Sir Antony

So, Antony Gormley is to become a knight - and I get an excuse to write about him.

I really like most of the stuff he does.  In fact, "like" is an understatement - I think a lot of it is really great and some of it has influenced my current project,  notably his "Field" installations of tens of thousands of clay figures and the many examples of his groups of identical figures.

My current project - "Faces" - will comprise 45 figures, all identical apart from their height and their facial expressions.  Actually, I should say 44 ceramic figures and one glass figure, which has no facial expression on it.  For current progress please go to:

http://www.peter-heywood.co.uk/work_details.php?id=40&s=0

My son Tom and his wife, Kim,  gave me a book on Antony Gormley a couple of years ago and up until now I've focused on the pictures of his work rather than the words between the pictures.

When I first got the book I was a bit put off by the first lot of words - a conversation between Antony Gormley and E.H. Gombrich (1909-2001) described on the cover as "one of the world's most celebrated art historians".

As a former journalist and editor I approach conversations such as these with caution.  To my mind, they are often a lazy way of dealing with a topic.  Two people are allowed to ramble on and, perhaps  because they're supposed to be famous,  little or no effort is made to edit things so some clear messages are delivered.

I thought this was particularly true of the recorded audio conversation between Monika Kinley and Jon Thompson in my previous blog (but I was too polite to say so at the time).

Anyhow, Gormley getting knighted has prompted me to take another look at his book and see whether I'm still irked by its arty-farty text.

Conclusion:  This Context of Practice course must be influencing me!  The first few pages are really interesting:

It turns out that Gormley read Gombrich's book, The Story of Art, while he was at school, and that's what inspired him!   He says it "made the whole possibility of not only studying art but also of becoming an artist a reality for me."

Gombrich starts the conversation by talking about Field, where the clay figures are just roughly human in shape with two finger holes for the eyes in the head.

By pure coincidence, the figures in my Faces project bear some similarity in that they're just a representation of a head and body although I've gone the opposite way in one respect - I'm trying to make the shape of my figures identical and so smooth they look machine-made.

Anyhow, Gombrich says he's interested in the "psychology of perception; if a face emerges from a shape you are bound to see an expression".   He goes on to cite a Swiss inventor of a comic strip, Rodolfe Toepffer, who observed that virtually any scribbled face, regardless of how badly it's drawn, is expressive - it conveys meaning.

This is EXACTLY my starting point for my Faces project; I scribbled some faces on a coffee jar, was intrigued by the emotions they conveyed and decided to try and develop the concept in 3D.

So the bottom line is that I'm warming to the thought processes behind Antony Gormley's art in a similar way to me warming to Grayson Perry, following his Reith Lectures and his penetrating observations of taste and class in his previous TV programmes - see my previous blog: http://peter-heywood.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/taste-and-class.html

As a result, I will make a sustained effort to read the words in Gormley's book - although I wish the book covered the way he made some of his sculptures, in the way that Perry included his sketch books in his "Vanity of Small Differences" book, covering taste/class and the production of his amazing tapestries.

I'll also buy E.H. Gombrich's "The Story of Art" so that I can see what Gormley found so inspirational about it.  Maybe it will also help me sound more intelligent on this Context of Practice course.

I wonder whether Grayson Perry will ever be given a knighthood?  The thought amuses me because of his female alter-ego.

UPDATE: I managed to buy a second-hand version of "The Story of Art" for 1 penny (plus postage) on Amazon and it arrived today (10th Jan).  At first glance I think I'm going to like it.