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| Frottage from Le Fascinant Cyprès (The Fascinating Cypress) from Histoire Naturelle (Natural History) |
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| Frottage from Le Fascinant Cyprès (The Fascinating Cypress) from Histoire Naturelle (Natural History) |
'Surrealist automatist technique developed by Max Ernst in drawings made from 1925. Frottage is the French word for rubbing. Ernst was inspired by an ancient wooden floor where the grain of the planks had been accentuated by many years of scrubbing. The patterns of the graining suggested strange images to him. He captured these by laying sheets of paper on the floor and then rubbing over them with a soft pencil. The results suggest mysterious forests peopled with bird-like creatures and Ernst published a collection of these drawings in 1926 titled Histoire Naturelle (natural history).' Images sourced from MoMa Collection Text sourced from Tate Glossary Highly surreal work by artist, Max Ernst, which gave me a lot of food for thought. Today I completed a series of rubbings on buildings in London. However, it never occurred to me that I could possibly use these textures as the base of the drawings and actually create forms around them instead of just having them as patterns. At the same time some of them work on their own and some just don't depict anything in particular. The rubbings will go on until next week the latest, as the book needs to be ready by end of March and I still need to letterpress the text, so updates will follow hopefully s o o n. |
