H O L V I   The Lower Gallery exhibitions

2.4.-4.5.2008

suomi

John Court -Drawings

John Court The Institutionalization of the Doodle

It took many years to work out that this whole drawing process began at school, when I picked up my pencil to copy down the written words on the blackboard, most of which I could not understand. It was easier to doodle than to write a word, and in a working sense, my drawings have institutionalized the doodle as a diagrammatic art form.

That negative encounter with learning set off a need to make sense of the world through the active manipulation of the pencil line as drawing. It is therefore more meaningful to me to make a drawing, and understand its contents, than to copy down a word, and be totally perplexed by its structure and meaning.

The act of drawing connects the physicality of learning to the engagement with ideas. This is why I use the freehand drawing method as a simple way of connecting the action to the mind. The physical experience comes from the building up of the words, by the layering of glue and the addition of aluminium leaf, which can be blurred by the penetration of light.

An important element of the work is in the work ethic, the idea that a work requires time and effort as part of the creative process. The mass of time spent within that space creates a drawing which hangs motionless in space like the mental block I experience when reading and writing.

From a distance, my drawings give the appearance of being manufactured by a mechanical reproductive process; they posit a state of neutrality, a sense of motionlessness, and for some viewers they are totally impenetrable, but people are often surprised by their ‘actuality’ – of very basic art materials such as hand drawn pencil (graphite) and aluminium leaf on paper. In one sense there is something in that moment when a viewer feels the frustration of not understanding. It means that the work’s actuality exists outside the conceptual framework that created it, that we should consider the moment of actuality in the viewing of a work.

John Court homepage

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Contact information:
Jyväskylä Art Museum
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tel. (014) 626 852