Naked trig, A Project’s Progress
Exclusive Pictures and Methods Exposed
What’s so special about trig points? I was asked this recently, by a lady with emulsion in her hair who answered her door by leaning out of the upstairs window of a quiet country cottage. What are they even for? Aside from being a handy place to empty a thermos or a serviceable plinth to strike a pose upon for the traditional summit photograph. “They put lasers on them and they all join up” I was told by one farmer. Part of a top secret military air defence strategy, suggested Local Press around their time of construction. Alternately, and in all likelihood, they were built by the Ordnance Survey as fixed points for observations to be taken from during the Re-triangulation of British Isles (1935-62).
Observation is my first fixed point. Central to all the adaptations of method, the substitutions of subject matter, is this, I just love looking at things, trying to make sense of them with my hands, and all the amazing other stuff that happens in between. Prior to this project, as my work increased in complexity, I sought to exploit more reliable means of observation, projecting from plans, and measuring angles, using any means at my disposal, other than copying from a camera. Hence plein air.
Regarding the picture as a projection of the visual sphere, a measurement of the apparent angle between two cardinal points, combined with a known length, that is, the length such an angle would produce upon intersecting with a given surface at a given distance, will result, if you take all angles, in a graticule, radically simplifying the task of recording observations, providing an internally consistent framework in which to ask questions of a location, such as how does this relate to this. vice versa does the location illuminate the projection. And here we have the continuity of method which first suggested to me trig points as locations for a series of pictures.
Curiosity is the other cardinal virtue, if it can so be called. Disenchanted with the transitional seams encountered in polyhedral projections, I wondered what was on the other side of the seam, how far does it go? unable to imagine, I took it as a proposition and ventured into the realm of exponential tangency, the gnomic projection. Taking the cube root as defining the obliquity of an infinite plane, how else to to arrive at a composition, but by the familiar tools of crop and rotate?
A series specific format was conceived as fixed ratio one to three, In an attempt to isolate variables, the ready capability of modification to one to pi, cemented the panoramic credentials of the ratio. A foot by a yard was deemed portable, ergonomic, but had far reaching unforeseen limitations, reducing the viewing distance of some pictures to an uncomfortable intimacy. The horizontal/ vertical format was intended to be modified as required.
Bryn Iocyn, Conwy
Simultaneously investigating and reconciling the characteristics of both the location and projection was another important premise, Looking for reasons, and visual opportunities. Not that it ever easy, as Gombrich Points out, to distinguish between thought and afterthought in the making of art. This characteristically entailed taking notes and multiple graticules in to the field, and testing out compositions before putting pen to paper as it were.
Reasons influencing materials, A Ply-wood substrate objectifies the image, emphasising its solidity as an object while the grain discloses the fact that it is a section of a greater whole. it’s also quite versatile and robust. Pastels, mixed. Colour was such an important attribute to being on location, that line alone left me feeling short changed. The broader areas covered by pastel than the point is capable of also held promise of an economy of means. Touch is important, and roughness evocative. fix for durability and layering.
Rhiwledyn, Llandudno
Hoskins’ Making of the English Landscape, is worth quoting for the similarity in sentiment at the opening of both the project and his book, elegiac on “seeing the natural world through the eyes of men who died three of four thousand years ago... On some desolate moorland, it is even easier to feel this identity with the dead of the Bronze age who lie nearby under the heathery blanket of a burial mound… there are many such timeless scenes, and there is an acute and melancholy pleasure in this mental game”.
The fact that you can’t seem to step foot outside in north wales without stumbling over five thousand years of modification to the landscape, by man and nature turn in turn, much of it preserved by the reversion to pasture did little to ameliorate one fact which completely escaped my in proposing the project, that that majority of visual information from any given summit is confined to a narrow band on the distant horizon. The extended field of view granted by the projection on the table is of little use then. A number of strategies present themselves, confine the view / crop the graticule, work at a larger scale, or change the location to one with greater subject sweep. To the satisfaction of my curiosity, but at the expense of decisiveness and a little more legwork, I went with sweep.
Bryn Euryn, Rhos on Sea
It’s in the nature of gnomic projection, that a single plane can never be a total view. This is useful in a situation where the area of interest is limited to one particular subject, but increasingly I was wrestling with it. On the Orme, the natural sines of the slope suggested to that a cylindrical projection would have greater sympathy with the site. Retaining the axial obliquity of the preceding projections for continuity.
The question of what is relevant, what necessary, to include in a picture, is brought into sharp focus by the contrast between the dense foliage of Bryn Euryn picture and the stark and open Gogarth panel. The issue is of great antiquity, and I would be reluctant to generalise beyond individual cases. Suffice to say that it provides an indication of a tendency without which there would be no creativity whatsoever, that is, the impulse to do something completely different.
Gogarth, Llandudno
Such an impulse might also lie at the root of the appetite for verticality which developed around this point. Blog feeds, twitter, the vast majority of web pages employ CSS sheets, we are more perceptually attuned to the vertical now than perhaps at any other time. Also, practically, fitting a horizontal 1:3 panorama into a feed 550 pixels wide will result in a pitiful loss of scale, nine times smaller than it’s vertical equivalent.
Reconciling activity and the weather has occupied a good deal of thought I must confess, Masses of heat, cycling up hills followed by long periods of inactivity in exposed situation called for some novel solutions, well, novel to me at least. Which after much trial and error, can be said briefly to consist of a light shower-proof wind layer and the wonderfully warm, light, affordable, robust and DWR treated Army surplus snugpack softie suit with indestructibly chunky full length zips. Optional sherpa fleece mid layer, snood, pilots cap, fingerless gloves. It is little wonder that the OS confined observations at trig points to late spring, summer and early autumn “when the weather was more settled and conditions more conducive to difficult, delicate work in hostile terrain”(John Davies, Primary trigs in Wales, 2012)
Prenol. NGR SH something or other
Weather solved, the massively optimistic proposition of undertaking the locations in distance order had to be contended with. It’ll only get easier, I told myself, new challenges, raise the bar, further, faster, that’s the spirit. Which would be perfectly acceptable, if the method employed on the locations weren’t so protracted as to require a month’s worth of visits, without the expedient resorted to by the OS of camping near by. The psychological effect of distances increasing exponentially, a kind of lateral vertigo, was by no means accounted for in the proposal. Neither were instances of Hostility or situations of “nothing of interest” (CPAT HER) if only I has started the other way round, then it would have only got easier. Well, that’s not an option, so the options are, find a more economical method, go smaller, adapt, or share the fate of the Irish elk. So, Painting it is.
Change of Locations
Such a smile on my face when, in addition to the decision to pursue painting as a medium, I woke to the realisation that the working assumption of Pillar sites only was just that, an assumption, and could be could be opened up to include the many more, and hence closer sites without pillars, which were employed by the OS to fill the gaps in the Primary network.
Change of Materials.
Observe, the drying time of Acrylic Paint, how portable, and durable. The stability and versatility of double matt drafting film as a painting substrate, think of the possibilities.
Now, my brush work is a bit rusty, and my method non existent. What a great position to be in!
No crutch of manual dexterity, No prescribed formula, just plenty to be discovered and much to get to grips with.
[Picture to go here]
Change of Method.
Niggling, at the back of my mind was the suspicion that by measuring angles, even if it was only a few cardinal points, to be subdivided and rendered on site and by eye, measuring, at all was somehow cheating. Excusable, serviceable, if the object is to make sense of and accurately portray an enormous amount of information, or if an unknown nature of the projection is itself the subject of enquiry. Neither were motives I had to hand.
Once this suspicion had had a chance to germinate the desire to rid myself of the graticule, to fly as it were without a net, became overwhelming, and the opportunity of developing a method devoid of the temptation to solve problems of relationship by reaching for the compass and clinometer instead of employing preferred methods of purely perceptual geometry, became irresistible.
Recreational investigations into the properties of pentagons led to my recognising pentagonal angles, at numerous locations, 18, 36, 72, 108, I was literally seeing stars, everywhere. the aperiodicity of pentagons, exemplified by Penrose tiling means that every point is achievable by subdivision of a pentagonal grid, they behave capriciously, mutate, almost organically, the intersections are sweet, and they contain the golden proportion of one to Phi, numerical analogue of growth where A is to B as B is to A plus B. Further, the height of a pentagon or golden triangle, as they’re equivalent, is about one and a half times the length of it’s base, So good old 1:3 gets a pentagonal makeover.
[Picture to go here]
My Love affair with pentimenti has come to an abrupt end, in my own work at least. I came to resent the richness of oblivion, the layers of mistakes, corrections. Thinking laterally, with a desire to retain these layers, to allow them to speak and remain unadmonished, The possibility occurred to me, of turning the layers side on, and each into a strip, a vertical trench into the visual sphere, where alla prima observations might rest untroubled by subsequent alterations, to intersect, with economy the greatest number of horizontal relationships of colour and tone, to see the way things change on location, to condense the broadest of sweeps into choppy geometric synopsis of paint, to evoke rather than describe, to generalise from an accumulation of particulars, This is appealing.
Also as micro giornata, they constitute a strategic response to the limited open time of Acrylic under a stiff breeze, similar to furlongs in the open field system, which were practically and physically defined as the amount of land which could comfortably be ploughed by one man in one day.
Speaking of which,
That is all.
