The sincerest form of flattery
Last night I unexpectedly went to see an exhibition of work by Nasreen Mohamedi. Hooray for late night opening art galleries and spontaneity with visiting Friend.
The photographs, drawings and artists' ephemera were all in black and white, including the framing, and the gallery is all white paint and grey concrete. My companion was even wearing black trousers and coat, so my total experience was almost entirely monochrome. Usually I'm all about the colour, but I found it really absorbing to be so starved of colour. The total effect was formal and austere and extremely impersonal. I really liked it, but could entirely understand how my companion didn't.
Most of the drawings were a bit too like technical drawings for my taste, but I thought most of the photographs were great. I particularly liked some photographs where she had started with fairly standard images - a dog on a verandah, some lecterns on desks, a child - and then drawn black lines round sections as if to crop them, refiguring them as abstract images - a curled hairy thing on some wood, some geometric shapes and shadows, a mouth and some beads.
I like photographing patterns myself, but this was a stage further into modernism than I usually go, so I thought I'd try doing likewise. I started with a fairly arbitrary selection of recent photos that I hadn't taken with patterns particularly in mind. Then I cropped them and made them black and white.
These are nothing like as austere and abstract as hers. I'm interested in how difficult it is to achieve those qualities. The closer up and smaller you crop, the more abstract it generally becomes, but her photographs weren't particularly close up, so I didn't allow myself to get too close up either. Her photos were mainly of inorganic materials and mine are natural things (well, if you count cord and bobbled fleece as natural) and I think it's partly that difference of subject that makes mine still relatively sensuous. But partly I suspect it's because it's so different from my usual photographic voice (insofar as a rank amateur like me can have a voice), despite the apparent similarity of a liking for fairly abstract patterns. As well, of course, as her being a proper artist and me not.
I guess this is another one of my suddenly seeing things differently moments. I love it.
This one I just couldn't bear to remove the colour:
The photographs, drawings and artists' ephemera were all in black and white, including the framing, and the gallery is all white paint and grey concrete. My companion was even wearing black trousers and coat, so my total experience was almost entirely monochrome. Usually I'm all about the colour, but I found it really absorbing to be so starved of colour. The total effect was formal and austere and extremely impersonal. I really liked it, but could entirely understand how my companion didn't.
Most of the drawings were a bit too like technical drawings for my taste, but I thought most of the photographs were great. I particularly liked some photographs where she had started with fairly standard images - a dog on a verandah, some lecterns on desks, a child - and then drawn black lines round sections as if to crop them, refiguring them as abstract images - a curled hairy thing on some wood, some geometric shapes and shadows, a mouth and some beads.
I like photographing patterns myself, but this was a stage further into modernism than I usually go, so I thought I'd try doing likewise. I started with a fairly arbitrary selection of recent photos that I hadn't taken with patterns particularly in mind. Then I cropped them and made them black and white.
These are nothing like as austere and abstract as hers. I'm interested in how difficult it is to achieve those qualities. The closer up and smaller you crop, the more abstract it generally becomes, but her photographs weren't particularly close up, so I didn't allow myself to get too close up either. Her photos were mainly of inorganic materials and mine are natural things (well, if you count cord and bobbled fleece as natural) and I think it's partly that difference of subject that makes mine still relatively sensuous. But partly I suspect it's because it's so different from my usual photographic voice (insofar as a rank amateur like me can have a voice), despite the apparent similarity of a liking for fairly abstract patterns. As well, of course, as her being a proper artist and me not.
I guess this is another one of my suddenly seeing things differently moments. I love it.
This one I just couldn't bear to remove the colour: