Skip to content

Week Three – Oscar Faulkner

Drawings from Friday’s lecture. I have less writing this time and looked for shapes and picked up on linear directions within the presentation. I found the reverse of the drawings more interesting and started to draw on both sides.

I chose Damien Hirst for my research in class. I was mostly drawn to the categorisation of mundane objects, the repetition, the by-products of living. I am also trying to elevate my receipts, give them new meaning and purpose.

Before my tutorial on Monday I was trying to come up with three dimensional ideas but I agreed that it is too soon in my project.
In the tutorial we discussed points including:
Drawings might be a mix of precise and exaggerated
They could be a lot bigger
To make my questions closer together, closer steps between problem solving means you will be less likely to miss something.
Maybe try a work on receipt paper
Separate numbers, words and codes from the receipts – start extracting
Could draw on a blackboard

Large Scale Drawing 1

I cut a sheet of paper to 1 metre x 1.6 metres. My drawings last week were A2 in size and this is larger than A0. It fits the projection a lot better.

I am following my eye with my hand. When the projection is on I can’t see what I’m drawing or where I have been, but I am trying to keep moving and enjoy studying the various directions, which are quite random.
Using putty rubbers to move graphite around.
The composition feels unbalanced because of the large square, although I had not been aiming for any particular composition at all.
This is where I started to draw with the eraser more.
This is where my drawing has gotten to by the end of the week but I think it could be worked into more. It is still just graphite on paper.

Below are some details of the drawing. Different moods seem to have collected in areas.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles – Maintenance, 1973

Mierle Laderman Ukeles came up with the idea of Maintenance art to draw attention to the overlooked workers of our society.
The maintenance is not a found object but a found activity of the everyday. Her work being called performance suggests she is also elevating something ordinary as I wrote about Damien Hirst. Ukeles’s work is more impactful for me, it has a strong social commentary and frustration.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles mopping the sidewalk in front of a staircase at the entrance to the Wadsworth Atheneum museum

When I started to add water to my drawing with a cleaning rag I thought of the video of Mierle Laderman Ukeles we watched on Friday. I was moving with the cleaning rag and I thought of my summer working as a cleaner. The receipts are all from this summer.

In my journal I had described my movements as ‘robotic’ and ‘mechanical’ before they were ‘aggressive’. The next day, Abidish told me about his work and could show me through video documentation. It would have been interesting to re-watch my more chaotic movements and have filmed the large drawing.

Paper Cup / Viewfinder

On Friday we were asked to do something with our paper cups. For the week my cup was used as a pen holder because I didn’t know what to do. I thought I should do whatever I had an urge to do, something simple that I would probably do with a paper cup without being given this task.

I stabbed my paper cup to use it as a viewfinder. I’m calling it a viewfinder because it reminds me of looking through a real one, and because it helps me to focus on a view that I want. I find my normal field of view is too busy sometimes.

I look at the Wellington Monument on Pen Dinas hill every day from my window. This image was taken from my desk looking through my cup viewfinder.

1 thought on “Week Three – Oscar Faulkner”

  1. ah I love the viewfinder cup project, brilliant, so simple, so eloquent, so beautiful. Really interesting drawing emerging too, yes keep working it, it needs to be more intense, more layers, more contrasting marks, hard now to imagine its source – the receipt, is that a good thing or does the receipt need to be referenced again, more literally? I am not sure, I also like its journey away from the source, purely abstracted, yes the details are interesting and beautiful, curious and intriguing. Keep going, this is going somewhere..

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: