Another look at some art - one of my pieces this time. "Design for a Machine to Escape the Bank Manager " was, I guess, born from the desire to do a piece emulating one of my all-time heroes, Leonardo da Vinci.
Last year I worked on a 6 month project I called "Synthesis". The basic idea was to use some of the very old traditional drawing techniques I'd been investigating to render images derived from various 'new media'. Specifically I was concentrating on two sources of imagery - the first was illustrations of copyright-expired texts sourced from open source libraries like the Gutenberg Project, of which, no doubt, more later. In this case, however, the picture was based on an image I made with 3D modelling software on the computer. I was experimenting with a package called 'Groboto' which 'grows' machine-like structures. I combined 2 of these, one for the body of the flying machine and one for the wing ribs, and rendered the resulting structure 3 times, in plan view, elevation, and in perspective view.
I wanted something like da Vinci 's flying machine designs from his notebooks, but taken to a more elaborate conclusion, the point being to render the image using the same kind of materials and techniques which he would have used. The paper is a very heavyweight handmade cotton tag from India called 'Khadi'. I'm using this for all my drawing work at the moment - I love the surface texture, along with the fact that it's made of 100% recycled cotton tag. The makers use offcuts from the T-shirt industry, so the paper is available in a number of different self-coloured variants as well as the bleached off-white which I use. The drawing outline was transferred to the paper by scaling up using a grid, which can still be seen in the background - I wanted traces of the methods to be visible. The drawing itself is done using a combination of Derwent drawing pencils in natural clay pigments, and Koh-i-Noor pigment sticks held in a fat lead-holder. I use 3 basic colours - terracotta, sepia, and white. The shadows and outlines are picked out using sepia colored Pitt artist pens. (I did try a dip pen with sepia ink but that didn't work so well on the absorbent surface). Finally the highlights are done using white gouache.
The last stage of the drawing is to add text. I find more and more these days I'm using text to add an extra dimension to drawings. In this one it's designed to give the piece more of a notebook-like feel to it - the text takes the form of the kind of technical notes an engineer might make on a drawing, done in an antique-looking handwritten font. Along with the photo of the 'bank-manager' (sourced from a collection of old photos on-line , the 'notes' are printed in mirror-image on heat-transfer paper (the kind used for T-shirts) and ironed onto the surface using a technique developed with a lot of trial and error!
As often happens, the 'meaning' of the piece only became apparent when it was more or less complete. Having got more and more frustrated with the difficulty of selling any art in the present economic situation, the overdraft was getting larger and larger. We fantasized, as well one might in this situation, of selling one large piece which would solve our financial crisis at a stroke, which suggested the idea of a new principle for pricing work. Instead of working out a price based on time and materials costs, I came up with the idea of pricing "to each according to their needs". The price of the piece would be related to the subject rather than the effort. Thus "Design for a Flying Machine to Escape the Bank Manager" was priced at the level of our overdraft at the time of its completion, so the buyer would have the satisfaction of knowing that they had indeed helped us to escape the Bank Manager. Sadly, at the time of writing I have to report that the overdraft remains un-cleared, and the drawing is still for sale on etsy.com. Anyone want to help out here? ... or you could contribute to our crowd/funding effort at indiegogo.com/wowlookwhatigot before (15th April 2013).
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