Tacoma, WA
121423
UPS

Pardon My Dust: Balancing Concept and Risk through a Strategic Artmaking Processes
Joshua Cunningham
[Chalk]

Related work

Later in my process, I was inspired by the match mural works of Claire Fontaine. They discuss the importance of risk in the process of art making, and how drawing the audience into the risk of the piece greatly increases the intimacy of the experience. With the emphasis on embodiment of perception, this kind of risk-involved intimacy was something I really was striving for in the piece. ‘Pardon My Dust’ takes this dialogue of risk and adapts it to spaces where open flame is not safe. By using chalk, any observer could interact and change the piece with as little as a breath. This preserves the risk element of Fontaine’s pieces, while allowing for more settings of exhibition. The combination of these pieces in tandem asks the question: is risk an element of what makes the experience of art impactful? What does risk do that heightens our perception of a piece?

The adaptation of this risk-medium into chalk also sets the piece in conflict and conversation with traditional teaching, which rushes space and time, but is expected to be a longevity of knowledge. This piece serves as an analog to teaching methodology and highlights the temporality of the learning space. A short lived piece with a lot of prior planning plays out like a presentation or a lecture. Years and years of preparation go to placing a professor in front of a class, and often they can only succeed in imparting only a portion of their accumulated experience on the class during the semester. In parallel, the students of a class only experience each iteration of teaching on the black board once. They experience multiple, perhaps even dozens of black boards worth of information, and are expected to absorb and retain the knowledge. Often, by the end of a single class session, a student couldn’t recreate a single iteration of the board without referencing notes. When we erase a piece, how long do the memories last, and are they authentic to the original experience?

Background

This project was born through the investigation of the embodiment of both time and perception. The writing ‘Planktons in the Sea’ discusses time as a compilation of lived experiences, particularly through the metaphor of timeshift, where two clocks become out of sync from one another and cause beats and disturbances in audio engineering. This article challenged me to ponder how we as humans perceive and experience time differently in various settings. The conversation is flipped in the piece ‘Time Compiled,’ a short essay in the book Figured Stones by Paul Prudence, which discusses the experience of time through the lens of the immortal essence of geology. It asks the question: If a stone is not witnessed by something alive and short lived (like a human), does its time really count? This pushed me to frame the concept of time around its perception rather than its passing, driving me to focus on the who is experiencing the time rather than the what. To further investigate the idea of individual experience, I turned to the first chapter of Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which discusses the nuance and individuality of sensory perception. What stood out most from this essay was the argument that perception and stimulus were separate entities - that you can feel something without being touched, and you can hear things without fully comprehending them. What this means to me as an artist is that while my work may be entirely visual, it can cause people to feel more than simply what their eyes are seeing. These works formed the foundation from which my concept was derived.

When it came to encoding the concepts into a visual language, I was inspired by the illustrations and process of Wylie Beckert. Their pieces have a moody air, clean illustration, and incorporate movement through a multitude of different subject elements. Their process is well defined and layer oriented, adding detail and deepening color and contrast at each step while retaining the air of the original sketch. Beckert’s pieces greatly inspired my original thumbnails and sketches, and pushed me to incorporate the forms of my characters with intentional movement and believability.

Claire Fontaine, P. I. G. S., 2011, Production stills

Like most projects, this one began with a healthy dose of brainstorming. The reading by Paul Prudence inspired me to work with the magnanimous as my subject. I was initially drawn to compositions with a large ‘timeless’ subject matter and a small figure in the foreground. I began with thumbnail sketches, and the more that I drew, the more I became drawn to the figures. The idea of momentary significance, as both described in the Prudence reading and ‘Planktons in the Sea,’ reminded me of the temporality of experience. I began to focus on the moments of time that are seemingly insignificant due to their transiency. In this, the subject that continued to appear in my sketches were moments of waiting, particularly on transportation.

From this I began a quick sketch and paint to explore subjects and mood. After I completed the initial painting and was happy with the mood, I began plans for the final composition. I began with a 3D mockup of a train and block passengers to get a feel for lighting. In this digital medium, I was able to explore different compositions and lighting schemes simply by changing a few variables and moving the camera. This let me follow my ideas as they came, without having to redraw for each iteration. Once I landed on a general composition I liked, I rendered the file and sent it to my iPad for further detailing.


Digital value study (top) and value thumbnails (bottom)

3D Renderered thumbnails


At this point, I was struggling with the original idea for a medium. I wanted to do this project as a large scale watercolor painting. Thinking about the idea of temporality, I wanted to create a piece with more risk and more interaction than a static painting. I was reminded of the match work murals of Claire Fontaine, which celebrated the idea of an artwork’s inevitable end. I worked from this concept, and landed on creating a chalk mural in a space where it could be appreciated, but would need to be erased. This concept seemed to match my intent for the piece, and so moving forward I keep the idea of a black and white chalk drawing in mind.

In Procreate on an IPad, I sketched out the figures and general details of the piece. From there, I created value studies inspired by the 3D rendering. I selected the most balanced composition, and scaled it up to work on details. I then finished a detailed digital drawing. I spent a majority of my time on this step, because I realized that my chalk drawing would have to be completed in a single session. I wanted to have the whole piece planned, and in a format that I could project and trace the illustration onto the blackboard.

Observations and Reflections

I found that through this rigorous planning process, I had less iterations than I expected. Once I landed on a concept and general design, my iterations mostly worked with smoothing out details. I think that initially exploring the concept in 3D helped me grab a composition that I liked without too much time and effort spent thumbnailing. For example, exploring the composition in 3D led to a realization that I enjoyed a more flat graphic style over something overly put into perspective. If I had tried to plan the piece on paper, it would have taken me quite a while to render a perspective piece, but in 3D, I was able to rotate the camera to change the perspective. This was a new element of my process, and I really enjoyed how it informed my art making. I hope to utilize it more in the future.

The choice to switch to a chalkboard mural from a painting was surprising to me, but the painting never felt like it fully met the theme, and the blackboard felt much better. I allowed the concept to drive my artmaking, and it led to a piece that felt cohesive in both medium and subject matter. I hope that moving forward in my artmaking career, I am not afraid to make choices that will improve the ability of my pieces to communicate with the audience. Choosing to let my piece be erased was hard. I expected to be saddened by the erasure of my piece, but I was oddly excited by it. The intimacy of creating something that really only about 10 people saw in person just felt so beautiful. It caused me to reflect upon other momentary artworks, and what it means to be and create art. This process highlighted the importance of intimacy in art; making art for only myself and a few others to fully witness is not only just permissible as art, but also deepens the gravity of the meaning behind the piece.