Paul Nash - Stages

1. Paul Nash, Diving Stage, 1928 2. Paul Nash, Mansions of the Dead, 1932 3. Paul Nash, Moon Aviary, 1936-7

Rocks

1. Andrea Mantegna, The Agony in the Garden, 1457-1459 2. Andrei Tarkovsky, Still from Stalker, 1979 3. Jiro Taniguchi, Page from The Walking Man, 1992 4. Katsushika Hokusai, Studies from Rocks, 1815  

...I think of Magritte

'Whenever I drive in any mountainous region and look at the line against the sky, I think of Magritte. And whenever I see beautiful, perfect clouds in the sky, he's the first thing that comes to mind. I think there is a humanity, a generosity and a kindness to others in Magritte's work. He takes the viewer into account. And I have always found the economy of his images very moving. They communicate very purely and directly. One of the most profound pieces of Magritte's is Discovery [1928]. It is an image of a woman whose flesh resembles the grain in wood. There is this aspect of Magritte which is about dealing with the world around us, and there is a certain materiality, a reality about that world that he creates, even though he makes these strange juxtapositions.

It is hard to imagine a lot of the computer programs that we work with in daily life, such as Photoshop, without the influence of Magritte. We owe to Magritte the many ways that we see the world through transparency or gradation. So I hold him in high esteem for showing us how images can be overlapped, or how they can be gradated into each other.' 

Jeff Koons

1. Réne Magritte, Le Monde des Images, 1950 2. Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, North Korea  
3. Réne Magritte, Le Siècle des Lumières, 1967 4. Clip art banner on cheese image
Quote from here

Albrecht Dürer studies

1. Albrecht Dürer, Three studies of a helmet, c.1503 2. Albrecht Dürer, Muzzle of an Ox, c.1502-4

Ceramic Components

1. Turbine component 2. Boron nitrate ceramic shapes 3. Black and white zirconia component 4. Ceramic honeycomb filters 5. Ceramic knee prosthesis component 6. Total knee replacement system comprising of ceramic components

Giovanni Bellini / David Lynch

1. Sacred Allegory, Giovanni Bellini, 1490-1500 2. The Red Room from Twin Peaks - Fire Walk with Me, David Lynch, 1992 3. Stage in Eraserhead, David Lynch, 1977

Matthias Grünewald Drawings

I recently came across two works by Matthias Grünewald in a book of German master drawings. His works seem to utilize the academic, classical Renaissance feel and technique of his contemporary Dürer while retaining an expressive quality to anatomy and scale as seen in works by earlier artists such as Dirk Bouts, Rogier van der Weyden and even Giotto. These drawings really accentuate this merging of styles. I find his work fascinating partly because it seems so strangely singular in its stylisation of forms, but also because of its scarcity, (both features of another interesting painter who worked in Italy at around the same time, Jacapo Pontormo, and whose greatest works, like Grünewald’s, remain in situ in hard to find churches rather than on the usual museum circuit). Sadly, very few of Grünewald ‘s works survive, less than fifty paintings and drawings in all from what I have read. Some time around 1631-2 a number of his works, including an altarpiece of three panels, were lost in a shipwreck while being transported to Sweden. There are few records of his life, but the writer W. G. Sebald in his book After Nature writes of how he is said to have led a mainly reclusive existence beset by hardships. Sebald also vividly describes Grünewald’s great work the Isenheim altarpiece, drawing on the details that make it so strange: ‘Spreading out above them is the branch work of a fig tree with fruit, one of which is entirely hollowed out by insects.’[1]

1. Study for Mary Magdalene 2. St. Johannes 3. St. Dorothy 4. Study for weeping figure 5. Portrait of Guido Guersi 6. 1934 Publication

[1] p8, Penguin Books, 2003

Glass / Cheese

1. Molten glass being rolled into continuous sheets 2. Processed cheese sheets

Spatial Constructions

1. Spatial Graphics No. 48, Petr Miturich, 1921 2. View of Petr Miturich's studio, 1921 3. Spatial Constuction No. 5, Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1918 4. Model for the set of Khlebnivov's poem 'Zangezi', Vladimir Tatlin 1923

Pekka Halonen

1. Winter Landscape at Kinahmi, 1923 2. Kinahmi Winter, 1923

Emerging / Holey

1. Man in port hole 2. Mao Zedong swimming 3. Wade Guyton 4. Holey ground

Cellulose

1. 'This syrupy substance is cellulose obtained from plant material after it has been treated with caustic soda and carbon disulphide. It is used to produce the man-made fibre rayon.' 

2. 'Cellulose fibre is mechanically baled in the manufacture of rayon. The gauge of the fibre can be adjusted to make textiles of various strengths and weights.'

Odol

‘Odol, a brand of German mouthwash, was a pioneering firm in research into graphics, through the development of its own brand image. The bottle is of a simple, functional design (but) on the posters the bottle is often associated with romantic landscapes. One poster puts a Böcklin landscape on the little bottle. On another, the letters ‘Odol’ outline a Greek amphitheatre in a landscape evoking the ruins at Delphi. Contrasting with the functionalist unity of message and form are three extrinsic forms of sensitization that associate utilitarian gargling with dreamlike scenes. But… forms that are ‘extrinsic’ in one sense are not so extrinsic in another. Odol’s graphic designer in fact utilizes the quasi-geometrical character of the brand’s letters, treating them as visual elements. The latter take the form of three-dimensional objects that wander in space, are distributed in the Greek landscape, and outline the ruins of the amphitheatre. The transformation of the graphic signifier into visual volume anticipates certain uses of painting; and Magritte did indeed draw inspiration from the Odol amphitheatre for his Art de la conversation, where an architecture of ruins is likewise constructed in letters.

The equivalence of the graphic and the visual creates the link between the poet’s types and the engineer’s. It visualizes the idea which haunts both of them – that of a common physical surface where signs, forms and acts become equal. On Odol posters, alphabetical signs are playfully transformed into three-dimensional objects subject to a perspectivist principle of illusion. But this three-dimensionalization of signs precisely yields a reversal of pictorial illusionism: the world of forms and the world of objects make do with the same flat surface – the surface of alphabetical signs. But this surface of equivalence between words and forms proposes something altogether different from a formal game: an equivalence between the forms of art and the forms of objects of everyday living. The ideal equivalence is rendered literal in the letters, which are also forms. It unifies art, object and image at a level beyond the things that oppose the ornaments of the Symbolist poem or graphic design, governed by the idea of ‘mystery’, to the geometrical and functional rigour of the engineer’s design.’

Jaques Rancière – The Surface of Design

1. 'Odol' spelled out at the 1908 London Olympic games 2. Odol advert 1906 3. Odol advert 1907 4. The Art of Conversation, 1950, René Magritte 5. The Art of Conversation, 1950, René Magritte 6. Portrait of Ed Ruscha found here 7. Optics, 1967, Ed Ruscha