Notes from the Rift/Love is a Battlefield

I’ve intended to expand the content of this blog to include remarks on my own studio practice for some time now, most especially since remarking on Kristen Peterson’s approach to documenting her work and the ways in which access to an artist’s practical concerns can help to demystify the process of art-making and hopefully start tackling yet another barrier standing between the artist and the world-at-large. Seeing as I’ve recently started a new suite of four drawings, now seems as good a time as any to finally heed my own advice.

The content of these four ink drawings - images and short textual cues from a Victorian-era guide to a form of cane-and-umbrella-based martial art alternately called Bartitsu or Baritsu - has cropped up before in my work in a few different forms, typically in painting (back when I used to paint with greater regularity) and more notably in a stalled book work. None of those approaches ever came close to tackling the root of my fascination with the subject, and when it came time to dutifully pack away my stack of source material for my move from Glasgow to Derbyshire, it all remained in storage until the next move back to Canada last summer.

By the time I was making work in Hamilton again, I had started taking advantage of my restored access to a university library and was reading Heidegger (among others), particularly his ‘Origin of the Work of Art.’ Its occasional silliness aside, I’m a huge fan of what he has to say about the notion of a rift where opposing forces clash and generate the work of art - I’m simplifying the concept, of course, but I think the man himself can sum up the degree of difference and similarity actually at work here:

‘Strife is not a rift [Riss], as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other. This rift carries the opponents into the provenance of their unity by virtue of their common ground.’

At the same time as I was processing that nugget, I was carrying out a related but more practical experiment with rifts, this one a mere accident of a photocopier that created a creased shadow in a double-page book illustration I’d collected for research purposes, and now seemed a potent starting point for further investigation.

The Rift (Sapphire), 2007

Technically speaking, this represented a huge departure in the way I typically handle ink, but I did find that the soft wash and lack of distinct lines made the rift itself a more plausible image. I also enjoyed the vague sense of conspiracy present in the all-female gathering, and for the sake of balance a male analogue seemed appropriate.

The Rift (Steel), 2007

Unfortunately, I did find this far less satisfactory. I blame the composition in part, but ultimately found that the soft focus, watery ink approach that made women’s gowns from the 1850s seem so rippling and suggestive just translated into dull rubbish when applied to men’s suits from the turn of the last century.

However, I was still fascinated by that rift. A comment on the titles of these two pieces would be appropriate here, as they are coyly referential to Sapphire & Steel, a short-lived British sci-fi melodrama from around the time I was born that clearly drew its budget from the producer’s niece’s piggy bank but, along with some of the more classic instances of Doctor Who, clearly illustrates the potential to create truly unsettling scenarios with cheap and minimal visual cues. It’s that sort of deceptive simplicity that keeps me dedicated to drawing as a medium, and which made the idea of a rift that is both a density of ink and a badly photocopied book crease so compelling to my lo-fi sensibilities.

I was eager to tackle the concept again, preferably in a simpler form so as not to devour another three weeks of my studio time, and so I selected a solitary figure from my archive, and made sure she was female so as to avoid my irritation with male dress sense.

Bent, 2008

Without context, that vertical shadow in space (and time, as I like to think) becomes far more ambiguous, and somewhat more sinister when towering over a single figure. In the interests of experimentation, I also revised my handling of the ink washes, using similar loose washes only to contain their fluid shapes with fine outlines at each layer.

Besides articulating the details of the drawing itself in a way far more pleasing to my persnickety eye, the process of tracing each liquid trace in turn has a stronger relationship to the temporal concerns that have been emerging in my drawing practice lately. But the latter is a story best kept for another day. In either case, I found I had arrived at a way of addressing the rift while incorporating figures in relation to that rift capable of a more dynamic presence in the drawing.

And suddenly, those gentlemen engaged in their polite combat had the ideal means by which to come out and play. Their strange violence feeds well into the rift as an ambiguous threat, and the possibility of including the text of the Bartitsu manuals brings the image back into the realm of the book as a source of the rift.

These drawings are two layers into the process of building up a sufficient density of ink to make the rift read as such, by which point the colour will have transitioned from that delightfully feminine pink to an arterial reddish-purple - though the sexual ambiguity of the colour choice is obviously just another layer in the tension of the violence/etiquette occurring in the images themselves. Just another reason why drawing ideas can be far more satisfying that the mere discussion or writing of them - particularly when accidents occur like those droplets of ink over the word ‘position’ in that last image, which made me panic for two seconds before I realized that I rather liked the result in a materially-relevant, Kill Bill-style sort of way. The trick will be achieving it elsewhere in the series without overdoing the effect.

With two figures engaged here as well, I’m also realizing that there’s room to physically entangle the contour lines of the ink blots even while I continue to build and differentiate the forms from each other. Given the underlying intimacy of both image and text, it certainly seems a positive yet subtle visual move. Form and content, fitting together like fish and chips. Or spaghetti and meatballs. It’s dinner time, isn’t it?

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