THROW OUT THE GARBAGE

I really like completing a drawing and then posting it the same day. Somehow, the immediacy of this action is better than posting a drawing done say two years ago.

I was thinking about malic moulds because of previous posts as well as because of the input of our far flung correspondent, Robert, on the subject. I have discovered that dressmaking patterns are great malic mould generators. For example, I found this image on the web of a 15th C brocaded dress pattern. It reminds me of malic molds. And so I used these dress patterns to make my drawing. Possibly the basic form generation is evident via simple projections and manipulations from the form outline.

So more thoughts on the Large Glass and malic moulds.  Duschamp was asked by Francis Roberts why he felt compelled to paint on glass? Duschamp’s answer:

The main point is the subject, the figure. It needs no reference. It is not in relation. All that background on the canvas that had to be thought about, tactile space like wallpaper, all that garbage, I wanted to sweep it away. With the glass you can concentrate on the figure if you want and you can change the background if you want by moving the glass. The transparency of the glass plays for you. The question of painting in background is degrading for the painter. The thing you want to express is not in that background. (Roberts, Laws of Physics p. 63)

And then Dalia Judovitz gives us this relevant meditation:

By using the transparency of glass as a medium, Duchamp denies one of the signatory marks of painting, that of figure/ground relations. By using glass, Duchamp reduces the notion of pictorial background to a readymade, one that changes with the position of the glass. This gesture liberates the subject matter of painting…as well as redefines it as a new site. This site is no longer governed by the regime of sight, of pictorial vision, but its deferral as pictorial becoming. The figure in this work is merely an allegorical appearance whose logic stages its own representational conventions as an apparition. (Judovitz. Unpacking Duschamp. p60)

Transparency indeed dispenses with the figure ground.  It happens in the Large Glass and in happens on your piece of paper.  Throw out the garbage. We are being liberated from pictorial vision. The figures are our content. And the pictorial background becomes irrelevant. We are free to focus on what matters to us as problem solvers.

Like I said before, the path we walk has already been traversed by Duschamp.

And so we draw.