I have just been to see the new Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, I am not an established fan of Louise Bourgeois work. I use the term fan to distinguish my engagement from that of connoisseur, collector or critic- my engagement lies beyond the casual but lacks the rigour of any of the latter categories. The ground floor of the exhibition is devoted to Louise Bourgeois’s Insomnia Drawings 1994 to 1995, I was surprised how much I enjoyed spending time in their company and will revisit, I have become very interested in physical mark making and the Insomnia drawings which have their literal genesis in a bout of insomnia are as you would expect both scrappy, tetchy at times, sophisticated, alternately decorative and harsh and patterned and representational as you walk around what must be a 100’s of drawings displayed in a map of wakefulness.I associate my interest in physical mark making with my interest in the physical gestures that can lead to the creation of recorded sound and the way that the physical gesture is interpolated, you can make a knife purr and a feather stab.
The last marks that I found so interesting were in an entirely different context- Olivier Malric created the 2d special fx for the animated feature The Illusionist. Olivier was responsible for beautifully hand drawn and animated water splashes and smoke. To see the original drawings of any of these fx is extraordinary with each successive sheet of paper containing only some very enigmatic marks and smudges moving each fragment of a water droplet or boundary or whisp of smoke one precise fragment of a second forward. There were unusual processes at work in Olivier’s mind, how does he track where all the multiple trajectories are headed and translate this knowledge into muscular movement? Although I know he makes a study of physics he creates these wonders simply with pencil and a stack of semi transparent paper, he appears to tune in to and feel the organic process from the inside.
60pages is an excuse for cramming thoughts and anecdotes together without doing the hard work of joining them up, I have taken the essence of 60pages to be a grant of permission. So here are a few other words on mark making. My father who is a scientist (scientists never retire) late in life for reasons I am not clear about decided that he would expand his horizons by going to an art class. Somehow or other he was advised to attend a class given my Richard Demarco. Demarco has a role in my life as the guy who put on Strategy Get Arts in 1970 which resulted in me as an impressionable teenager being exposed to a large amount of extraordinary work by Joseph Beuys, (later on my own personal thanks to Beuys consisted of impersonating him for three seconds at the end of a Scritti Politti video shot in Paris which I think lurks somewhere on youtube). Back to my father, I think he imagined that he would be assisted in producing something that he would look at and consider realistic or accurate or perhaps charming in the sense of say a competent amateur watercolourist such as Prince Charles, he has related how he was utterly baffled by Demarco’s refusal to give instructions. Demarco insisted my father and his other pupils just started making a mark on the blank paper in front of them, he refused to answer my father’s question as to what the mark was supposed to be a drawing of; from his retelling of the moment I suspect that my father who, in his time, had confronted the environmental perils of acid rain, had been an effective amateur boxer and a vicious rugby player had never before or since had such a moment of existential panic and fear.