Both shows surround the notion of the letter or postcard which is the perfect scenario for me whilst I am travelling and I've been continuing the postcard size theme with my drawing, a kind of document per se of my ideas.
I have been tearing up the fine layers of paper creating a 3 dimensional surface. I've then been rubbing graphite on and off the surface, adding and removing the shades of grey. Some are all over images that look a bit like landscapes or possibly water, mud or rock. Other drawings only partially cover the paper and look more like leaves, icicles or moons.
I am allowing the drawings to develop of their own accord, not really understanding why, trusting the drawing and myself to work it out over time. Suddenly you make a new mark and the drawing takes a new direction.
It's probably the most I've drawn in ages, in the practical sense of continuity (proper blocks of time) and calm. Perhaps I should be more specific about my brief?
Palimpsest is still on mind. This adding and removing, trying to 'write' something down.
I have read the 1925 essay 'Mystic Writing Pad' by Freud where he talks about the idea of note taking and the preservation of a memory that can be resurrected any time, unchanged, unlike our actual memory in our heads which is in a constant state of flux.
Freud talks about writing with chalk on a slate which later can be erased when the information no longer is of interest. Sometimes it is because you have run out of writing space, so you rub something out in order to write a new message on top. The permanent trace of information is therefore almost completely removed. In our age of technology, computers and mobile phones, text messages are erased just like that, with no trace of the original message at all, not even a whiff of it. With Freud's 'Mystic Pad' the permanent traces of previous notes are no longer important. But, he says "it is enough that they are present".
Maybe, there is this sense, that the written (post it) notes I leave around the van, in books etc. are akin to the postcard size drawings that I am making in the studio. These are a pictorial interpretation of a memory or something to remember, or 'get down'? There is the destructive mechanism of tearing and cutting into the paper which I then cover with graphite, followed by the act of rubbing out and colouring in again.
"Untitled" Graphite on Paper 170 x 120mm
"Untitled" Graphite on Canvas Board 150 x 100mm
for 'Poste Restante' Exhibition at An Tobar, Isle of Mull