Motion, Sound and People on Paper.

I held a motion workshop on 21st January 2010 to experiment with how music is a catalyst for movement in the body, and how to go about capturing that in drawing. I met with Jamal (the model) and Jade Gibson (a good dancer) a few days before the workshop and we did a warm up session. It soon became apparent that Jamal had some Capoeira training so it was decided those were the moves we would use for the workshop, and I found some Capoeira and Brazilian Carnival beats to establish the right vibe.
I organised a group of ten people to attend a life drawing workshop at Greatmore Studios. As the session got under way a pattern was established. A movement clip would be choose and then broken down into a series of three 'freeze frames' which would be held for short periods of time ranging from 1- 3 min. This allowed time to capture the figure but not enough time for a detailed accurate depiction of the figure. I wanted to establish the link between one pose and the next on a single sheet of paper.
After lunch break the feedback was that people liked the fast poses and they wanted to keep going with them. The rhythm was established and Jamal would take one pose and then move on to the next and continue in this fashion. In trying to capture all these short poses I felt a growing frustration as I was unable to use the model as reference and create a good likeness. However the irritation began to subside as I just recorded the most important core gestures of the movement, and did not get too caught up in the details of the movement.
The end product was not a neat photographic rendition of the model in movement. Instead it was a more real depiction of the over whelming feeling a human brain experiences as it has to process the large amount of information needed to capture a model in motion. As well as the feeling of physical and mental exertion that accompanies that.
I am reacting to portraying my experience of reality as a one dimensional clinical super realistic image. In the line work I try to capture the richly textured environment of people, sound and motion. I plan to do research into what shifted in my brain activity at the point when I stopped trying to records still frames but rather took in the fluid motion. I want to look at the research done by Bulgarian psychiatrist Georgi Lozanov on how music can change brain waves activity causing a person to be in a more receptive or active.