Mike Parr

I have now reached the point where large drawings on paper are being produced in tandem with large drypoints and etchings. Energy and ideas are continually flowing between one medium and the other. Across the paper I work at great speed, which facilitates a particular kind of resolution as well as a particular kind of content.

Drypoints are made directly onto metal plates with a carborundum-tipped stylus or a diamond point for fine work. The line cut into the copper raises a burr and it is the burr (rather than the groove, as in etching) that carries the ink. I also use other tools such as an angle grinder, sandpaper, nails and old wood chisels for cutting and scumbling the surface of the metal plate.

In contrast to the mobility of the work on paper, copper or zinc plates are a mass of resistance. The key, though, is to understand how this extreme contrast facilitates my work, because I find the difficulty of ‘seeing’ the image to be particularly stimulating, as accurate contours in the mind are defeated by the process of drypoint drawing. Lines continually skid into one another, agglutinate and form patches of graphic turbulence and the surface becomes greasy, opaque. The sheer physicality of the process and the characteristic ‘damage’ of the drypoint lines and, in the large works, the overdrawing across images and plates, are also all in direct contrast to work on paper. It is as though at every instant I am breaking down my facility as a draftsman.

What I am really talking about is the meaning of difficulty, how images are formed, what is left out in the process and how ‘skill’ glosses over or conceals the artist’s understanding of his own work.

Mike Parr, 1990.

Mike Parr, Language and Choas I, 1989-90

 

Mike Parr, Part of: 12 Untitled self portraits (Set 1), 1989

On Parr’s work Graham Coulter-Smith and Jane Magon write the following:

Parr is embarked upon a search for something which can never be found, a self which is inherently lost. Our being, Being in general, is lost - that's why we are so obsessed with finding it. The human irony is that we are strongly motivated by a quest for identity, but our very mode of seeking prevents us from ever finding it. We seek ourselves via self-representation, but the very act of re-presentation is the antithesis of that self-presence we hunger for. Each act of self-representation is a disappointment because it can only ever produce a trace, a burnt out replica of that self presence we desire.

…charcoal drawings, with their physical record of the artist's hand, evoke the theological ideal of the artist's presence…the traditional aesthetics of presence. 

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~robert2600/mparr.html