Anne Douglas on Paul Clay

Anne Douglas on Paul Clay – 19/11/09

Anne Douglas walked us through the works of Paul Clay. We analysed his drawings and were explained how Paul Clay saw drawing as the direct opposite of photography, and his vision of drawing as an extension of ourselves. We analysed the drawings of Paul Clay and tried to understand his view on the art of drawing. Anne Douglas explained from the start that her definition of “art” was “doing something supremely well”. One of the main focuses that we observed on Paul Clay’s drawings is the idea of referential: he called these the passive, the active and the medial. We were asked to produce a drawing ourselves illustrating a natural event that would take in consideration the referential system and the change in the active, passive and medial elements in our drawings. We then presented our drawings to the class and explained our referential system, and our representation of forces in the drawing. The class then commented not only on our representation but also on our drawing skills.

During our seminar, I tried to question Paul Clay, and could not stop be understand what he was doing what a form of pseudo-scientific representation. Paul Clay’s drawings bother me. For me, they are in direct contradiction with the definition of art given to us at the beginning of the seminar: art is doing something “supremely well”. Paul Clay does no seem to be doing his work supremely well in any perspective. His illustrations are merely pseudo-physics. The system he tries to represent with the water weal is just a very poor tae on the study of forces and referential which has been the method to analyse actions and reactions in the physics discipline for centuries. The physics idea is the same as Paul Clays with the only difference of having a consistent and logical norm of representation. When Paul Clay puts emphasis on one aspect of the forces applied to his schematics, he is simply changing the referential. In other words, he is just changing the “item” around which the whole force system is applied to.

In physics there are precise ways of drawing forces and applying them in relation to a referential. The simplest example is in the heliocentric referential, the earth goes around the Sun, but if we take the Earth as a referential, the sun is the other planets are the ones moving in an ellipsis around the Earth. Paul Clays drawings simply change referential by putting more emphasis on the water, the hammer, or the wheels.

The closest this application could be taken to my work is the importance of some items on others in the artistic representation and how one represents this emphasis. In comics, one can apply more or less emphasis on an item, an emotion or an event, and sometimes all three in the same situation consecutively. Paul Clay’s approach to drawing allows one to consider what he would like to have as the main referential in his drawing, allowing for a view of the drawing in different perspectives.