I am not intending to post every piece I make in the #BlackSquares365 project on this blog on a daily basis. I will reserve that for Twitter and Instagram. Eventually, I hope I will be able to document it all on my website and possibly a site of its own where people will be able to safely buy on line. As for posting on a-n, I’ll aim to only post every week or two with an update unless I have some interesting thoughts or meet interesting challenges.
As the project is new I will probably post a little more often to give some background . Today I thought I would mention the piece I made a couple of days ago. This piece is my take on where it all started. The oldest image of a black square as a complete subject in itself that I have found is an illustration in Robert Fludd’s “Utriusque Cosmi Maioris” from 1617. That engraving is a depiction of the nigredo in alchemy and, at the same time, the chaos of unformed matter at the start of God’s creation. A conversation on Twitter about it a few years back reconnected me to the work I did on alchemy more than 40 years ago and spawned my last series of #BlackSquares work. Black squares have often make fleeting appearances in my work in the few years since the series I showed in “Black Lines, Black Squares & Black Magic” at Black Swan Arts, Frome, towards the end of 2015. Until recently it has been a flirting, but my interest in re-engaging with 3D work has rekindled a passion to explore the idea in myriad ways. I studied sculpture and printmaking at college and much of my degree show work was rooted in alchemy and my final year thesis was about alchemy too. It’s fascinating to me that the subject keeps nagging at me. A few years ago I heard David Nash give advice to young artists to the effect that they should make a note of every idea they have and that he was still working out ideas he had first started as a young man. I guess that’s what has happened to me. David Nash was one of my visiting lecturers at college.
