A Figure Emerges
This is a bit of an origin story for one of the ways an image can mark a moment of change. It’s about how a titan of dust let me know I could trust myself more as an artist.
While most of my art making is connected to abstraction and intuitive mark making, I do occasionally make a more straightforward landscape or figure drawing. But I was thinking back tonight to one particular drawing that sat a bit between those two modes.
In 2015 I had started making abstract drawings that I ended up calling Dots Series 1 & 2. They were new for me and woke something up that had blocked me in previous art making. The drawings were raw with swipes of paint, many marks with pen and pencil, spontaneous text, and recurring circular forms.
Then one day in January 2016, I happened upon an image online that struck me. It was a photo from the demolition of two Scottish power station smokestacks. The vaguely out of time image showed the collision of the two stacks forming a spectral brimstone figure for a few seconds before the towers were no more.
Cockenzie station in East Lothian, Scotland was a coal-fired power station until its closure and then demolition in late 2015. Thousands had gathered to see the stacks come down not expecting this chance image like the cinder afterimage from the burning of a harvest wicker man.
Seen from the crowd’s point of view, it seems more commonplace. Just a spectacle for the curious around the ending of a local era.
I’m not actually a believer in otherworldly spectres so the image was just a fascinating visual anomaly. But it struck and stayed with me nevertheless.
A few days went by and as I set a new panel on the easel, this rapidly came out.
It was just the start of something but the clear form of that Scottish smoke titan stood centrally, its fragmented body darker than the image in the original photos — a frenzied series of palette knife swipes in jet black.
I almost covered it up at first. My rational mind scolding, “that’s not the kind of art you are making!” But “why not?” Another part of my mind answered back. It was just play after all. Just moving paint and making marks to see where that took me.
So I continued with the figure intact.
I even added somewhat cartoon billowing smoke cloud layers drawn with thin pencil lines and explosive layers of bright coloured dots, lines, and scribbles.
And then words appeared. That’s how it feels sometimes. The words come to mind and I commit them often simply and directly to the surface.
And then from the centre of the figure’s chest, where in the photos of the dusty titan there was a space, I place a deep red circle. It’s like a power heart like some raw and elemental Iron Man.
I flash back briefly to this early childhood drawing of Iron Man done on some scrap Phillips paper from my grandfather’s work.
No, I’m not sure why he has a sword.
And then finally the figure stands burning with energy. And even in the drawing’s completion I don’t know what compelled it but I name it Emergent as that feels like what happened.
The subsequent drawings from that year didn’t go back to this raw figurative form. If anything they deepened in their abstraction but also feel more confident to me in hindsight. Like by allowing this figure to emerge, I allowed myself to say,
“It’s okay, you can let go. You can let aspects of yourself topple and collide with each other to form something new even if it lasts for just a few seconds and maybe defies your understanding in many ways.”
…
A note that the Cockenzie power station demolition photos above are copyright their respective creators. I tried to track down original sources for the images but couldn’t.
I like this, following the trail, from start to finish, that led to a work of art.
It's incredible how this figure found a way of existing within dust, pixels and ultimately paint on your panel!