Getting There
A Rapper’s UPPER
This time I will insert one of my YouTube videos, a drawing of my niece Jenna –three years old this week– but drawn a couple years ago.
My prime goal was to avoid cute; difficult to do in drawings with very small children, but the reference photo was all about her unusual sleeping pose, a superb, very unusual, neatly folded, accordion-like composition. I would only need to follow its lead and focus on that dynamic pose she had been so used to, and which had been so practical in her previous life.
As the drawing went forward I photographed its progress moment by moment, eventually arriving at what seemed a satisfactory finish. The drawing resolved itself without effort, and later on it was very easy to convert its dozens of stills into a video format.
For the music also, since I so enjoy creating the odd piece, I decided to take the most challenging route and discover whether something in a jazz mood might be less cute, less cloying than a lullaby. I think I found it.
The blend of image/music is surprising and, personally, is as close to flawless as I could hope.
The paper on which the abstract markings were made had some transparency. Then the several pages were chopped randomly and the cuttings assembled and reassembled until they began to evoke a recognizable image, in this instance a male upper torso from behind and to one side. Once a figure had, with my selective choices, more or less created itself, the segments were, one by one, pasted into place on a stiff cardboard; you can actually see and count the individual pieces, and detect the overlaps. The original is about twice up in size to what is viewed here.
A second stage was to photograph and enter it into the computer darkroom and apply colouration. This revealed some gorgeous tones in which the pasted over markings came through as of the opposite part of the colour wheel. The end result is a gorgeous, original, creative piece.
Fillière © Mar 8 2019
Five components, all of different irregular sizes, have been cut with ruler and knife from several different pages of random ink and pen or brush markings. In each instance the markings suggest that they continue outside of its local edges.
The individual pieces are then collaged into a new image which in itself also implies an existence outside of its boundaries. A male torso prototype, or perhaps it’s an alligator lurching after prey, or, it becomes whatever the mind wishes to see though it has obviously gained much from the artlessness of abstractions.
Collage, and abstraction, are now of course both century old artistic techniques but obviously they can still energize one’s imagination, and provide a solid workout for compositional skills.
Fillière © 20th 3 2018
If you count the edges of the chopped segments of abstract markings you can find a dozen pieces out of which this image was assembled and pasted down. I think of it as an innovation on a kind of centaur. Great fun to do such a wild compositional search-and-find assemblage.
A dream is most often, or at least mine are, like a metamorphosing octopus, a non-stop serial segue of mutations in being, syncronous with the suspension of logic and time. And the dismissal of happily ever after is another function of most of my dreams.
Rocks, leaves, pottery shards, broken board overturned in search of luminous word that might ease a poem through tension of page …
fillière 