Nevena Tsoneva sings a Bulgarian folk song "Delio Haidutin"

I adore music like this. For some reason it reminds me of music we heard in Western China. Like Tibetan (?) or Mongolian singing...

Back Home Under Unfortunate Circumstances

It’s been close to six weeks since I prematurely came back from a world trip. The circumstances under which we came home were not ideal. During the past six weeks I’ve been in a strange place. Maybe that’s why I feel like I’m in a huge rut. It's been that strange that I haven't been able to bring myself to sit in front of a computer and get out my thoughts.

My partner and I were in Serbia when we got an email asking us to call home. My partner called, and the news was that his mother, who a year ago had been diagnosed with cancer, was going to undertake treatment again. The first few rounds hadn’t worked, so another round was necessary. We decided it was best to go home. Three flights later, we arrived in Melbourne.

It was a good thing too, for about a month after our return she passed away.

This past month was the only time I got to spend with her. I had spoken to her on the phone before, but we had never met until that day she came out to the airport to greet her son.

Since returning, I’ve had a real bad run, creatively speaking. I can’t bring myself to sit down and do anything. It could also be that my usual tools aren’t with me yet, so all I can do is walk around at a loss for what to do. It's this really subtle feeling of impermanence. The weather has not been nice. There are probably heaps of reasons as to why I can’t bring myself to do anything creative. But I picked up my camera today and took a few shots, and this was intensely satisfying. I hope this is a sign for things to come.

A grey post to re-start the blog, but it needed to be done. I feel things will turn up once I’ve passed this stage of limbo.

The 'History' in Art History

My sudden thoughts at night before falling asleep, May 2010, Hue, Vietnam (this photo isn’t from Vietnam. It’s from a reclining Buddha in Ayutthaya, Thailand): To do Art History well, one needs to know history.

Maybe that was my problem. The more I read things like ‘Kowai E (Scary Pictures)’ and listen to things like ‘A History Of The World In 100 Objects’, I realise that these authors’ skill is in understanding the time and place from which the objects of their enquiry came from. They are able to inferring and conclude many things because they are able to situate these things within a historical and cultural context. Knowledge of these times and places give clues about the art works, and from there deeper understanding can be gained about the work itself.

So back in my first year and second year university days, I found art history a real chore. I found the topics interesting and I was intrigued by a lot of the art work we saw, but I could not, for the love of life, do visual analysis (ie Hoch’s montages use images that have been torn by hand, and this rough edge creates a sense of unease in the viewer, the tension is further enhanced by the way the woman’s eyes have been torn out, the colours are cool colours which gives the image a subdude and tiring tone etc etc). I still hate visual analysis for the sake of visual analysis (fair enough that first year art history requires students to do that), because it often seemed to bring too much back to the individual artist. There is plenty of validity in this approach, but I found this limiting and frustrating.

What I didn’t realise, until recently is that what I should have done was to take the step from the artist to the society s/he was working in (so the previous analysis should read more like: Hoch’s use of montage, which juxstaposes the mundane and crude mass produced print image with her organic painting style, is making a statement about the frantic pace of contemporary life in a society which is realising the limitations of modernity and industrialisation, and this point is further visible in the choice of muted and soiled colours she uses etc etc). Because obviously artists are from historical and cultural contexts too. And add more primary and secondary sources, like other historians, to paint an image of the world at large. It seems as though I was too caught up in the individual’s life and individualness, I forgot the ‘historical’ part of art history.

So in a nut shell, what I should have done was: take a piece of art work, describe it, situate it in a time and place, and then from that time and place make inferences about the work. You need to know about the time and place from which the art and artist came from to make sense of it. By understanding a bit about the context of the artwork, you can further think about what the significance of that art work is. It took me a while to realise this fact (because, you know, I’m not so tuned in on things like that and I’m not such an art freak).

So the other reason, probably, that I couldn’t make this mental leap was because back then I didn’t have such a good grip on history. My idea of history, while probably not so narrow compared to my peers, was still not very broad. I was only getting a sense of the fluidity of categories and ideas, of the movement of peoples and thoughts. I knew of certain events and people, of some ideas that have shaped our world and so on. And it’s only really recently, while on my travels, that I’ve really felt what this all means. What I mean is, I think I’ve got a much more grounded feel for human history.

And asking a 18 year old to be able to mix that historical understanding with visual art analysis is really asking a lot, I feel.

It might sound like I’m suggesting this is what art historians are trying to do, and that’s the approach they should take; a broad historical one in which art is one of the things that can be studied. That’s not what I’m saying, but I do feel this is more towards my preference. Like I said earlier, there is merit in studying more closely an individual artist’s biography and philosophy to understand art, and I find this is particularly useful for studying modern artists. Especially since there seems to be a case were the identity of the artist has become core to a piece of art work, the genius artist and the artist as an avant garde who challenges the established world order and ways of thinking and all of that. But my personal interest is in the large scale. The broadness of the world, the ideas that construct our world and realities, the transformation and migration of thoughts and world views, and how this is expressed and inherent in the visual artefacts that we create.

Kudos to Scott McCloud!

I just had an absolute ball reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. It did a lot of things for me, but it just made me realise how really fascinating symbols are. It really is truly amazing why certain artworks come across the way they do. I can't even begin to articulate clearly what effect McCloud's work had on me, but it was a really intellectual and acadmic dissection of the genre of comics.

Just over the last couple of days, I've really felt like I've been getting in touch with my roots again. Why did I ever start drawing in this manga style anyway? Why was I always drawn (har har) to the comic form? Firstly, the manga style (whatever that may be), I think, is purely something that appeals to me. Hands down, nothing else more to be said. Any style will be liked and disliked by other people, and I guess for me, I really like a certain strain of manga style..not everyone's cup of tea. No doubt. And as for why comics, that is, sequential art? I think it's because it works as a substitute for music. I'm really not very musically oriented...I love music and am just amazed by the fact that some people can even compose and make music the way they do. It's such an alien process for me... I was never naturally inclined to make music the way I am inclined to draw.

Anyway, as a substitute for music... Sequential art, obviously, plays with time and space. And pace. It's this message carried through progression of time (or in the case of sequential art, the illusion of progressing time) that is really empowering in a way that a single illustration cannot be. It's... really tricky business, to really control the flow of the narrative. The more I think about it, the more amazing it is that comic artists are able to do it, and that readers are able to link images together and make a coherent sequence out of two or more images placed next to each other. Really crazy stuff. I've always listened to music when drawing, and on the rare occasion that I comic. In part it was to set the mood of the piece and put my mind in another world, but I also now suspect it's because I like that sensation of being swept away by that sense of flying, or dreaming (as a side point, I was discussing with The Boy that the music I like is generally something with a heavy beat, jagged, epic, bold and distinct, rather than the more subdude and lulling, wishy-washy music like Love Generation (sorry, not a big fan of that piece)). And now that I think of it, it's probably also a substitute for dance. I love to dance, I love watching dance... movement, basically. You can do movement and time in comic form. A bit hard to mix the both in a single image, without some sort of sequence in it.

But then by that reasoning I should really fancy movies. But I've never been a big movie person. My collegues and The Boy are always horrified by my lack of movie knowledge. Again, I never had this desire to really get into movies. I think it's because movies generally don'tgive me much interaction. Most of the time, because it's filming 'real' things, your scope for imagination is more limited than when you watch an animation, which is a series of icons more flexible than those icons we see in film. So what I mean by 'interaction' is kind of what McCloud talkes about... Drawn images are really flexible in what they convey because of the lines we use, the level of detail in them, and the level of abstraction in them - an accurate reflection of our physical reality, which is what photos and film capture, doesn't allow for this level of flexibility. The beauty of symbols and icons. I was really fascinated by semiotics when I first heard about it at uni, and maybe it was that initial excitement... I was reacting to the excitement of the power of symbols and various interpretation? (I find the variety of human interpretation and perception of things really interesting too. But that's a topic for another day).

I'm not dissing film, photography or any other kind of art form, and apologies if it comes across that way. I guess I'm just becoming more aware of why my tastes are the way they are. It's only really kind of dawned on me that I keep coming back to this style and medium for a reason. It appeals to me on all sorts of fronts. It sits well with me, I'm familiar with it. I wonder if I would be more into photography (of real, serious things unlike the frivolous subjects I choose to photograph like cute pudgy salt shakers and very beautiful and delicate 'anime-like' dolls) if I was so naturally inclined? I guess so. But I'm not. I think I've explored the media available to me in the scope that's possible - coloured inks, gouache, some acrylics (dismal failure), oil pastels (some hope), charcol... and I eventually slip back to what I ultimately like.

So I say now, but you never know, I might change my mind a few months, years, decades down the track. And that's cool too :)

I couldn't even half express what I wanted to, but I think I might need to calm down a bit more to write something a bit more coherent...

:: Edited August 2010 ::