Nikhil Chopra at the New Museum

Whilst enjoying your tea and scone in the cafe at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, you can also enjoy freshly-shorn piles of human hair, slowly decaying histories (and produce), and the artist Nikhil Chopra drawing high and low (and often in his underwear). "Memory Drawing IX" is a drawing performance that unites mark and theatre, chronicle and memory, allowing for viewers to physically enter the space of making (pictured, me, physically in the space of making).

From the NMCA press release: "Nikhil Chopra combines approaches associated with theater, portraiture, landscape drawing, photography, art actions, and installation to chronicle the world through live performance. As the Victorian draughtsman Yog Raj Chitrakar, Chopra haunts bustling market squares, forgotten old buildings, city streets, and museum galleries to make large-scale drawings. Within the performances, daily actions—washing, eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, shaving, and observing—are transformed into ritualistic spectacle. While an ambiguous past collides with an unstable present, Yog Raj Chitrakar reveals the process of documenting what he sees while exploring self-portraiture, autobiography, history, fantasy, and sexuality."

More information about Chopra at the New Museum is here.

Compass in Hand at the MoMA

Christian Rattemeyer introduces the exhibition "Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection." A stunning collection of work - do do do see it if you can, or the catalog is available from MoMA for $60 USD. Click below for video.

Quick Link to a Great Idea

This just in from Patrick Nugent, an inspiring union of drawing and digital projection.

Drawing Voyeurs Needed

From now until Friday, you can watch artist Stephen Wiltshire draw a 20' panorama of the New York City skyline while in residence at Pratt. Yeah, okay, you say - what's so interesting about that? Wiltshire carries a combination of autism and photographic memory - he does photorealistic renderings of cityscapes after seeing them for a short period of time. For this project, he was flown in a helicopter over NY for 20 minutes, enough time to lock the image in his mind, enabling him to render it in striking detail.

See the article and live webcast of the drawing-in-progress here.

Thanks, Jane!

Acquire FUKT

Well, it wouldn't be very polite to say 'Get' now, would it? Southern civility reigns. FUKT, the German contemporary drawing magazine, has just released its latest incarnation at the NY Art Book Fair earlier this month, and I gather that it is available at Printed Matter in Chelsea (yay for Printed Matter!!).

Featured artists include: Ante Timmermans, Charmaine Wheatley, Per Dybvig, Gert-Jan Akerboom, Heidi Linck, Jenny Mörtsell, Louise Hopkins, P. Nicolas Ledoux, Oskar Korsar, Stephen Marshall, Katja Eckert, Tina Jonsbu, William Powhida, and Björn Hegardt (ed).

See back issues and all other good info at http://www.fukt.de/index.html.

Prepare for SketchCrawl #25

Drawing communities are everywhere, and the web provides for instant visioning across the network. SketchCrawl is based in San Francisco, but has satellites around the world. For one day, every few months, members of the SketchCrawl network spend the day drawing, then post the evidence of time well-spent and a world well-seen. The groups range from couples to whole drawing mobs, and they are always looking for more members.

The next organized SketchCrawl day is November 21, 2009. If you are interested in joining up, go to their website to see if there is already a group forming in your town. If not, start one yourself - all instructions for doing so are on the FORUM section of their website:

http://www.sketchcrawl.com/

Drawing, the Social Discipline.

PS - I've organized one for Columbia, SC - go to the sketchcrawl website for more info!

Perfect Circles

Snipe Hunts and Freehand Circle Drawing Competitions (held in Vegas, annually) are both of enduring intrigue. The first time I heard of Pope Julius' request of young Michelangelo, I dedicated myself to mastering this performance of grace, with spotty success at best. Tonight, wonder was rekindled in the form of finding dozens of perfect circle drawers on YouTube. Starting with a math teacher from Ottowa who posted his circle (perfect!) in 2007, we are once again making the very best use of time and technology. A full page of circle vids can be found here, and the one that started it all is below. Circle on.

Blog on Blog Action

I think I mentioned before that it feels incestuous to blog about blogs, or at the very least a bit too navel-gazey, but a few decent illustration-related blogs have come into view in the past days, and I must share.

http://www.rocketfiction.com/ and http://www.scientificartist.blogspot.com/ (both by Paul Rivoche)
http://www.drawn.ca/ (swap meet)
http://www.linesandcolors.com/ (resources abound)
http://www.dailymonster.com/ (utterly and totally for fun)

There are enough links in the blogs above to keep one going for quite a nested run.

Resistance Drawing

I had the pleasure this week of being in a group drawing show with elin o'Hara slavick, an artist based out of UNC-Chapel Hill, whose series "Protesting Cartography" presents an expansive profile of the consequences of ongoing US military action at home and abroad. Slavick's artist talk further illumined the possibilities for drawing as a form of protest, be it quiet or screaming; many ideas from the talk can be found in the volume Bomb after Bomb, A Violent Cartography, which includes plates of her drawings, essays by Carol Mavor and Howard Zinn, and an in-depth interview with anthropolgist Catherine Lutz. Images of all the drawings can be seen here.

Working in a similar vein (and even a similar medium - gouache), artist Julie Weitz engages in terrorism-era social criticism via her abstract drawings of balaclavas. Reading the images of Weitz and slavick together offers a glimpse of powerful protest rendered through visually seductive drawings, both thoughtful aesthetic engagements with global issues.

Happy 10th Birthday, Big Draw!

This marks the 10th year for the Campaign for Drawing's month-long event known as the Big Draw. With over 1000 venues in play across the UK, the events encourage drawing as a part of daily creative practice. Drawing is defined in ways both generous and inclusive, and participation is welcome at all levels.

Full details and schedule are located here.

Avidly Seeking Drawing Maxims???

A storehouse awaits at http://quote.robertgenn.com/getquotes.php?catid=84&numcats=347 - one of 350+ categories of art quotations and observations maintained by Robert Genn, of the Painters Keys website. I have noticed some double attributions - could Balthus and Degas both have said, "One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil"? For that matter, I say that at least once a semester, could I get some credit as well? But seriously, the Genn collection is exhaustive, and great for inducing a quick "ah!"

Genn also is the force behind a twice-weekly email that often hits the nail on the studio head - http://clicks.robertgenn.com/ for archives and free subscription.

Drawing Conferences Abound!

In London, or plan to be there next week? Excellent. The Campaign for Drawing and the Drawing Research Network are co-hosting "Thinking Through Drawing," a one-day conference on October 8 featuring a series of talks by practitioners in the forefront of contemporary drawing. Please visit www.simcoe.co.uk/drawing/news.htm for full schedule and registration information.

And given that you're already in a conference mood, you will no doubt be wanting to also spend time at the Campaign for Drawing's international gathering, "Drawing for Learning, Engagement and Enjoyment". Held October 7 - 11, the conference schedule is packed with opportunities for discourse, pedagogy, and practice, including The Big Draw (longer post on TBD to follow).

"Writing on Drawing" Book Review on Artmatters.info

So, yes, this review is a wee bit dated, but I was thrilled to come across http://www.artmatters.info/, an art website based out of Nairobi. As a long-time adopted Capetonian, it was wonderful to see beyond the borders of ZA, and get a glimpse of Kenyan online art activity.

A book review of "Writing on Drawing" that weaves in the Kenyan perspective appears at:
http://artmatters.info/?p=1264

Arkansas Art Center

If you're looking for a small but diverse collection of drawings online to use as a classroom reference or simply to flip through for personal pleasure, the Arkansas Art Center has a compact but well-presented online resource. Spanning the 17th through 20th centuries, it is an excellent survey of works on paper.

Show Your Work

This may be basic information for most, but I have had several students ask recently how to go about exhibiting their work. Here are some good (free) listings of exhibition opportunities.

College Art Association:
http://www.collegeart.org/opportunities/type/3/

New York Foundation for the Arts:
http://www.nyfa.org/opportunities.asp?type=Opportunity&opp=OppArtist&id=95&fid=1&sid=54

Las Vegas Arts Commission:
http://www.lvartscommission.com/artist-opportunities/

Rhizome.org:
http://www.rhizome.org/

Chicago Artists Resource:
http://www.chicagoartistsresource.org/visual-arts

Scaling Up the Dream Mark

This is short, as the demon pneumonia has my attention (hack), but I wanted to link to the work of Matt Woodward, recently featured on spillspace.com. Woodward's scale is the one I am finding most intimate right now, as I'm looking at new drawings and how they're performed on the page. By intimate, I don't mean small, or precious, but inviting and enveloping. The drawings themselves are larger than life, but they feel like a whispered secret told by the body.

Classic Cinema! The Dot and the Line

Thanks to Amanda W for sending this Academy Award-winning animation by Chuck Jones (1965), based on the book by Norton Juster (1963). I still feel sorry for the squiggle - he's just a hep cat doin' his thing.

Mass Gesture

For the last two days, I've been coordinating a collaborative drawing project at Clemson University. Over 140 people participated in the making of the piece, which was framed as an experiment in accumulated gesture. Measuring 10x24 feet, the piece started with a texture rubbing of rice grains plus whatever people had in their pockets - change, keys, vitamins, headphones. The page was divided in half, and the two sides were developed very differently, each obeying a very separate logic of practice (one very formally controlled and systematic, the other driven by play and inventional gaming). The final act was to unify the entire piece in terms of both material and compositional flow.

Social metaphors emerged by the handful. The dyadic formal division was too extreme to be sustained if it were to remain one piece, so compromise was required. That took the form of a tenuous bipartisan drawing effort that was quickly buried by sea of heavier marks that indeed unified the piece but rendered it less nuanced. Tradeoffs occurred. Not everyone was pleased. Levels of personal investment and ownership varied radically, and the marks were an index of engagement. Moments of consensus were frequently reached, but then practice didn't necessarily follow from agreed-upon intention. Numerous parallels to the health care debate were drawn, in addition to thousands of marks. Many people drew big for the first time and loved it. It was a very good day.

Mouse Marks

www.odosketch.com is one of many online (etch-a-)sketch sites, but its pleasing palette and array of simple tools kept me happy for longer than the usual sixty seconds. It may be that because the palette is relatively limited, it makes for an interesting gallery collection of completed works - given the same few tools, what is the range of possibility? Clearly, reasonably vast.

Leaving the Trace

The temptation for a text-free post here is high, so I will partially indulge. Visit Lightmark. There is also strong temptation for puns involving a light-handed touch. No.