Gum Bichromate Experiment

I have had this image sitting on my desk for ages and wanted to share it as an illustration of the (partially finished) art process. So many of my Google+ Artist friends share their drawings and paintings, and I think this fits in that category, although it a photograph.

This is a gum bichromate treatment of a photo of my grandmother. Gum bichromate is an alternative film-based technique that I learned in a workshop at Gallery 44, which thankfully still promotes antiquarian processing.

The image here is in its rough state, and you can see the masking tape that attached the image for exposure, as well as the pigment brush-strokes that given the impression of having been painted by Francis Bacon (of the screaming popes).

From Fox Talbot to Robert Demachy, from the Lumière brothers to Heinrich Kühn, the bichromate process has a long and varied history spanning well over a century. After falling out of common use for an extended period of time, a resurgence in gum printing began again in the 1970′s through the writings and work of a new generation of artists. It is essentially a modified watercolour. This one was done on Arches paper and has a heavy, antique feel to it.

Gum bichromate (or dichromate) printing involves creating a working emulsion made of three components:

Gum arabic
A dichromate (usually ammonium or potassium)
Pigment

The emulsion is spread on a support, such as paper, and allowed to dry. A negative or matrix is then laid over top the emulsion and exposed to a UV light source. Usually a contact printing device or a sheet of heavy glass to ensure even, constant contact is employed. The light source hardens the dichromate in proportion to the densities of the negative. After exposure, the paper is placed in a series of plain water baths and allowed to develop until the unhardened portions of the emulsion have dissipated.

Dream of the Japanese Maple

"It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them." (Man Ray)

A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light.

The technique is sometimes called cameraless photography. It was used by Man Ray in his exploration of rayographs. Other artists who have experimented with the technique include László Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad (who called them "Schadographs"), Imogen Cunningham and Pablo Picasso. Variations of the technique have also been used for scientific purposes.

Some of the first photographic images made were photograms. William Henry Fox Talbot called these photogenic drawings, which he made by placing leaves and pieces of material onto sensitized paper, then left them outdoors on a sunny day to expose. This produced a dark background with a white silhouette of the object used.

From 1843, Anna Atkins produced a book titled _British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions_ ; it was the first book to be illustrated with photographs. The images were all photograms of botanical specimens, which she made using Sir John Herschel's cyanotype process, which yields blue images. 


Photograms were used in the 20th century by a number of photographers, particularly Man Ray, who called them "rayographs". His style capitalised on the stark and unexpected effects of negative imaging, unusual juxtapositions of identifiable objects (such as spoons and pearl necklaces), variations in the exposure time given to different objects within a single image, and moving objects as the sensitive materials were being exposed.

This photo would be a negative of a photogram, had the film image not been taken with my Nikon FE in late October. These are leaves from a Japanese garden that have fallen into a pond.

(Thank you, Wikipedia!)

The Hero With a Thousand Faces

This is one of my first Lensbaby (Xmas present to me) experiments - a pair of wooden angel wings from a Quebec church, and now part of my collection of folk art. They hang on my wall and I suppose one could wear them, literally or figuratively.

I am a huge fan of Joseph Campbell's writing, and love how he weaves the stories and archetypes of religions and mythologies into a pattern. Campbell explores the theory that important myths from around the world which have survived for thousands of years all share a fundamental structure, which Campbell called the monomyth.

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

His The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949, is a non-fiction book, and seminal work of comparative mythology. He discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies. Since publication, Campbell's theory has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. The best known is perhaps George Lucas, who has acknowledged a debt to Campbell regarding the stories of the Star Wars films.

Joseph Campbell talks to Bill Moyers about the hero within...

Moyers: Does your study of mythology lead you to conclude that a single human quest, a standard pattern of human aspiration and thought, constitutes for all mankind something that we have in common, whether we lived a million years ago or will live a thousand years from now?

Campbell: There's a certain type of myth which one might call the vision quest, going in quest of a boon, a vision, which has the same form in every mythology. That is the thing that I tried to present in the first book I wrote, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you're in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again.

Moyers: How do I slay that dragon in me? What's the journey each of us has to make, what you call "the soul's high adventure"?

Campbell: My general formula for my students is "Follow your bliss." Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.

 http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/herojourney.html and Wikipedia

The Burning of the Leaves

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves,
They go to the fire; the nostrils prick with smoke
Wandering slowly into the weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin, and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.
The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust:
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! the reddest rose is a ghost.
Spark whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.
Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before,
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there:
Let them go to the fire with never a look behind.
That world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.
They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

Laurence Binyon, The Burning of the Leaves

Image: Sunflowers, October's End, © Jan McCartney 2011

Mother and Son

Among the many highlights of Marcel Proust's magnum opus In Search of Lost Time is the death of the writer Bergotte. Despite a potentially life-threatening case of uremia, Bergotte goes to a Parisian museum to view a favorite painting (Johannes Vermeer's View of Delft) after a local art critic points out a heretofore unseen detail, a patch of yellow wall "so well painted that it was, if one looked at it in isolation, like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty..." As Bergotte, increasingly lightheaded from his illness and mistaking it, rather comically, for indigestion, stares at and contemplates this new discovery he says to himself, "That is how I should have written," then repeats "little patch of yellow wall" several times before being fatally felled by a stroke.

Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son is itself a "little patch of yellow wall," a film to die to. The brilliance of Mother and Son is how it turns perspective and perception against us. Inspired by 19th century German painter, Caspar David Friedrich, this is a film compulsively aware of itself as two-dimensional; through the use of special distorting lenses, Sokurov collapses foreground, middle-ground, and background, erasing the illusion of depth. A static blur hangs, like an immovable fog, around the sides of the frame, effectively eliminating peripheral vision—and perhaps foreshadowing, as an artist's work is wont to do, Sokurov's recently rumored, slowly impending blindness.

This collapse of perspective applies equally to Mother (Gudrun Geyer) and Son (Aleksei Ananishnov), both of whom, as is clear from an opening scene in which they recall having the same dream, are elemental presences playing out an intimate and ritualistic death-rattle pas de deux. And yet there's a strong subversive undercurrent running through Mother and Son, suggesting its protagonists are somehow in collusion, attempting to cheat and ultimately escape divine law. This only becomes explicit in the film's final scene when the Son attends to his Mother's corpse and whispers, "We will meet where we agreed. Wait for me."

Full review at Slant Magazine.

Image: Sunflowers, © Jan McCartney, 2011

Lines

Draw a line. Write a line. There.
Stay in line, hold the line, a glance
between the lines is fine but don't
turn corners, cross, cut in, go over
or out, between two points of no
return's a line of flight, between
two points of view's a line of vision.
But a line of thought is rarely
straight, an open line's no party
line, however fine your point.
A line of fire communicates, but drop
your weapons and drop your line,
consider the shortest distance from x
to y, let x be me, let y be you.

Poem by Martha Collins from Some Things Words Can Do, Sheep Meadow Press, 1998

Image: Parking Lines, © Jan McCartney, 2011

The Monoliths

Zombie faces don't scare me, but the Monolith, with its mindless determination and relentless advance, makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The stuff of dreams, and there is no escape. The stuff of reality as well.

2011 - A Space Odyssey: In the most literal narrative sense, the Monolith is a tool, an artifact of an alien civilization. It comes in many sizes and appears in many places, always with the purpose of advancing intelligent life. Arthur C. Clarke has referred to it as "the alien Swiss Army Knife"; or as Heywood Floyd speculates, "an emissary for an intelligence beyond ours. A shape of some kind for something that has no shape."

(thanks, Wikipedia!)

Image: Monoliths, © Jan McCartney, 2011