Sunday 6 November 2016

Leafscape - the limited edition book

It’s been 18 months since I started creating Leafscape and I am delighted to be able to announce that my Kickstarter project is now live. Now is the time to get involved and be within a chance of having your own copy of the Leafscape book. 




Between 16 - 25 February 2017 I will be working hard to place the botanical kingdom in the spotlight with my exhibition of new watercolour paintings at Abbott and Holder in London. For this exhibition, I am exploring my vision of a botanical dystopia, documenting leaves that are growing on the margins of human civilisation whilst challenging our sense of scale, its value and how we measure it. 


In celebration of the Leafscape exhibition, I would really like to produce a limited edition, linen bound, hard-back book that presents all of the paintings and the environmental soundtrack of all the outside sounds from where each leaf was growing at the time it was found. The idea of recording sound in this way introduces a completely new element to botanical art. 

If successful, this Kickstarter Project will allow me to print 500 copies of this book. It'll also help to turn the whole notion behind 'Leafscape' into reality; by allowing me to pass on the wonder that I have so painstakingly documented to your eyes and ears in a tangible format.

To make a pledge towards the project and be within the chance of owning your own signed and numbered copy of the book, please click here.

Should the campaign be successful, I intend to gift 10 copies to the following institutions with public libraries so that the book can be still be seen by those with an interest in scientific illustration, botany and fine art who missed out on owning a copy for themselves:  

The British Library 
The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew 
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 
New York Botanic Garden 
Royal Botanic Garden Sydney 
The Linnean Society of London 
Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid 
Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society 
London The Duchy of Cornwall 
The Chelsea Physic Garden


Q&A: If you have any questions at all about Kickstarter or the exhibition, please don't hesitate to message me, I'd be happy to walk you through the process and talk about the work and show. 



Spread the Word: I am the only one managing this project, so there's a lot of communication required on my part to spread the word whilst I continue to finish the odd painting, soundtrack and book. So please feel free to encourage others to get involved as the success of this campaign will directly determine what we can accomplish together in 2017. Kickstarter has very kindly supplied us with a 'share' button at the top of its page for you to use.

You can continue to follow me and my future projects on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.



Thank you for joining me on the botanical adventure, 
as ever, it is a pleasure to be here with you, 
right now, at this very moment in time and space.

Sunday 23 October 2016

Giants in Thimbles VII - Principium et finis

'A Walk Through H' by Peter Greenaway is one of my favourite short films. The film is roughly 40 minutes long and tells the story of an abstract journey using a combination of one vocal narrator, the music of Michael Nyman and a series of 92 maps which hang on a wall. Like all of Greenaway's films, it moved me in the first few minutes. 

060820162014 Catalpa bignonioides, Watercolour on paper, 13 x 19cm
Work in progress

This is what Peter had to say about the short film:

"The map is an extraordinary palimpsest to tell you where you have been, where you are at this present moment, and where you could be, and even in subjective tenses, where you might have been, where you could have been. It’s a total consideration in the sense of temporality as well as spatiality.

Map from 'A Walk Through H.'
'A Walk Through H.' would suggest certainly a question or a query of what 'H.' stood for. I am sure that one will not have to travel very far before coming up with the notion that it could very well stand either for Heaven or for Hell, also in consideration that one man’s hell could be easily another man’s heaven and vice versa. So here is a presentation of a series of maps that would lead the soul, if you believe in reincarnation, from the moment of death to the nether place whether that indeed would be heaven or hell.  In this film, armed with his ninety two maps, an ornithologist makes his journey from this life to the next."


041120151203, Poplar x canadensis, Watercolour on Paper, 1m x 1.20m
As the pieces are finished and the process of painting is steadily grinding to a halt, I am beginning to focus more on the other elements of the collection, such as the book and soundtrack. My original idea was to line the linen bound book on the inside with a star chart, but I have in the last few weeks changed my mind and am now looking at maps again. In Spain they make these fantastic military maps which are a bit like the Ordinance Survey in the UK, only much harder to get your hands on. In true style of the Leafscape project and 'A Journey Through H.', there is this mysterious map shop hidden somewhere in the back streets of the old Arabic quarter of Granada. It's location is elusive. It seems it is the type of place you accidentally come across only never to locate it again in your lifetime. I myself have never seen it, so I might be in luck. 

As a consequence, I am thinking a lot about maps at the moment, their meaning and what it is to observe and experience something and then to map it out. I am beginning to feel that a map is not only a means of representing space, but also of time and presence. Through a combination of art forms - drawing, writing, music and film 'A Journey through H. does exactly this. The entire film can be found following this link, although I do recommend buying it.


041120151613, (Morus nigra), Watercolou
on paper, 13cm x 19cm, Work in progress

Whatever will line the inside of the Leafscape book, it'll be a map of sorts, for maps are codes and therefore anything can be a map. The sequence of our DNA to climate change models. They are all maps. Maps are abstract because they only contain what the recorder wants to put in it and can be interpreted differently depending on the observer. They are representational abstractions and a surrealist fantasy.


Art's concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the 
formlessness that is beyond the edge. (Oliver, 2016)

300620161138, Acer sp., Watercolour on paper, 13 x 19cm
Work in progress

When I look at any standard geographical map, I always take notice of the boundary lines. When I watch 'A Walk Through H.' I consider them too, but as I start to slowly understand the nature of the journey the maps are taking me through I begin to think about the metaphorical boundaries, the ones I cannot see, that haven't been drawn out.  Where is H? Where is this soul migrating too? Where are we all going? Then I am less concerned about the roads and footpaths and lines drawn on each piece of paper and more concerned about the edges of the paper. Like a medieval monk, I become anxious that we might fall off the edge of the flat papery view of the world. I manage to convince myself that the edge that marks the end of the sequence of 92 maps marks the biggest boundary of all. 


Everything will flourish at the edge . . . (Derrida, 1987)

080120161247, Platanus x acerifolia. Watercolour 
on paper, 13 x 19cm, Work in progress

When we paint on a piece of paper we are aware that we are working inside the matrix (space) that is held between the edges (usually 4) of said piece of paper. The world we are depicting however, be it imaginary or real, isn't like this - there are many edges in our three dimensional reality and the vista extends outwards on and on and on. What we do as painters is to distil a piece of that vista into a tangible boundary marked by four edges, and these edges will eventually work to frame the picture, but not limit it. In this capacity, the edges of a painting act not to close off but to open up possibilities for the emerging image (Casey, 2014). They act not to exclude further brush strokes but to expand their reach as the edges are where the picture meets the real world. Therefore it is really important that as painters we are aware of the power of these edges and what they can do to transform our work. 

Come to the edge, he said. They said: We are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. They came. He pushed them and they flew. (Apollinaire)


041120151708, Catalpa bignonioides, Watercolour 
on paper, 19 x 13cm, Work in progress

To understand the edges of the paper and of reality is to understand the bit inbetween the edges of the paper and reality. The two features require each other in order to exist - take away the edges and the in-between is amorphous. We need edges in order to define, but that defined shape is still organic - it can still take on a myriad of forms and sizes. There is no strict measurement for the area in between the boundaries. As painters we are aware of this every time we represent something. Any representation of the real world needs both edges and gaps to be present. History happens in-between the edges of things. It is in this space where art is created, philosophy is conceived and political actions emerge (Casey, 2014).

Respect the edges (Pavitz, 2007)

Section of leaf 100820151542

As I mentioned in the first chapter of Giants in Thimbles, I consider the edges to be very important in this collection, but at the time I wasn't fully aware of why. In Leafscape, the leaves often get chopped off and are placed on the margins of the paper. Right at the very beginning I thought that they just represented my feelings towards my own existence - of being on the margin all of the time and not being able to claim my space, or of even wanting to. But then some leaves did start to claim their space, but ended up being too big for that area, so even though they were in the middle of the painting, bits got chopped off. In plant terms, that's my botanical dystopia - them not being able to grow freely in a human world, but in personal terms its my feeling towards my own life. I am trying to find my landscape, I am looking for that place, which is always on the edge, on the horizon, and as I look for it, I unwittingly create a map of my own existence.


Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. 
At the edge of perception, weird things dance and howl. (Boroson, 2015)


Leaf 080120161241 Platanus x acerifolia next to leaf 100820151542 Catalpa bignonioides.

In two weeks time I will be drawing a line on my invisible map from Granada, Spain to Haselmere, UK, where my framer is. The three massive paintings are being put inside a van and driven all the way to England. These three beasts are going to be difficult to frame - we just can't get big enough mount board, so it might be that the leaves really do outdo supply. Painters have always agonised about how to frame their work. They are after all where the painting stops and a different world begins (Hodgkin, 2003). The frame affects the work inside and outside the space. Frames let us know where the artwork is, they contain the art from a logical view. 

Don't be afraid to step into the unknown 
(Lyrics to Come Down to us, Burial)

301020151949, Poplar x canadensis, Watercolour 
on paper, 13 x 19cm, Work in progress

Immanuel Kant thought that frames were necessary to make a painting what it is. He felt that if a painting didn't have a frame, it wouldn't deliver on its role in transporting us as viewers. That the unframed painting would look too 'made' and too much as a mere 'object' rather than a 'portal'. In this vein, the frame can belong to the painting just as much as it does to the wall. With this in mind, we begin to see that frames actually have the ability to totally deconstruct space, even beyond wall and picture. They are the Venn diagrams of the art world. The image in a frame exists in a world of its own, yet it also touches on ours. The leaves in Leafscape are precisely that - they exist within their boundary in their own worlds, but they touch our own and extend into a void we cannot see.


Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard. (Murakami, 2005)

080120161240, Platanus x acerifolia, Watercolour on paper, 19 x 13 cm

David Hockney was the first person to bring me into a space where I begun to consider edges and frames more seriously. For twenty years I have remained a huge fan of his photomontages (or what he calls 'joiners'), mostly because they show what an edge actually is. You get to see how the edges mark time and space - the inbetweeness, and how in our world, there are many edges. I often feel that Hockney's joiners are the only non-digital, two dimensional thing out there that describes our reality fully. Now of course, we can find Hockney working with multiple camera lenses in a single moving picture, which is broadening his first concept - frames within frames. 

100820151540 Catalpa bignonioides, Watercolour 
on paper, 13 x 19cm, Work in progress

As I begin to concentrate on my next collection I am starting to consider moving onto board and not using frames at all, thus pushing us all to consider the edges even more intensely. The magical thing about being in the 21st century is that you can do this. Exhibitions are now being curated in a way that space is left around works so that the actual room or wall begins to act as a frame. Exhibitions are no longer jam packed like they were in Edwardian times. Curators now give us breathing space, like the universe expanding, the edges are getting ever further and further away. 

Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. (Oliver, 2016)


301020151943, Acer pseudoplatanus, 76 x 56cm, Work in progress

I am now painting my last piece in the run up to seeing the framer. Rather like in 'A Journey through H.' I have journeyed through 34* leafscapes to arrive at my final destination - a Sycamore leaf from Bognor Regis, my home town, collected in a park I used to play in as a child. I am nicknaming it 'Honey Sandwiches', it seemed apt. The real leaf itself is a maroon tinted stunner. I remember seeing it on the floor and pressing it there and then in between the pages of a book on quantum physics, forever trapped. But my journey doesn't end here, at home or with a sycamore leaf. I am not a medieval monk and the world is not flat. I believe life is like a spirograph, it just simply keeps looping around. All I've done in the process of searching for a home to call my own is to arrive at my childhood. I have painted a complete circuit and now I am already off again on a new circuit; the next project and who knows where it'll take us.


Principium et finis

180820161420, Catalpa bignonioides
Watercolour on paper, 13 x 19cm

*There are 34 paintings: 3+4 = 7
Chapters of 'Giants in Thimbles' = 7
Exhibition opens on the 16th: 1+6  = 7
Exhibition closes on the 25th: 2+5 = 7


Bibliography

Boronson, M., (2015), The Girl with Ghost Eyes, Talos Publishing

Casey, Edward, (2014), The Edges and the In-Between, Unpublished essay

Derrida, J., (1987), The Parergon - The Truth of Painting, Bennington, G. and McLeod, I., (trans.) Chichago, Chicago University Press pp 37 -82

Duro, P., (1996) The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays essays on the boundaries of the artwork, Cambridge University Press. Cambridge

Eastham, A., (2011), Aesthetic Afterlives: Irony, Literary Modernity and the Ends of Beauty, Continuum

Goffman, E., (1979), Frame Analysis. Pennsylvania Northeastern University Press

Hodgkin, H. in Daoust, P., (2003) Edge Trimming, The Guardian, 2nd January 2003. 

Kant, I., (1790), The Critique of Judgement, Meredith, J, (trans.) Oxford. Claredon Press

Little, S., (2004) 'Framing Dialogues towards an understanding of the Parergon in Theatre'. PhD Thesis. 

Murakami, H., (2005), Kafka on the Shore, Vintage Publishing

Oliver, M., (2016), Upstream: Selected Essays, Penguin Press

Parviz, M., 'Ten Guidelines for Painting', unpublished text of August, 21, 2007






Monday 29 August 2016

Giants in Thimbles - VI Closing the Gap

I observed Belicena differently today. I decided to go for walk using a different palette - a sound recorder. Equipped with a different tool for recording my experience here on planet earth, I started to 'see' things differently. Reacquainting myself with my original calling, I placed myself within an ecology of sound and began to listen properly. When you listen properly, you instantly become present in time and space. Processes slow down and one becomes acutely aware. You find yourself merging with the landscape and you begin to see how even your own body influences the way sound waves move.


Sounds are like ghosts. They slink around the visual object, moving in on it from all directions, forming its contours and content in a formless breeze. (Voegelin, 2010)


Poplar (Populus x canadensis) watercolour by Inky Leaves
041120151159
Poplar (Populus canadensis)
Work in progress. Watercolour on Paper. 1m x 1.25m


I have mentioned several times in this online diary that I am interested in how painting could hint at a sound to produce an experience that is beyond visual, or in fact, audible - to tap into something that is spiritual. There have been times when I see a painting and the artist, being a master of brush and composition, ushers me into a space where I hear sounds - imaginary ones. In this sense, a painting can be seen as a theatre, transcending its material form into something else entirely, something ethereal, such as a story or a feeling.

Sound renders the object dynamic, it makes what we see quiver with life (Voegelin, 2010)


Catalpa watercolour by Inky Leaves
100820151542
Indian Bean Tree (Catalpa bignonioides)
Watercolour on Paper. 76 x 56 cm


Over the past two years, the Leafscape Collection has become multifaceted and layered - it no longer is just a collection of paintings - it has become phantasmagoric. I am still working very hard to provide my audience with an experience, using writing (crowd funded book/blog), pictures (the paintings), sound (a CD album), place (the stories on the backs of paintings) and to time (painting titles). The album itself, which I have not mentioned until now, will feature sounds taken from the sites where each leaf grew. I am doing this to extend the nervous system of botanical art and what it can achieve as a call to action, but the CD can also function as a stand alone piece (it'll be available to those who pledge for a limited edition book on my Kickstarter Project this Autumn). 


‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ Walter Pater


Poplar (Populus x canadensis) watercolour by Inky Leaves
301020151946
Poplar (Populus canadensis)
Work in progress. Watercolour on Paper. 1m x 1.25m

This collection invites you to explore distant lands (nb map-like features), lost memories and invisible worlds through sound and sight. The main story arc is about plants and humans - how we interact with our environment and how our environment interacts with us, and I believe very strongly that this story cannot be told with pictures alone. Everything is in pictures these days. Try to embed an audio file in Blogger and you'll find the experience fairly frustrating. There is no easy way of doing it. It’s the same with Facebook and Twitter. 

The blink of an eye lasts three hundred milliseconds. The blink of an ear lasts considerably longer. From birth to death, the ear never closes. Kim Cohen (2009)


Populus x canadensis botanical illustration by Inky Leaves
041120151203
Poplar (Populus canadensis)
Work in progress. Watercolour on Paper. 1m x 1.25m


There aren't many people who pay attention to the sounds and often when they do, sound is left to enhance another sensory output and never left to singularly become (Voegelin, 2010). Yet, the invisible and the formless world must be given equal validity in order to transform the visible and the formed. This is basic alchemy. This is how one can belong to the world fully. We all have invisible souls that grow into something intangible but in the modern world this seems to be unrecognised. We are all living in a world which overly taxes the left hemisphere of our brains. Our languages and our systems rarely tap into the right side - the ‘acoustic’ side – of our brain, and as our existence is becoming progressively more ‘wired up’, this is becoming increasingly so. I believe that by using pictures and sound we begin to use the other side and become more responsive.


Maidenhair Tree (Ginkgo biloba) botanical illustration
250220162005
Maidenhair Tree (Ginkgo biloba)
Watercolour on Paper. 30 x 30 cm


All that is visible must grow beyond itself - extend into the invisible.
Hexagram 50 of the I-ching



Maidenhair Tree (Ginkgo biloba) botanical illustration
250220162007
Maidenhair Tree (Ginkgo biloba)
Watercolour on Paper. 30 x 30 cm


The auditory world is always dynamic and never static and in order to really understand sound, you have to realise that you are part of it. You are inside a soundscape.  This is how I try to ‘see’ when painting – I try to feel the space around as if I am part of it. I try to sense the distances between the object and myself and convince myself that they are not really there – there is no distance, it’s an illusion.  Sound’s ephemeral invisibility frequently means it is ignored. Ever heard of the saying ‘seeing is believing’? It seems that there is this absurd belief that to see things is to understand things. Furthermore, often when we see something for the first time, we tend to give it a name and construct a relationship with the item which in turn defines us and our own identity. We separate ourselves from it. Listening, however, is always cloaked with disbelief. We often say ‘did I hear you correctly?’ or more often I find we say ‘pardon’ when we really did actually hear what somebody said. 


Giant Rhubarb (Gunnera manicata) botanical art by Inky Leaves
150620151536
Giant Rhubarb (Gunnera manicata)
Watercolour on Paper. 76 x 56 cm

The unsettling thing about sound is it breaks down the ego. For example, if we hear a noise then we are instantly part of that noise - we share the space and the moment with the noise. There is no distance between us. I find thunder and lightening to be an excellent example for illustrating how differently we react between sight and sound. When we see the lighting, we instantly identify it and locate it and measure the distance in relation to ourselves. Then, if the source of lightening is a few miles away, a few moments later we will hear the thunder clap. The problem is, you can't see the thunder, which means you can’t locate it. Consequently, the rumble of thunder is far more frightening and intimidating because it’s right there, all around you. You can't grasp it, but you can hear it. It is obscure. Such is the sublime nature of sound.


English Oak (Quercus robur) botanical illustration Jess Shepherd
300620161144
English Oak (Quercus robur)
Watercolour on Paper. 76 x 56 cm


Of course, we ignore the most subliminal aspect with the recorded audio in particular. Akin to photography, it determines the threshold between life and death, whilst simultaneously offering the exhilarating and terrifying possibility of passing between the two. The human body and mind become peculiarly vulnerable at this threshold (Dickson, 2016). We live in an age where we can extend our existences beyond the grave, but unlike photography, which is based on sight and therefore allows us to distance ourselves from the memory, audio from beyond is uncomfortable because sound is part of us – there is no distance. So rather disturbingly, you get the melding of space and time inside of you. You become a vessel; you become the landscape, the environment between this world and the one that existed before.
  

Catalpa bignonioides painting by Jess Shepherd
300720150946
Indian Bean Tree (Catalpa bignonioides)
Watercolour on Paper. 76 x 56 cm



As I look back, sound has always played an important role in my work. When I think about installation I made in a dark room in 2002, not only did I work with the contrasts between dark and the light to hint at the sublime, I worked with sound. I put a compact disc by COIL on a loop. As a fourteen year old, I was also had a habit of recording sounds -it was a hobby I kept up until I was 21 years old. I still have all the old analogue dictaphone tapes littered with outside sound recordings. I have teachers delivering lessons, the starlings on the roof, birdsong in Barcelona, my father's old car engine, seagulls and lunchtime mayhem at secondary school. I think I even captured myself walking the complete circuit of Andrew Goldsworthy's moonlit path at midnight. At the time I recorded these sounds, it was about trying to document my reality. The tapes were predominately my way of diarising my life. I remember organising my recordings – I would tape me vocally reading out the date back at home first thing in the morning so I wouldn't look strange talking into a device in the middle of the street. How things have changed with hands free devices since then?! That was in 1998 and things have moved on. 



Sound is perpetually on the move, making time and tenses rather than following them. (Veogelein, 2010)

Grape Vine (Vitis vinifera) painting by Inky Leaves
041120151204
Grape Vine (Vitis vinifera)
Watercolour on paper. 76 x 56 cm


When I stopped condensing time into reel at the age of 21, I started to do the opposite - I started to listen. My favourite channel on what was then the 'new' DAB radio was the test channel, which was bird song in a farmyard on loop. I used to listen to it all day and sometimes all night. I found doing the latter would completely disorientate me and this effect really intrigued me. This was probably the first time I realised the power of sound on the body, our existence and our ideas of reality.


One of the most nourishing aspects of producing the Leafscape album is how it has taught me to reclaim my existence – a way of living that feels almost primeval. Time is slowed down when you are in the field recording and vision looses its importance. The noises made by humans can seem intrusive and you start to see patterns. You learn when certain birds sing and when the farmers open particular sluice gates for irrigating. You sit eagerly waiting for the thunderstorm to blow in and the flap of a pigeon's wings becomes intolerably loud. As you crouch down, trying to get out of the wind, swallowtail butterflies will land on you and a snake will slide past. Everything changes scale - time changes and space changes - which is not only intriguing to witness, but also fairly satisfying to see given the rather large leaps in scale in the artworks themselves. Everything in this compilation is now mirrored - the collection has become whole. It has become its own ecosystem, with its own measures of time and scale.


Poplar (Populus x canadensis) botanical art Jess Shepherd
041120151155
Poplar (Populus canadensis)
Watercolour on paper. 76 x 56 cm


Biblography



Chain, P., (2016), Sound mummification and the art of fixed sounds 

Coppolino, E. F., (2016) Planet Waves Podcast 

Cohen, K., (2009), In the Blink of an Ear, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, New York





Voegelin, S., (2010), Listening to noise and silence, The Continuum Internataional Publishing Group