produce flowers: some varieties have huge flowers that only last for one night and emit a quite extraordinary exquisite fragrance, and maybe the allure of that would justify this kind of interaction. The title - Fragrance - seems to offer a way to engage with the image on a physical level. But whatever the starting point for an image, the art is in the expression of it and a personal response.)
You can learn a lot from drawing something, giving it intensity, finding its sensuality, and I love the draughtsmanship of it.
I did a whole series: "White Man at work".
I've always been aware that we listen to works of art through many sense channels, and it's the tension between the aesthetic and awareness of the physical that give art it's power. There are art forms for each of our senses.
All art is choreography, and the erotic in art in not just the images, it’s the way you do it that gets under the skin.
The erotic is sex with style: it reminds us how to dance, which makes it a nice subject for art.
Art is like a hypodermic.
I know it's a bit of a strange image, but look at other drawings on this site and you may see some connections. But whatever the artist's motivation, you enjoy it or not according to your own take on it. The show is on in Cork St until 27 January.
It's one of the images in my "Prints for sale" page, along with a more recent version of the same image. "Fragrance" was done in 2002, and I did "Fragrance 2" this year.
Photography
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- Category: Images
- Published on Saturday, 14 January 2012 16:51
- Written by Loz
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This is a selection of my photographs, in no particular sequence. I always have a camera with me, as a way of paying attention, and I love working with photographs, originally in a darkroom but now digitally. I notice that very few of them include people...
Drawings
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- Category: Images
- Published on Saturday, 14 January 2012 16:51
- Written by Loz
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This is a selection of fairly recent drawings.
Colour comes from coloured pencils on a smooth watercolour paper, or very bright pastels on textured black paper. Most are fairly large, between A2 and A1.
Just at the moment I am preparing some of them for reproduction, and it's possible to buy them here. Gradually others will be added.
Drawings
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- Category: Images
- Published on Saturday, 14 January 2012 15:26
- Written by Loz
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I've always been fascinated by drawing. I'm delighted by the absurdity of it, a few scratchy scribble marks and we fit an illusion to it, read it as a place, a gesture, an object.
Drawing is the art of hollowing out a piece of paper, suggesting something legible in there. I'm always trying to get better at it, to develop language, to work on the reading.
Many of these drawings are done with colour, not representational colour but used as a way of giving more liveliness to the image. Just as the Impressionists with their pointillism painted light by describing depth with colour, minutely adjusted dot by dot until the reading of space became lucid, I like to use sequences of colour to develop the forms and spaces of an image. After years of teaching life drawing and in medical student days studying anatomy, I find the human figure to be enough of a subject to explore all this.
Colours read at different depths in an image. Dark areas recede and light ones come forward, but as well, the way vision works results in the colour and the surface of an object being perceived separately, we pull red forward and push the blue end of the spectrum back to coincide with the object, and when we look at colours on a flat surface we compensate and read this as varying depth in the paper.
By keeping the marks thinly spread out I can use very bright colours which act quite precisely to produce an illusion of depth, like the Impressionist's dots. Paint makes dots, pencils or pastels make scribbles which can be animated in themselves, and where the tendency with paint is to spread it which can obscure the sketchier underpainting, drawing marks all remain visible: a drawing keeps its innards on show. The marks tend to be diagrammatic rather than descriptive of surface appearance (such as with use of light and shade), and the challenge is to arrive at a totally convincing illusion through this accumulation of hints and suggestions. For the figure, movement or gesture is essential, and I love trying to get this right using colour.
In a way, drawing is for me a form of sculpture. The spaces and objects of the illusion emerge from the cloud of directions for how to interpret the scribble and as they come more distinct they become virtual sculptures that I needn't get up and actually make. (Perversely when carving I use the light and shade to read the appearance and refine the carving marks to clarify the shading as if it's a drawing. Some people make sculpture by form, this is more by light.)