Although I had a number of ideas I struggled to get going with this exercise. I had already moved past this exercise and completed Project 4 Exercise 1.3 which I have already documented in this blog. Finally I decided to try and get my thoughts down in a diagrammatic and visual form.
I started by thinking about the Kneeling Drawing exercise that I completed and tried to put down my actions in a diagrammatic form. By using a series of line and arrows I represented the movements of my legs and hands. Quickly following on from this I tried to show in symbol form the thought process that I usually go through when thinking about commencing a painting or drawing. Lastly I thought about the process of thinking itself and the physical act of drawing or painting.
The initial diagrammatic drawings and sketches that I produced are shown below.
I had already taken note of the mention to record my thoughts and to the end I made a mental and physical note to regularly do this when I walk Fred, our dog.
It was whilst thinking about how to record human movements that I remembered a technique called THERBLIGS. I had come across this whilst completing my Accountancy studies many years ago. It is a system developed by Frank Bunker Gilbreth & Lilian Moller Gilbreth to record movements in time and motion studies. Therblig is an anagram of Gilbreth.
I looked up Therbligs on Google and noted that it consists of 18 kinds of Elemental motions used in the study of motion economy in the workplace. I wondered whether I could adapt this to the actions used in the studio. I’m sure that it could be adapted but even if successful it would only record the physical movements of the artist and not the thought process which is equally if not more important.
I further developed the physical diagram for the bodily actions carried out during the kneeling drawing.
What does this tell me about the drawing or the process? It gives an idea of the how the drawing was created but not the why or any evaluation of the outcome. In this respect I find it unsatisfactory.
Moving onto the thought process I developed the symbols, words and facial characteristics of the process that I go through when trying to create a drawing or painting. In some cases this process is more or less instantaneous at other times it can be drawn out over days, weeks or months. The process is the same. I have represented it in the diagram below in two separate ways. In the first instance I used a combination of symbols, words and facial characteristics in a circular flow diagram and for the second I used words only.
Could this be helpful to me. In a fairly basic way I believe that it could as it could point out where I am in th2 creative process. I feel I could develop the “ideas / thought” , ” ideas / select” and “experimental” phases further. To me this is the taking of an idea through the sketchbook phase to the embarking on a final piece. I suspect that I will refer to the processes documented in the diagram in my head rather than noting them down. However I will try to use the process when reflecting on completed work. Will it give me an indication as to where the successes and failures were?
Mark Taylor 'Studio Practice' 