Make a reverse charcoal drawing
Use charcoal and an eraser to create a drawing, working in reverse to reveal the white of the paper. Cover the surface of the paper with charcoal and then 'draw' with the eraser, removing areas of the charcoal to reveal the white paper underneath.
Let charccoal do the talking!
Experiment with charcoal. Make a drawing using charcoal of a found image. (It can be any image, but it may help if the image is black-and-white). Explore the marks you can make with charcoal as you draw.
Charcoal can be used to make a range of marks. A charcoal stick, turned on its side makes a broad swooshing mark. Charcoal can also be used to create delicate and sensitive lines and marks. It can be smudged and rubbed away leaving only the faintest of traces.
Think about the distinct characteristics of charcoal and how these effect your finished drawing.
Memory
There was a little period where I think, in some strange, intuitive way, I sort of dealt with the memories of war.
Although best known for her contemplative images of nature, the subjects of Celmins's early work were very different. War planes, smoking guns, automobile crashes and explosions feature in her paintings of the 1960s. These paintings were based on photographs she found in books about the Second World War.
Celmins’s work is not autobiographical – she generally does not make work about her experiences or feelings. But she has commented that many of these 1960s works relate to her early childhood memories of the Second World War. Thinking about these childhood memories, she said:
… it was a time of great stress, mostly because there was so much noise and chaos. And my biggest fear was being left somewhere and not finding my parents.
House #2
1965 is among Celmins’ earliest sculptures and also relates to her wartime childhood experiences in Latvia. Celmins painted fires and plane crashes on the outside of the dolls’ house. That Celmins’s father was a builder, makes her choice of subject particularly significant.
This violent imagery can also be seen in relation to the political backdrop in the 1960s, and the Vietnam War. Celmins was passionately anti-war and attended demonstrations against the USA's involvement in Vietnam. Discussing her early sculptural works and making specific reference to
House #2
(one of her favourite pieces from the time) Celmins has said: 'I have to admit that there is a psychological component to the work.'
The warplane also appears in the
Concentric Bearings
series. In
Concentric Bearings B
1984 an image of a falling plane being shot at is placed next to Celmins’s image of stars shooting in the night sky.
Writer and critic Dave Hickey has suggested that Celmins’s shift from using imagery of war and violence, to the ocean, desert and sky, paralleled a shift in her personal life. Writing in the catalogue for her retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia; he says that her status changed ‘from the status of a refugee to a nomad – a nomad who could find her bearings from the infinitesimal reference points that nature offers.'
Make an artwork exploring an aspect of history. This could be a drawing, painting or sculpture – or a collage or multi-media work using a range of images and materials.
Use your personal history and memories to inspire the artwork. Think about things that remind you of your childhood. Gather photographs, drawings, letters from your past or from your family archive.
Or be inspired by the social, cultural and political history of your community to create your artwork. If you are working in a group, consider the possibilities of creating new, collaborative stories that can be expressed not only through art but also through music, performance, dance or drama.
Shooting stars, turning planets and rippling oceans suggest movement and the passing of time in Celmins's images. While there is this cosmic sense of time in the elemental subject matter she works from, the subjects also allow the artist to explore the relationship between deep space and the flat surface of a picture.
Influenced by
minimalist
artist
Ad Reinhardt
’s
Twelve Rules for a New Academy
1953, Celmins started to consciously strip away elements in her art. She rejected the use of expressive gestural marks and planning compositions. The vast expanses of ocean views, deserts and star fields she depicts have no beginning or end. This also gets rid of the need to compose or arrange elements within a picture. She creates depth through her intense investigation of the image and her chosen material. Most of her images, like
Web #1
1999, are painted or drawn very close to the edge of the surface she is working on and seem to extend beyond the canvas, or edges of the paper, into the space occupied by the viewer.
As the artist describes it, although the image is ‘pinned down, in your mind it wants to expand out. Reality (the art) makes it stay where it is on the wall'.
Made, invented – it is not the image experienced in life, but in another reality.
Her painstaking approach and the intuitive nature of her process restricts how much work she makes and in turn limits displays of her work. She works methodically at her own pace and has likened herself to the spider and its precise and industrious constructions.
What do you think? Time, photography and process
The image stays where it has been placed so rigorously and attentively. The original photographic source is from another space we have lived in but is transferred by the making into another space.
The thing I like about painting is that it takes just a second for the information to go in and you can explore and analyse that later.
This article considers one work on paper by Vija Celmins in the ARTIST ROOMS collection:
Untitled (Desert–Galaxy)
1974. In a focused analysis of this dual-image drawing, the artist’s strategies of spatial typologies, mimicry, finish, and rejection of linearity are considered in relation to Celmins’s contribution to the development of an alternative, photographically mediated form of drawing practice.