Drawn Together: Collaboration Through Documentation
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I think that I appreciate the concept of simplicity more than any other time in my life. As an emergent art student, I was drawn to expressive canvases full of vibrant, gestural marks and loaded anarchic imagery. I am still in awe of those kinds of paintings, but it’s actually the minimal and subtle elements within artworks that hold my attention nowadays.
Wassily Kandinsky’s signature paintings are complex. But he toned down his otherwise elaborate compositions for a suite of four drawings that synthesized the forms of modern German dancer Gret Palucca, into simple arrangements of lines. By breaking down the dynamism of Palucca’s movements via straightforward linear forms, Kandinsky highlights the essence and essential physical aspects of her dancing.
Kandinsky’s drawings are based on photographs of Palucca taken by Charlotte Rudolph, who was renowned for photographing dancers in action. This was an avant-garde concept at the time, since dancers typically posed for the camera in prior photographic documentation.
Kandisnky, a member of the Bauhaus school faculty, interpreted Palucca’s dance form as being in accordance with the school’s pedagogical and aesthetic principles of art and design. In 1926, the drawings were published alongside Rudolph’s photographs in the arts journal Das Kunstblatt. Also published was Kandinsky’s essay, Dance Curves: On The Dances of Palucca, in which he notes that Palucca’s style of dance was characterized by “1) Simplicity of the whole form, and 2) being based on the large form.”
Having documentation of exercises in action is essential to my physical training development. Seeing film and still photographs of my workouts helps me to focus on the details, especially concerning whether I’m using and maintaining proper form.
As far as documentarians go, I have such a great one. My wife (
) is incredibly supportive of my work, and a saint for putting up with my consistent requests to be filmed. More than anyone else, she’s got an eye for what looks good, and a knack for making me look good on film. I’ve recently started to take stills from the films and make artwork from them. In these works, I interpret the realistic documentation through a painterly style.Below are several recent artworks, alongside my wife’s documentation of my fitness routines:
I really like your “arty” photos.