Category: Context

Treatise, Tantra, Mantra

image: Great Mirror, oil and pigment on paper by JWR Some background contextual research regarding the explication of pictopoiesis: Treatise note: to list of treatises given in above link add: Leonardo Da Vinci A Treatise on Painting also: Vincent de Beauvais “Great Mirror” also: Albertus Magnus also: Sol le Witt Paragraphs/Sentences of Conceptual Art; Paul Klee […]

Cloud

Painting in progress, and without it being predetermined, a cloud suggests itself. I orientate the work in different ways. The cloud, like the thought of it itself, subject to constant reformation. Its behaviour governed by conditions around it, near and far, of atmosphere, weather and climate. Everyone knows clouds.     I have already journeyed from the earthed […]

Pictopoiesis and Pragmatism

Painting in progress:   There are certain facts about oil painting which make it tricky to handle at the beginning. When I began painting in earnest, I found it difficult to handle oil paint, actually I did not like it. I had only ever used water paints before. But I persisted with the oil painting. […]

The Integrity of Line

The drawings below were all made freehand, with a basic mouse, no other aid. I call them mouse drawings. At the time I was interested in the possibility of inventing a series (alphabet-like) of protoforms suggestive of different habitats or dwelling places, structured line by line. Like building a skeleton, external and internal. In every case, […]

Origin always has echo

The art of our earliest ancestors is compelling, so I was interested to look through an article (see notes at end of post) in my inbox, which has triggered the following post: Some time ago I did a series of paintings in which, amongst other matters, I was interested in trying to commune and reconnect […]

Fabric of Common Descent (video)

(best heard with earphones) Fabric of Common Descent from Janet Waring Rago on Vimeo. Soundtrack by Alexis Rago Shown in exhibition Virtual Particles at Camberwell University of the Arts, London (December 2018)  

Six Persimmons (ongoing)

This painting began with a figurative point of reference but follows the same pictopoietic pathway of previous paintings. Pictopiesis is not only applicable to non-objective painting. The first passage of paint is always a defining moment, it is the point of origin of the work, and always has its echo in the eventual outcome. This is the […]

Yellow Leporello 9×9

  I began with a playful title for the above, Yellow Leporello. I wanted to see where it would lead me because I know that it always leads somewhere new and surprising. Leporello, the word itself is reputedly taken from Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni which contains the so-called Catalogue Aria in which DG’s manservant, called Leporello, unfolds […]