A few days ago I was in a shop with a Narnia wardrobe. You could just push through the coats into another world (of the back room), right out of your normal day. It reminded me of something.
In Venice six years ago I was on a research fellowship to the Fondazione Cini. I got very interested in the spaces where things end — or rather, where the space for possibility begins. My curiosity fixed on pictures like this:
If you go through the lower right-hand doorway, you find yourself in the unstructured background of the scene. Undefined space that has been earmarked as not-in-focus. At the time, this was very tempting to me. What would happen if you simply walked out of the image? I fantasised about my new address. Olivia Smith, Behind the Library, Nowhere.
Sketches of pillars that were made to capture ornamental detail were alluring for where they stopped. I was wowed with the fact that you could have something so heavy and tangible that just melted away. What was the rest of the building like? What would it be like to dwell in? What delightful physics to have something so weighty holding up…nothing.
I stood on the mosaic tiles of the church floor and thought about finding their glitch, about climbing their illusory stairways, but they were all filled in.
There is something so tempting about unfocussed-on space.
* * * *
Sometimes if you look at someone, and talk to them, there is a lot of noise, and I end up focusing on one thing: often their hands. Afterwards, I remember e.g. their hands first, and bring in the full feel of them later.
Different types of sketches feel like they hold a record of this tendency.
Leonardo da Vinci’s 'The drapery of the Virgin's hip' is a little bit of lucidity surrounded by hum. Inference lets our mind see the rest if we want to, because we know roughly how the shape of a person will fill out, but we don't have to. And ditto his 'The hands of St John in the Last Supper'.
These sketches know the joy of selective focus.
And these two repeated eyes, one bolder than the other. There’s such pleasure in the piecemeal of this, of tuning the radio frequency of sight in to just one feature. You can keep hold of people like this, take one point of focus as the guy-rope to tie your sense of them down with, the rest of them glowing in the background, off-grid.
Love this.