I do some of my best work....

All alone, in the quiet, I sit and ponder, then grab my notebook and start to draw. Tiny details creep into view; cracks in the lino, chipped chipboard doors.

A stationary version of trudge, as time passes by unchecked, my feild of vision is narrowed, and I am hunched over, head down, thinking.

Eyes down

Bear in mind this wasn't drawn from life. Here's the difference between the view when I walk along looking straight ahead, and the view when I stoop and stare at the pavement some way ahead of me, say 8 feet ahead.

The yellow grid was to give me a reference of true vertical and horizontals on the picture plane. Then I plotted in the vanishing point. On the left is the classic vanishing point on the horizon. On the right the vanishing point drops with respect to the position of the pavement and imagined buildings either side.

On the floor in the library....

... I made this study, with floor at an angle to the picture plane. I haven't pinned down the vanishing points yet, for the moment I just want to draw what I see, and maybe follow the lines later to see where they meet.

Sat on the floor, in amongst the shelves, I'm low down; my eye level is only about 20" above the floor. But I observed that, with the picture plane skew to the floor, the horizontals running left to right are always parallel, whereas the verticals veer upwards and outwards. One vanishing point is out of sight, high above me and outside of my vision.

Are you following me still, or have I lost you already? I'm very excited. I don't know and I don't care if all of this has been worked out before by someone else. I have the need to discover the rules for myself.

Trudge

To trudge: the slow, weary, depressing yet determined walk of a man who has nothing left in life except the impulse to simply soldier on. As said by the Chaucer character in Knights Tale.

I often trudge, not in the sense mentioned above. But I am prone to walk in a hunched, huddled manner, staring down at the approaching pavement, as the walls and road slide by in my peripheral vision.

And so, about a year or so ago I wanted to capture my viewpoint as I trudge. Again, being less than 5' tall will probably be a factor in the viewpoint.

As I trudge, the normal view of perspective is askew. But how? When I look down, straight down, at the floor I found that the 'picture plane' is parallel to the floor, and therefore to the canvas. Interesting. The vanishing point is central on the middle point at the bottom of the page I draw on here, pretty much where my toes are.

It's not easy to stand, hunched over, holding a sketchbook and pencil in your hands and remain still while observing and mapping your surroundings. But it's very rewarding to look at the resulting picture and found you've nailed a small bit of the puzzle.

David Hockney - I'm excited

Some months ago I saw David Hockney's documentary 'A Secret Knowledge' and it changed my world, for a short time. As I tend to do, I immediately rang my dad, then my older sister who is getting into Art, and raved about it for about an hour each. If you've never seen it, David identified links in the way artists used to depict the world in their pictures, and then identified a fundamental change. He goes on to discover the secret science behind that change.

Apart from opening my eyes to pictures I'd only ever glanced at for years as an art student, it showed me how passionate Hockney is about works of art, and about the making of art. He was intelligent, down to earth, passionate, excitable even. This was a guy I wanted to learn more about.

Jump forward to this Christmas and I get a book about David Hockney from said sister, Mel. The foreword alone by Paul Melia dn Ulrich Luckhardt was full of ideas and questions before I'd got to page 9. My mind already buzzing, I flicked through images of Hockney's work and saw the journey he'd taken. Then I stopped dead on page 155, a drawing of a Van Gogh-esque woven yellow chair, drawn with an altered perspective. He explains "In the theory of one-point perspective the vanishing point is infinity and the viewer is an immobile point outside the picture. If the infinite is God, we never connect, but if perspective is reversed the infinity is everywhere, infinity is everywhere, infinity is everywhere and the viewer is now mobile (is this better theologically?)."

This alteration in perspective grabs me and holds me. I know it's wrong but there seems to be some kind of truth to what he's trying to portray here. I am mad? There's potential here for me to investigate. It ties in the with 'Trudging' image I've been playing with for a while which depicts an altered perspective of a pavement and the buildings rising up on either side.

The thinking behind my self portraits

A self portrait is a drawing or painting I do whilst looking at myself in the mirror . But some of them don't look like me, either because I got the proportions wrong, or because I was concentrating on emphasising something which distorts what I see in the mirror. The purpose of the self portraits I'm doing at the moment is not to create an accurate and life-like likeness of my face. Here's a photo of my face. But the photo isn't 'me' either; it's a recreation of the light which reflected off my face that particular day, influenced by the photographic and printing (or computer & VDU) facilities it's reproduced on. But it's still not 'me'. Come round and meet me, and look at my face, but when I'm dead you can look at my face, and it's won't be 'me'. I could be involved in a car crash, and have extensive plastic surgery, changing my face...... You get the idea.
Therefore, to say that a particular self portrait on paper or canvas is wrong because it doesn't look like me is meaningless.
Let me repeat myself - the self portraits I'm doing are drawings or paintings done whilst looking at myself in the mirror. The resulting drawing I do may bear little resemblence to my actual face, but ask yourself, does it matter?