Book44

SketchBooks

FEU ET FLAMME
June 26, 2012 - November 12, 2012
16x24 cm.; handbound, found cover w/collage {{Unrelated but apropos: Bishop writes, “If the digital means anything for visual art, it is the need to take stock of this orientation and to question art’s most treasured assumptions. At its most utopian, the digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture; at its worst, it signals the impending obsolescence of visual art itself.” This is to my mind a good thing. As we all know there is no chance that art will become obsolete, but there is a good chance that Art and the trappings of the Art World could, and for some in the new media sector, that’s what we’ve been working towards – not getting included within Art’s boundaries, but obliterating boundaries altogether, seeing art not as a noun but as a verb, as something one does, one practices, not something that is. ---Sarah Cook (comments on the article "DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA" - http://artforum.com/talkback/id=70724)}}

Cover of sketchbook 44: a red 19th-century publisher's binding stamped in gold, titled 'Feu et Flamme', the author's name blacked out — an antique book altered into a sketchbook

Sketchbook 44: the altered title pages of Zénaïde Fleuriot's 1888 novel Feu et Flamme — author struck through and replaced with 'Mvr A. Samyn', dated 1888–2012, ringed by the year's cities from Neuchâtel to Las Vegas

Sketchbook 44, drawn over the printed page 'Chapitre Premier' of Feu et Flamme: a faint pencil portrait of a girl with tousled hair, one eye darkly shaded

Sketchbook 44, 'Summer, Jun 27': iris and leaves in vivid colored pencil growing past a shaded skull, journal notes on color and the Book of 8 project, over a printed Feu et Flamme page describing Parc Monceau

Sketchbook 44 spread, 27 December 2012: colored-pencil studies of bare feet, a potted seedling and a small tree, beside dense game-design notes on ditching the open world and unrolling the world in chapters

Sketchbook 44 spread labeled 'Murillo': blue and graphite studies of standing nudes and women with 1960s bouffant hair, one gaunt figure gazing down at right — noted 'Battle of the Frigids, Slovenia'

Sketchbook 44 spread: pencil profiles of faces and a hand with a ring, facing a faint mapped reconstruction of Alchemilla Hospital from Silent Hill — elevators, kids' room, kitchen — labeled 'SH1 endgame'

Sketchbook 44 spread from the Imagining the Future symposium, Neuchâtel, 10 July 2012: ballpoint portraits of speakers with a microphone, and a watercolor of the Alps over the lake with a sailboat

Sketchbook 44 spread: charcoal studies of a male nude from behind and a thigh, with a handwritten list of the ten sibyls — Persian, Libyan, Delphic, Cumaean — and their legends

Sketchbook 44 spread: ballpoint plane trees and a mossy fountain, with scribbled motion studies of dancers noted from Les Ballets C de la B's 'Oude King' — 'human range of motion', 'over pain madness'

Sketchbook 44: pencil drawing of the ruined castle of Fenouillet on its rocky hilltop, drawn as an outline map of boulders with touches of violet ink

Sketchbook 44, 'Things that happen at night', last night in Fenouillet, 27 July 2012: four ballpoint vignettes — a hill against storm light, wind through a dark window, a man in darkness, a figure day-for-night

Sketchbook 44 page: ballpoint masked figures in hooded robes labeled Beauty, Wit, Virtue and Grace — 'the fairies are not your friends, they are old magic' — with a crowned tragic mask at center

Sketchbook 44: graphite copy after Velázquez — a short-haired boy with a white collar glancing over his shoulder, a hand below him raising a small glass

Sketchbook 44 spread from GDC Europe 2012: ballpoint figures of attendees, and Thomas Grip saying 'Keep systems simple, rely on imagination' beside his eight numbered design principles

Sketchbook 44 spread: pencil studies after ceiling figures — a flying woman with wind-blown drapery carrying an infant, and a second tumbling figure seen from below

Sketchbook 44 spread, 3 September, model session: soft pencil sketches of the same nude bending, kneeling and seen from the back, poses overlapping across the gutter

Sketchbook 44 spread: graphite studies of a standing male nude in two overlapping stances at left, and at right the model reclining, legs extended toward the corner

Sketchbook 44: a magenta orchid painted in gouache and colored pencil against a smoky black-brown ground, buds above and a fainter penciled bloom emerging below

Sketchbook 44 spread over the printed chapter headings of Feu et Flamme: a tonal graphite nude curled around his knees, hands clasped over his feet

Sketchbook 44 spread, 'Slightly lost': ballpoint sketch of the Heusden bus stop en route to a driving exam, a reclining graphite nude below, and watercolor figure studies in grey and burnt orange opposite

Sketchbook 44 spread, 2 October 2012, Boeing 747 to Las Vegas: red ballpoint sleeping passengers under a painted blanket, with a swatched palette of 'colors for a trip to California'

Sketchbook 44 spread: airplane cabin interior in red ballpoint — seat backs, tray tables and curtains in crosshatch, a sleeping passenger's hand curled at upper left

Sketchbook 44 spread, IndieCade day one: blue ballpoint portraits of Ian Dallas, Chris Bell, Amy Hennig, Jenova Chen, Christine Love, Anna Anthropy, and Steve Russell with John Romero at the mic

Sketchbook 44 spread: Mary Flanagan's IndieCade keynote — her full-length portrait beside her list from Jacquard to Gygax — facing notes from Richard Lemarchand's USC class with studies of clasped hands and a wire tangle

Sketchbook 44 spread: pale watercolor notation of the Pacific coast — green scrub hills, scattered trees, and an ochre bluff washed over faint pencil beneath

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