Spots Before My Eyes: An Open Ended Encounter with Damien Hirst

A visitor to Hypergraphia at the Flatiron observed, "there is the infinite variety of things, then there is an infinite variation of one thing. Your installation is the latter". I like that a lot! Infinite is out of my reach, but it is true that each time I draw or paint on a paper coffee cup - always the one shape and surface texture - a new image emerges.

 Cup of the Day #99 by Gwyneth Leech

Homage to Damien Dot Cup - state 1

Colored India ink on upcycled white paper cup

This came back to me shortly after I entered Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street to look at the Damien Hirst Spotravaganza on view. At first it was just acres of spots, but as I wandered the huge galleries I noted with appreciation that no two canvases are alike. He too is engaged in the infinite variation of one thing, in this case grids of multicolored spots on pristine white canvas. Principally the colors and sizes of the spots vary, as do the sizes and shapes of the canvases, but within each group of shapes and sizes are further variations. I especially appreciated the different meta-patterns emerging from whites spaces between spots in a set of circular canvases in the rear gallery. 

The edges of paintings caught my eye also. Where the spots are huge and sit right at the edges, the canvases seem to bulge and contract. In another room a very long canvas contained the spots on three sides, but cut through all of them on the vertical - spots by the yard!

 Cup of the Day #99 by Gwyneth Leech

Homage to Damien Dot Cup - state 2

Colored India ink on upcycled white paper cup

All of this was interesting enough to take me to the second Gagosian gallery on 21st street. When I walked in the door and saw the same display of large and small canvases, with the same tonal effects of highly pigmented spots on pristine white canvases I was suddenly filled with a feeling of exhaustion. But plunging in I enjoyed the extremes of scale - in some paintings the spots so tiny that I could barely make them out hanging next to one the length of a football field. I also made the fun discovery that when you stand close to the wall the spots turn into rows. 

Overall I have to say, I like the spot paintings to the extent that they remind me of those strips of candy dots on white paper that we used to buy as kids! Funny then that some of the spot studies shown in an accompanying book are actually arrays of venoms. Some candy strip that!

  Cup of the Day #99 by Gwyneth Leech

Homage to Damien Dot Cup - state 3

Colored India ink on upcycled white paper cup

At this point, I would love to show you some photos of the spot painting shows, but the security guards said no cameras. I was tempted to photograph the Hirst gift shop through the window on 24th street, where a pile of Hirst coffee mugs was plainly to be seen on a plinth (a colored dot in the bottom of each), but respecting his intellectual property, I returned to the Flatiron window and drew a Damien Hirst homage spot cup and hung it up.

The color swatches on the white background looked all wrong hanging there. So I took it down again and considered. Would I leave all that negative space? Let Damien have it; I would follow the call of the fractal! Before long, a positive lace of smaller and smaller dots encased the cup, knitting it up until it found its proper place amongst the Hypergraphia cup drawings.  

 Cup of the Day #99 by Gwyneth Leech

Homage to Damien Dot Cup - finished state

Colored India ink on upcycled white paper cup

This is what I learned form the experience - painting free hand circles of color is hard! If my project of infinite variation involved that kind of pristine execution I would hire a stable of workers too. As it is, my approach has a lot to do with impulse, error and chance - of which there is an infinite amount in the world. It really is an open-ended proposition.

"And for that matter", said my husband, "so is a cup."

Good photos of Damien's spots at Gagosian can be seen on Blake Gopnik's Daily Pic.

And here is a posting of 10 spot reviews over on GalleristNY.

Alice through the Plate Glass: Observers Observed

Saturday January 21st was a significant day - it marked the start of the final month of Hypergraphia in the Prow. This really is it - the home stretch. No more extensions. In four weeks time, on Saturday February 18 starting at 2PM the cups will come down. 

Cup of the Day #98

Down Jackets by Gwyneth Leech

India ink on upcycled white paper cup

In the meantime, Winter is finally here in earnest; down jackets, fur coats and hats abound outside the windows. Wicked winds whip around the Prow, blowing hair to crazy tangled heights. 

Cup of the Day #98

Down Jackets by Gwyneth Leech

India ink on upcycled white paper cup

Even in this bitter weather, people stop to study the installation. I enjoy drawing the viewers on cups as they linger, staring in. Then I hang up the cup drawings right away. Now the observers are intently staring out at other people staring in. Something very Alice-like about that.

Snow day in the Prow, January 21, 2012

On Fifth Avenue looking north towards 23rd Street

The heat differential between inside and outside has grown more extreme. The Flatiron's steam radiators lining the Prow hiss and bang, coming on and going off in no discernible pattern. The cups positively dance in swirling drafts and my daily take-out cup of tea cools too quickly after I arrive in the morning. 

View of Hypergraphia

From Fifth Avenue, looking east

It finally snowed over the weekend, enough to cover the sidewalks, creating a white frame for the Prow. All of a sudden the white patterns and negative spaces on the cups pop out and look fragile and lacey against the new backdrop. The installation is chameleon-like in that way, responding to the color and light framing it. I wandered back and forth on the platform, re-arranging the middle section. The composition is three dimensional and infinitely variable.

View from the inside, looking north west, towards 23rd and Fifth

So, in just four more weeks, my five month residency in the Sprint Flatiron Prow Artspace will be done and it will be time to dismantle and move on. Until then, in fair weather or foul, in shirt sleeves or wrapped in wool (depending on the heating situation) I will be in the Prow drawing, hanging and rearranging cups, receiving guests and watching people watch me as I watch the world go by. 

Inside view, looking north east 

Towards Madison Square Park

Where Do Ideas Come From? Finding the Bottomless Cup

Where do ideas come from? Every time I sit down to write about this I draw a blank.

So I went for a walk, a swim and a hot shower. As usual, these activities of motion unleashed a torrent of wordy narratives in my head, even a concept or two, possibly valuable.

Cup of the Day #95

Raining Words, by Gwyneth Leech

India ink on upcycled white paper coffee cup

For me there are two distinct kinds of ideas - the wordy ones, and the visual ones.

Apparently the visual ideas reside in a completely separate part of the brain from the words and since production of visual ideas generally relies on sitting or standing still, bringing them forth can be a trickier proposition.

When I am painting a large canvas in the studio, it is all about executing an idea already conceived. Discoveries and new directions certainly happen as I go along, but for me the struggle is about how to get the painting to more closely match the images in my head. Having said that, the first brush marks reveal limitless possibilities. Then as a painting progresses and decisions are made these options diminish, until at last only one brush mark will fit. I often feel a sense of loss as I paint. Each state could be the starting point for innumerable new artworks, but unlike in the digital realm, going back to an exact prior state is never possible.

But where does the initial idea spring from, the vision bright enough to launch a painting?

Listening for the muse in the Flatiron Prow

Yes, I think about those cup and string phones all the time!

 Photo by Theresa DeSalvio

I was having lunch at Eisenberg's Coffee Shop with composer and singing colleague, Martha Sullivan after finishing up in the Flatiron window and we were discussing the topic. (As a quick aside, there are a number of things I like about Eisenberg's, an unreconstructed lunch counter on Fifth Avenue at 22nd Street: their hot pastrami sandwiches, the owner's flamboyant shirts and the sign outside which says "Either you get it or you don't.")

Drawing with composer, Martha Sullivan 

and sculptor, Hu Bing in the Prow

 Photo by Theresa DeSalvio

Over my pastrami sandwich, I had a sudden insight. (Yes, ideas also come from conversation + food!) I have been making art since I was a kid and there have been only a few periods in my life when I made no art at all: during my first year at the University of Pennsylvania (no Fine Art major back then), right after I had both my children and after 9-11. I did plenty of writing in those periods, but my visual muse fled and was nowhere to be found. And how did I get back into art-making? By drawing on things that had no apparent value - envelopes, programs, photocopies, music. No one saw these, they weren't meant to exhibited. I did them while I was busy with other things - like taking notes in anthropology classes, feeding children or sitting on the subway. But eventually, these drawings led me back to my sketchbooks and from there to the painting studio. The ideas came pouring out as very small drawings - brain to hand to paper - which I then labored to turn into larger compositions.

 Drawing in the Prow

December 2011

 Photo by Theresa DeSalvio

The coffee cup story is similar. While my narrative brain was otherwise engaged at school meetings, artist meetings and at my part-time job as a choral singer, my art brain just took care of itself and made friends with the surface of handy paper coffee cups. It crept up on me while I wasn't paying attention. Now each time I sit down with art materials and a cup, the shape, the surface, the curve, the variety of colors and prints, all continue to act as catalysts and set my hand on a new journey. This time, the artwork is finished directly on the cup - no digging things out of notebooks later, no copying and scaling up from sketches which can be a deadening exercise.

Passing Christmas Tree

Cups in the Flatiron Prow

December 2011

Making art on cups is currently the core of my studio practice and for three year now the ideas just keep coming, each one different. Talk about a bottomless cup!

Readily available and of no value to anyone else but me in their used state, paper cups allow me to risk everything. Nothing lost, everything gained. In short, they are a very useful form.

I like to say, Bach had inventions, Shakespeare had sonnets - and I have coffee cups.

Cups in the Flatiron Prow

December 2011

Season's Greetings from DVF and the Full Brew

"Where on earth did you get that dress??" I exclaimed the minute Rachel walked through the door for rehearsal a few weeks ago. She was wearing an exquisitely cut, sleeveless cocktail dress in Sienna brown, patterned with bright white brushmarks, each with a dropped shadow beneath. If one of my painted cups had walked through the door, this is how it would look.

 Rachel Farrar in the Flatiron window, December 2011

Photos by Gwyneth Leech

"Diane Von Furstenberg, 2010," she replied with a smile. "Great dress, right?"

Absolutely perfect!

Rachel Farrar is one of my all time favorite people; a collegial choral singer, wonderful soloist, fun person with a terrific eye for fashion. She is making her way in New York City as an extra for film and television and has great tales to tell of location shoots, actors and directors. She is a self-proclaimed  "proud member of the Screen Actors' Guild". Beyond all that, she has successfully helped me shop for clothes, which makes her a very special person. I am a famously poor shopper; I just have no stamina.

"You have to come to the Flatiron and wander through the cup installation wearing that!" I told her. She agreed to stop by.

In a pleasing turn of the circle, I was in Soho recently on my way to see my friend, Yvette Cohen's exhibition of shaped paintings at Cassina on Wooster Street. Right next door I was stopped in my tracks by a window full of inverted coffee cups, arranged into a Chrismas tree. A nice effect. DVF? Diane Von Furstenberg again! Art, coffee cups, fashion. It's official - paper coffee cups are cool!

DVF window, Wooster Street, December 2011 

DVF finally "met" my hand painted coffee cups a few days ago when Rachel did make it to the Flatiron Prow on her way to a Christmas party, wearing That Dress. She threaded her way happily in and out of the cup strands while I took photos from every conceivable angle, from both inside and out, having a high fashion New York moment which was shared by at least a dozen photographers who clustered round the windows. I wonder where those shots will turn up?

When I got home there was an e-mail from another friend attaching a photo of Diane Von Furstenberg's 57th Street window. The coffee cup Christmas tree again.

"DVF meets coffee", she wrote. "Have you seen this?"

"Yes," I replied. "And better yet, I've lived it."

The Full Brew wishes everyone a Merry Christmas. I will be back drawing in the window Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 am - 2 pm, from December 27th until February 18th, 2012.

Sailing Past the Median in the Flatiron Prow

Cups of the Day #94

Fire Escapes by Gwyneth Leech

Colored India Ink on white, upcycled coffee cups.

I am surprised that it has passed already - the halfway point on my journey in Sprint's Prow Artspace at the Flatiron Building! Favorable winds of goodwill have buoyed us along since September 20th, and the exhibit has been extended until February 18th, 2012. 

I must admit, my first day drawing inside a sweltering triangle of glass seemed endless. I paced and peered out the windows in all directions. How was I going to manage this? But a routine took shape and my temporary studio has become an enjoyable and productive place to be five days a week. When I am not there, I think of drawings I would like to do, gestures and patterns to explore.

 

The artist at work

Photo by Trish Mayo

View from Fifth Avenue, December 2011

I top up the cup stacks daily with my own beverages from the many coffee bars and delis nearby. In addition, friends have donated stacks of their own used cups, each one with name and date on the bottom, and the place they drank the coffee, expanding the record of social moments.  I love to take lucky dip and see what color or text comes up from a coffee bar in deepest Brooklyn or Queens that I haven't yet had the good fortune to visit!

Rainy Day window

November 2011

Orchids from Eve and orchid cup

Colored India ink on white paper coffee cup

October 2011

Looking back over the first half of the journey, there are so many highlights: cups reflected in umbrellas during torrential rains, twins in brilliantly patterned rain coats smiling in at me, my hot dog cart so hard to draw, the tricky fire escapes on the buildings across 5th Avenue. Then there was the Bicycle Barber who came to call and gave me and the exhibit's curator, Cheryl McGinnis haircuts, the freakish blizzard that engulfed the Prow before the end of October, and Eve Suter who brightened a dark afternoon with a bouquet of coffee colored orchids in a tall white cup.  Not to mention the many great conversations with old friends, and new ones from around the world.

Hot Dog Cart Cup

White-out pen and colored ink on

Maroon printed paper cup

September 2011

Summer styles have given way to winter coats. I spy Santa hats, Christmas trees and giant bags of shopping these days. The trees in Madison Square Park changed to gold and are now a tracery of black branches against the pale stone buildings beyond. The sweltering heat of late summer sun turned to chill breezes inside the Prow. For awhile I sat bundled in coat and sweaters. Finally, the heat kicked on in the ancient radiators, sending the cups spinning in waves of convection.

Freak blizzard at the Prow

October 2011

Nights come early now and more and more photos are posted online, documenting the windows in all weathers and times of day.

Fortified by stacks of coffee cups, ample art pens from Faber Castell, the never ending flow of visual stimuli on the streets outside and the promise of many interesting social moments yet to come, I am looking forward to the rest of the crossing. February 18th will be here before we know it!

Night Photographers, November 2011

to view a Flickr album of other people's photos

of Hypergraphia at the Flatiron click here.

Drawn to Coffee Cups: the Complexities of Keeping it Simple

Cup of the Day #93

by Gwyneth Leech

White ink and colored India ink 

on green upcycled paper coffee cup

Numerous people have remarked at how simple the idea of Hypergraphia is - drawing on paper cups and hanging them up. My reply is, "it has taken me 30 years to get this simple!"

Hypergraphia is not my first go round with upcycling - I was doing it as a young artist living in Scotland. Then it involved collecting truck loads of plastic detritus from beaches and making them into sculpture. (That was in the days before digital photos. Where the heck did I store those slides?)

Now the paper coffee cup says it all. But how did I get there?

Aerial salt marsh views painted on

paper coffee cups

Stacked in the studio, October 2010

In 1999 I moved to New York City. Let's face it, New York can be a tough town for artists. There is so much stimulation, so many museums and art exhibts to see, so many other artists working here, not to mention the roiling sea of the art market that can buffet a person every which way. In the midst of all that it is easy to lose your sense of self and your visual compass.

To counter these currents I decided years ago to keep it local and keep it simple. I would paint portraits of my friends and their families. I did this happily until the complexities of commissions and the fraught politics of representation began to wear. Family portraits were not straightforward after all!

Wall of painted coffee cups

6 feet by  6 feet

In the studio, January 2011

I became interested in a local landscape, of tidal salt marshes along the coast of New Jersey, utterly familar to me from years of summers at the shore. It is the aerial view that intrigues me, first seen via Google Earth. The meandering streams and waterways look elemental, like the circulatory system of the body. Google Earth wasn't enough. I had to see it up close - first from boats, then planes. But it is not so easy to cage a lift on a small plane. Then back in the studio I struggled to get it down on large canvases, my ideas outstripping my time, my resources and my storage space.

Cup Collection

in museum display box with mirrored back

July 2011 

Finally, I started to pay close attention to my coffee cups which, in a casual way, had become the locus of an ever expanding lexicon of drawing and painting ideas, including abstractions based on those salt marshes. Started at meetings some four years ago, when paper replaced styrofoam, my image-making-on-cups habit had grown and grown, from stacks in my studio to a small window exhibit on 38th Street, and now to the Prow of the Flatiron Building where I will be drawing and adding new cups to the installation through February 18th, 2012.

I may even have 1000 drawn cups by then!

Hypergraphia Cup Installation

Sprint Artspace, Flatiron Prow

Interior view, December 2011

The exhibiting of the cups has presented its own complexities. I recently found pages of notes brainstorming the installation. I imagined elaborate ways of weighting the cups involving collections of personal items, household objects and even playground sand. Display ideas discussed were shelves, racks, pedestals. Finally the exhibit's curator, Cheryl McGinnis said she saw the cups "hanging every which way" which led to the breakthrough solution - loops on a line. Many different kinds of materials later, I alighted on the perfect weight of mono-filament and just the right kind of loop, reliably knotted yet imprecise enough to orient the cups pleasingly in all directions. 

Thus, after many meanders and through a process of trial and error, the seemingly uncomplicated and organic Hypergraphia installation came into being.

Hypergraphia Cup Installation

Sprint Artspace, Flatiron Prow

View from 23rd and Broadway

December 2011

Recently I calculated that Hypergraphia, the Cup Installation has been featured on over 75 web publications and blogs, including articles in Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Turkish, French, Arabic and Macedonian!

All this from the simple paper coffee cup held in the palm of my hand!

Bathed in Gold: Madison Square Park Goes Autumnal

Cup of the Day #92

Golden Network by Gwyneth Leech, November 2011

White-out pen and India ink on blue coffee cup

From my studio corner of the Flatiron Prow I have been watching for days as the trees in Madison Square Park turn color and spread a back drop of shimmering gold behind my suspended cups. 

View from the Prow Artspace

Flatiron Building, November 2011

Photo by Gwyneth leech

I draw the trees every few days and hang the cups so that inside and outside play against each other kaleidoscopically. Add in yellow traffic light boxes and the constant parade of yellow cabs until I feel enveloped in gold. 

 View from the Prow Artspace

Flatiron Building, November 2011

Photo by Gwyneth leech

Now the leaves are falling and I can see further into Madison Square. From my chair I can just make out one of Alison Saar's sculptures perched in the high fork of a London Plane tree, a glimpse that draws me into the park at the end of my drawing session.

Alison Saar Sculpture, Madison Square Park, 

through December 31st, 2011

There balances the black figure, head bowed, hair falling forward, covered with gun-metal butterflies. In an adjacent tree, an arborist on ropes is checking the canopy after a brutal, early snow storm damaged thousands of trees across the city. All seems safe and sound in the high branches and leaves drift down peacefully on Saar's totemic sculptures scattered through the park.

 Checking the tree canopy

Arborist in Madison Square Park

Photo by Gwyneth Leech 

Circling back towards the Flatiron Prow I bump into my friend Minouche Waring, a painter and glass designer, who lives on 6th Avenue at 26th Street. We go up to her loft to look at her latest glass pieces and drink Pu-erh tea with hot soy milk and Cardamom. My husband and I sublet her loft in 1993 while she traveled in India, our first experience living in New York City. Back then we recall, Madison Square was rat-infested and neglected. Concerted efforts by the Madison Square Conservancy have turned the park around and made it a brilliant showcase for public art presented by Mad. Sq. Art. It is my pleasure that Alison Saar's sculptures will be keeping me company until the end of the year, and that I will see more of them from my perch in the Prow Artspace as the trees go bare.

Alison Saar Sculpture, Madison Square Park, 

through December 31st, 2011

Photo by Gwyneth Leech

Art, Cups, NYC

evagolightly, Statigram, 9.31 pm, 10/23/11

que_serasera, 14PC, 8.39 am, 9/24/1

I knew when I hung my cup art installation in the Flatiron Prow that a lot of people would see it, situated as it is on a major intersection at the very heart of New York City.  However, I hadn't really thought about how the current multi-tasking, hyper-connected, mobile public looks at art.

petra_mckenzie, Statigram, 11/11

Typical encounters with my cups go like this: Pedestrians are striding purposefully by, cuppa in hand, ear buds in, talking on their cell phones. They are brought to a halt in surprise by the hundreds of suspended cup drawings scintillating and turning in the windows of the Prow Artspace. They promptly get off their calls, take photos with their phones, apply some filters and load them to the internet right away.

Rula, Statigram, 10/11

A few keywords - #cups #flatiron #nyc- and the photos join a growing online archive on Statigram, Flickr, Tumblr, Tweetpics, Google+, Facebook and other photo blogs of the way each individual sees the installation.

They are consuming their art and making some of their own on the fly!

Selen, 14PC, 10/11

In an essay called Lessons from Social Media, Nick Martin writes:

"Here’s a description of the process Leech goes through with each cup and why:
“Leech saves cups from her drinks — and occasionally from other artists she meets for tea or coffee — washes, dries them and records on the bottom the date, place, occasion, and drink it held, thus documenting the social moment.”

Catch that last part? Each cup documents a “social moment”. Every single cup suspended so delicately in midair symbolizes a personal interaction, an exchange of stories or ideas, a connection with another human being. All of these social moments are then made into art, and displayed to hundreds of onlookers sparking new social moments, ideas, stories, and connections."

Danielle_B, Facebook, 11/7/1

It is exactly as he says! And just as each cup is different, each viewer's photos are unique, sparking their own text-based responses and conversations.

"I love how simple yet magnificent and intricate this is all at once!"

 chrysanthacakes, Statigram, 11.49 am, 10/21/11

 

Where will it all end up? Where will all this connectedness take us? I have no idea. I am excited by the possibilities. 

"Contemplating Modern Art in New York City",
chacoan, Statigram, 2.44 pm, 11/1/2011

As I watch it all unfold, there are many cups of tea and coffee to drink and many more drawings to do between now and the beginning of 2012.

See you at the Flatiron. And don't forget to bring your camera - or at the very least, your cellphone.

 

cattie, 12.37 am, 10/31/11

rmar, Statigram, 5.58 pm, 11/4/2011

 

Matthew Huie, Flickr, 11/7/11