Imagery

My work is created through a Tachist approach and I choose to use the term ‘poemagogic imagery’ due to the word ‘image’ being confused with narrative, photography and notion of art being preconceived. When I create art I do not consider that I am creating an image. I consider my work an embodied object that has been created through feeling and form.  A virtual world is created through the picture plane and the essence of any imagery, or memory it provokes has been idealised through an abstraction. This approach may be considered reductive or conceptual – but my interest in art making is connected to Lyrical, Tachism and Abstract Expressionism and could be considered Post-painterly or even Romantic.  

 

Whilst I value formalism, the spaces I seek to create are not derivative of a Greenberg flat space and I aim to capture a virtual pictorial world within my work - not an image. Spaces I create are often ambiguous, hidden and architectonic and marks on the picture plane are considered passages and areas. Whilst I acknowledge there is a proliferation of multi-discipline practise and artists reacting to Greenberg through extending their canvas off the wall into situational painting, BMT, installation and alike. I choose to create art that values pictorial problem solving and drawing is a direct method to access this cognitive and affective domain.  My work relates to forms that convey internal human feelings and states of being. This poetic based approach to capturing a visual percept is in Rothko’s monoloithic forms, tactile spaces of Hamilton and Hesse, Kandinsky and Klee’s theories and art informal influenced artists such as Twombly and Tapies.  Drawing offers solutions for formalism that have struggled to come to terms with the proclaimed ‘death of painting’ and conceptual theories of painting. Drawing to me is a conduit to the unconscious inner life of the artist and ‘Poemagogic images. It is this essential space that is connected to the unconscious that I am interested in capturing within my work and seek to understand.

Thoughts on: Drawing, Poiesis, Praxis, form and feeling

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. Aristotle – Poetics  

I seek to understand how art can capture the unconscious and metaphoric form and how this is transcribed and applied through the material and directly by the artist’s hand. I am interested in visceral space and how syncretic forms  described by Ehrenzweig’s in the Hidden Order of Art as ‘poemagogic’ can be shaped by formalist principles and Plasticity. Drawing as a practise enables these cognitive and affective connections to be recorded directly and the immediacy and flexibility of the medium allows for the unconscious to be captured.  I am interested in exploring abstraction in Matthew Collings’statement that ‘form is feeling’

My work has always been based on internal architectonic forms that relate to mood and remain as a residue of feeling. The space in my work is private, idealised and invites the viewer to enter through illusion, but passages create ambiguity. The content of my work is about capturing this feeling and I am curious to explore whether this felt internal space links with the concept of Poiesis and if this space that could possibility be  Poemagogic and can be transcribed through Praxis and  drawing.

Poiesis as a concept that links to Ehrenzweig’s ‘poemagogic’, ‘percepts’ and even what Diana Pethridge refers to as Deleuze and Guatari’s ‘Rhizomic model’ interests me. Poiesis as a word derives from poetry and to me this word has metaphorical and idealised formal connotations.  This term was also utilised by Heidegger as a concept describing the ‘bringing forth’ process whilst creating an art work. There has been a longstanding relationship between Poiesis and Praxis since Aristotle and the term Poiesis is often used in science as  meaning ‘creation, production’. I have an interest in Poiesis as a word that can describe metaphor and creation  and Praxis as an application. Praxis links with materiality, Greenberg’s ‘media purity’ concepts and the medium being applied through action or marks or as a ‘verb’

My work is connected to formalism and modernism and I am interested in drawing in terms of what Diana Pethridge refers to in the Primacy of Drawing  as ‘affective semiotics of design and composition’.  I am also interested in how  Kandinsky’s  ‘necessity’ and purity of form  can be formally organised though drawing and applied through the hand. My work is connected to Tachism, it is also connected to the Malevich’s ‘fourth dimension’ non-objective idealised concepts - but I seek to utilise formal devices through applying drawing principles. Drawing directly within painting and collages allows me to create compositions that are not pre-conceived. Drawing also allows a process to find the work and tap into what Ehrenzweig’s describes as’ 'polyphony' and 'poemagogic ' phantasy. Drawing  can also construct space through erasure, collage and line and this direct medium often uses juxtaposing devices and visual tension and this becomes a spacial platform. This constructed space created through drawing is a visual pathway and the viewer can travel on Kandinsky’s ‘point, line to plane’.  I  have an interest in understanding how I can access and transcribe the unconscious ‘Hidden Order of Art’ through materials and plastic application of form.  I am intrigued by drawing’s ability to be direct, immediate and ‘primal’ and translate the senses through the hand.