Mantis

Hymenopus coronatus, also called H. bicornis, is a mantis from the rain forests of southeast Asia. It is known by various common names including walking flower mantis and (pink) orchid mantis. It is one of several species known as flower mantises from their resemblance and behaviour.

This species is characterized by brilliant coloring and a structure finely adapted for camouflage, mimicking parts of the orchid flower. The four walking legs resemble flower petals,^[1] the toothed front pair being used as in other mantises for grasping prey.
H. coronatus shows some of the most pronounced sexual dimorphism of any species of mantis; males can be less than half the size of females.^[2]
First stage nymphs mimic bugs of the family Reduviidae, which have a powerful bite and are foul tasting.^[3]
The mantis can change its colour between pink and brown, according to the colour of the background.

Excerpt from Wikipedia.












Phyllocrania Paradoxa - Ghost Mantis

Compared to many other praying mantises, the Ghost Mantis is a "miniature species"^[3] growing to only about 45 to 50 millimetres (1.8 to 2.0 in) long.^[2]
It comes in various brownish shades from very dark brown (almost black) to greenish gray. An individual's colors change between molts and are also dependent on light and humidity levels.^[2][3]
Phyllocrania paradoxa is camouflaged so as to appear as dead, dried-up leaf material.^[5] It has an elongated head, a flattened, extended prothorax (together referred to as its "elaborate headdress and shoulder shields" by one enthusiast),^[4] and leaf-like protrusions from its limbs.^[5] The mantis also has a forewing that looks like a desiccated leaf,^[1] and the "creases" in the wings are actually shadings of pigment.







 

12/02/14 Sign Up Tutorial, Stephen Boyd

Notes:
Frans Hals Museum - Glenn Brown

Botanical drawings - a method of description, bringing reality to the imaginary drawings

Mark Wallinger - hybrid race horses
--> joggling of two images 'grafted' together

Cabinet of curiosities - taxidermy mash ups, point in history before specialism (Wunderkabinett)

Pierre-Joseph Redouté - roses, botanical watercolours
--> Teylers Museum

Tree grafting (process)

Create sculptures/3D versions of plants like in my drawings, draw, document them

Binding papers together through water/pressure - pressing seeds/plant parts into soaked paper

Drawings in colour?

Drawings work better small, could go even smaller

Grafting artworks together - making viewer aware that they are imaginary drawings, showing imaginary aspects

Show the 'seams' of how the drawings/artworks are grafted/collaged together
Scar Tissue - grafts/gaps in my drawings? Fill them in, but make it clear it's another part of the drawing, not blended in

Dutch tulip vase - rarity/aesthetics of plant dictate social position, how they are displayed/privileged

Thomas Struth - photos of people viewing artwork, mirroring

How will the drawings be received?

Cyanotype - botanical drawings? Draw from the photographic centre - follows the circular scope of drawings, ideas mentioned before

Vitamin D - Chinese artists achieving a lot of detail without a huge effort/time dump

Treating paper before drawing - pushing drawing beyond the comfort zone of the white, flat paper
Silverpoint drawing

List conventions I'm following in my work and what they announce, e.g. botanical illustration conventions

photograms of natural/plant material, malformations of nature (no name given, try to find artist)
Angela Easterling?

Get transparent mapping pins for displaying drawings, work well under lighting

Artist Statement (Draft 2)

My work has always used nature as a major source of inspiration, not only for its beauty but also for the more grotesque side of nature which is equally as fascinating. I delve into the aspects of the symbiotic or parasitic relationships between organisms such as fungi and their hosts. Whether they’re living alongside the organisms around them, or are parasites, damaging or killing the organisms they live on. I try to convey the uneasiness we feel when looking at such relationships in nature through my work.

Creating a response from the audience is as much a part of my work as the work itself. With previous works I have made how the audience can view the work illicit emotional responses; uneasy or self-conscious as they edge around the work that is often across the floor space, in fear of damaging it. The work prevents them from being simply passive, and the ideas of non-confinement in my work are one factor that creates this. The artwork appears to take over the space, the walls, the floor, and could continue to advance towards the audience also creating anxious feelings within the viewer. 

After looking into the work of Giuseppe Penone and society’s relationship with nature in his work, and botanical artists such as Sarah Simblet, drawing has begun to take a more central role in my practice. Observing forms directly from nature, the works then become more abstract as the forms change through the drawing process.  Altering and mutating the natural forms until they no longer represent the reality of nature, but instead become strange an unearthly. Looking at nature under a microscope can also illicit these same feelings, where what is viewed underneath the microscope becomes otherworldly, peculiar. Bringing nature up through scientific methods such as botanical illustration and the microscope, the work that result from these investigations develop more organically. No longer rigid and accurate like the scientific analysis of nature, but instead more intuitive and impulsive, the work seems to progress across the page naturally.

I've received this book that I ordered in the post today. I decided to buy this book on Giuseppe Penone as it covers his more recent work, as well as looking back over his whole artistic career, and adds another interesting book to my personal art library that I can refer back to. From what I've read so far, I've discovered a lot of new things about his work. I believe this book was published alongside an exhibition of his work at Art Gallery of Ontario, webpage here:

http://www.ago.net/giuseppe-penone-the-hidden-life-within/

 "Penone’s practice pulsates with an awareness of a common vital force in all living things. Insights are gained through physical exploration of space. This ongoing exchange between the self and the world can be seen in the way Penone relates his art to nature — an interaction between inner and outer realms. Inspired by the quiet slowness of growth in the natural world, the work suggests a sense of time much broader than that encountered in our daily existence."

“My artwork shows, with the language of sculpture, the essence of matter and tries to reveal with the work, the hidden life within.”
–Giuseppe Penone

I've began to read one of the essays within the book, and it draws on some comparisons I've been mulling over in my mind between Penone's and Richard Long's work. The essay articulates some of the similarities they share that I haven't been able to pin down myself. I'll be writing about this essay and comparison in more detail once I've read and understood it thoroughly. I felt that there were bound to be similarities between their works, as Arte Povera and Land Art were taking place at around the same time, and seem to hold similar ideas and sensibilities.

Another drawing I've created, along with a few others which I'm not as happy with or haven't finished.  I'm pleased with how these drawings are happening, and once I've drawn enough I'm going to start combining parts of my own drawings together to create 'hybrids' instead of the research and inspiration I currently have up on my wall from the book Botany for the Artist. I think by creating more drawings from the ones I've already done, I may start to pin down ideas from them, such as what works and what doesn't within these drawings - their composition, how they appear on the page, balance etc.

What do I want to say in my work? Who am I as an artist?

With quite a few revelations regarding my work this past week, I've been thinking about my work and what it's about this weekend quite a lot. What is it I want to comment on/discuss in my work? I mention science a lot, but is it really what my work is about? Is it something I want to comment on in my artwork, or something I'm just interested in? I understand that I couldn't possibly include everything I'm interested in, in my artwork, so it could be that science is just more of a personal interest instead of the main subject in my work. I may use some scientific methods in my work, but are they really me commenting on science? Or do I use these methods as another way of looking at the objects I'm studying? And if science is a part of the message I want to discuss in my work, what do I even mean by 'science'? It is such a broad term and encompasses so many things, I think that I've been using it too loosely.

I think, maybe, that I'm not so interested in science in terms of commenting on it in my work, and more using it as a tool to explore nature in my work. Having a personal interest in it doesn't mean I have to include it in my artwork so wholly, and this is where I've been struggling, I think. While using a microscope may be seen to be referencing science, but it may be just nothing more than a tool to view nature with technology that allows us to see it in another way - closer up, in a more narrow, focused view from the whole of 'nature'. Looking through the microscope, you can only see what's in the circular lens, unlike in a forest where you are surrounded by elements of nature that can become overwhelming to the senses. But is this what I want to comment on in my work (how we view nature)? I'm not entirely sure, it may be a part of what I'm trying to draw upon in my art. Or it could be more similar to artists like Giuseppe Penone, wherein he comments on mans relationship with nature. Maybe I'm commenting on our relationship with nature, and how we view it through the scope of technology/science. However, this still doesn't feel quite right to me.

Is it simply a discussion on how I view nature? I often focus in on the smaller details, like when I'm on a walk in the forest. The texture of the bark on a particularly interesting tree, the fungi growing on an old tree stump, how the roots of the forest create natural 'staircases' on the hills. I tend to focus less on the whole, and more on the smaller microcosm of nature. If this is the case, is this enough to warrant creating work worth looking at to other people? Possibly, maybe not. I understand this may have more to do with my own confidence issues at the moment.

The video on the Whitehcapel Gallery website about Spazio di Luce. Giuseppe Penone talks about the process of creating the work for the exhibition and gives some great information and insight into the work.

During a tutorial last semester Liz suggested that I look at Giuseppe Penone's exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. I looked at it briefly but for some reason I never really referenced it or used it in my work. I decided to look again properly this time, and although I was disappointed I never knew about the show before it ended, they have a lot of information on their website, including downloads with information, gallery plans etc. I decided to buy the exhibition catalogue for this exhibition, as it looked to have a lot of information on the artist.

It seems to have been a valuable purchase, as it contains a lot of information not only on the exhibited work, but past work and includes previously unpublished drawings of his - something I am studying closely. I'll have to read this thoroughly to make a final opinion. It's a shame I didn't get to see the exhibition in person, however.

Link to the page on Whitechapel gallery website.

Seminar - The Research Question 28/01/14

Art as experimental
Art as conceptual
Thinking and making
Judgement - intuitive (need knowledge and understanding of art to be a good judge)
Analysis
Critical Distance

Romantic concept of art - inspiration hits from nowhere, no idea how or why art is created, intuitive, happens by magic

Producing work focuses research and could also be research

'The Essential Guide to Doing Research'

You can't formulate a research question without doing research or being informed

Concept mapping: thesaurus, synonyms of words/ideas can help develop a question or argument

 I found some recent articles about Giuseppe Penone in national newspapers:

In The Studio: Giuseppe Penone:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/in-the-studio-giuseppe-penone-artist-8456217.html

An article in the Independent about Giuseppe Penone, and his studio/how he works.

Whitechapel Gallery review:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/sep/03/giuseppe-penone-arte-povera-whitechapel-gallery

A review in The Guardian about Giuseppe Penone's recent show, Spazio di Luce, at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Giuseppe Penone

Having looked briefly at Giuseppe Penone's work last semester on a superficial level, I want to continue to look at him more closely this semester as I feel looking at his artistic practice may hold a lot of inspiration for me. To begin I took some books out of the library about his work, in addition to his writing as I think it's another way he used to explore his ideas and work, and may be something I want to start doing as well. He has a very poetic way of writing. In the books I have about his writing, it includes images of his artwork in addition to sketches and drawings he creates while trying to imagine his works. I think I need to look more closely at his sketches and drawings, and possibly find out more about them, as his way of panning out his works could be of some benefit to me. I don't tend to sketch out ideas for work in this way, and I think it's something I should start doing more often as it could result in even better, more resolved work.

Reading about Penone's work, there is a lot of reference to touch, the human body and its relationship to nature, the limits of the body. This really links in with the workshops and lectures I had with Robert Luzar last year, and the ideas he was discussing. I should revisit these I think, and what I learnt from them. I reordered one of his lectures so I will post it on here and listen to it again. I also had a tutorial with Luzar last year, and he gave me some good insight into these kinds of ideas to do with touch, so in a way my work relates to this much more than I first realised. He also gave me a reading list, such as Corpus, by Jean-Luc Nancy, which I have started to read so will definitely finish as it also links in strongly to this. There are a lot of philosophical elements here that I should really research and consider, in Penone's work and what Robert Luzar discussed in the workshops and with myself.

Examples of the video's I took on my phone of some of the drawings from last semester, after Stephen Boyd's tutorial. While I can see why he suggested to create these videos, I'm not entirely sure how to approach creating drawings from them. I'll try to do this, as it may produce something of worth or develop an idea further.

Once I've created several more of these quick drawings, such as the two in my previous post, I think that I'll begin drawing them on a much larger scale, to see what impact they have and how they'll work. I have a large roll of paper so I could make them wall sized, and I think this will be a good test to see how I could display such drawings as well. Will they work if I display them on the floor, for example? Or simply hung on the wall? Draped from the wall to the floor? In their own frame, free standing in a space? There are lots of possibilities to consider - my next curatorial challenge.

Botany for the Artist, Sarah Simblet

I decided to look back through my book, 'Botany for the Artist', to gain some more ideas of where I can look in nature, without the idea of 'nature' overwhelming me and being to broad. While I used this book as a part of my inspiration last semester, I want to continue to use it as I feel it's still very relevant to what I want to do in my work. However, I intend to use it in a different way to last time, and instead of using it as the inspiration to create scientifically accurate representations of plants, I want to use it as inspiration to create well drawn, 'hybrid'plants, or 'creatures' that look alive, look as if they could start moving or growing and taking over the page, similar to a drawing I created last year, seen below.

I left this drawing incomplete, partly on purpose, to elude to the idea that it could continue to 'grow'. However I don't feel it was executed as well as it could have been, and I feel that I could have worked on the drawing for a little longer.

After creating some drawings based on one of the drawings and other ideas I've had, I realised that I'm limiting the content in them by looking at such a narrow range of images. I looked through this book and my own drawings. There were some pages within Sarah Simblet's book that stood out to me, such as a page about the anatomy of a flower, where some of the parts of the flower, such as a petal, were dismembered from the whole, separated and seen 'floating' in the page, similar to how I planned out my first drawing last semester. Looking through these pages, the drawings I'd already created and ideas generating in my own head, I came up with the idea to combine elements of different plants to create these two drawings above. Combining fungi, roots, leaves, petals, and whatever else may come to my mind, I created these drawings and will generate quite a few more until I decide I have enough to continue to develop the idea.

I feel that these have been more successful than my first attempt last semester, and communicate the idea I have better, as they look like a more 'polished', complete drawing because the idea I have is more solid now. I think with these drawings I feel a part of my confidence coming back, which is good.

This is the page from my sketchbook from last semester that turned out to be much more relevant than I first thought. I thought it was just a quick sketch page, with nothing particularly interesting, but after my tutorial with Stephen Boyd and my feedback with Liz I can see now that it isn't.

I'm going to re-use this page in my current sketchbook, as I feel it alludes to the ideas discussed about using a circular frame for my drawings, and then drawing more intuitively beyond the frame, like I have done on this page. Forenow though, I'm going to be working on drawing in general and bringing in the circular frame at a later date, as I'm not entirely sure how I will make it work yet.