Magnetic Village

The theme of Tilman for februari is Magenetic Village. Excellent theme! It brings the abstract and not drawable "magnetic" in contact with a very tangible notion of "village".
At first i started drawing buildings in the grip of a circular magnetic field. See how nice gloomy the picture becomes on this brown paper, and look at the fine lines, that will be different soon!

But something went wrong: it became a city. The theme was village. Then i noticed that "village" and magnetic are contradictory, in the sense that all in a village is at a certain comfortable distance. Also, the villages are abandoned for the cities, the village does not attract any more. Only the old, those weary of life or green dreamers will be resettling villages. (All of the former is applicable to me, i would love to live in a village, but there are no villages left in Holland, it is just a big city interspersed with some parks, and heavily subsidized cows...).
So maybe is a magnetic village something that lies in the countryside and makes aircraft deviate down to the tower of the church? Nice idea too, but it does point too much to religion. Always somebody will be offended and likely to throw bombs immediately. (But even if we please these fragile religious tows, we will suffer even more from irresponsible well paid financial people so why bother anyway?) My village is too nice for that! (For bombers and for financial bureaucrats-rats alike.) I decided otherwise. I started drawing buildings, and placing them glued together by the magical force of the magnetic.

But i didn't like the drawings..terrible! There should be another way to do this, more easily to be shifted around...Then I got myself organized and started preparing drawings, more illustrations and assembling them, in a village setting. Nicely spaced.

Small roads connecting every building...Oh you want trees: that can be arranged, yes trees very much belong to a village :

Then the force strikes: all buildings get magically magnetic and glue together:

It didn't really satisfy me. May be this is too much hardship for a village! See, i mentioned the fine lines above - but in the last drawings the lines are really rude. Cartoon style. I opted for these lines myself, true: a village is sort of a cartoon. Life is not that nice anymore, it is raw, everybody wants to ripe you of, city jungle. The autonomous artist in me (that is the one who wants to make incomprehensible drawings) likes more the backside of the paper on which the houses were sketched then the front:

so in the end i had to abandon the village, the buildings were closed by wood, nails and planks.....poor buidlings!

So far the village. The next theme will be (i thought of global village, green village, indeed abandoned village, a heavily subsidized cow, but no...) it will be: city jungle!
But i do not want to leave you in this very desolate state, i want to let you dream for a moment, before jumping into real bad life again, let's us look for a last glimpse in the village pond, what do we see to say goodbye?: magnetic village......but mirrored in the waves made by ducks wich small chicks, peacefully deformed all the time, dream on dream on dream on.........

Magnetical Drawing

My theme was this month magnetical drawing. I had bought some of those drawing boards for children, which can wipe out every drawing anew. The drawing possibilities are not very good, but the theme seemed interesting to me.
I made some simple forms, playing with the hexagons, triangles and a cricle. You can see how the powder is shifted to one side, so we are not able to "fill" a black shape. If you stay on the geometry of the hexagon, it is acceptable, but....

When I was in Bremen i gave Tilman one of these boards as a present and i thought he would be tempted to make drawings on it. (He is very capable of drawing under the most difficult circumstances if he wants to...) Well, he didn't seemed to be amused. So the theme was extended a little bit, just magnetical drawings, not drawing on this magnetical board.
Although the theme was made more general, I quickly realized that this theme was not at all easy! The board is terrible, but also the "magnetic - magnetical" is not at all something that would have been interesting to ...Ingres, Picasso, Michelangelo. Why not? It is not really emotional. It is rather scientific.
Of course magnetical and attraction seems to be related and attraction is really human, but on the other hand the magnet is not attractive at all......
To come closer to an emotion, I tried to imagine from the inside how the powder would feel, first being in a square....


The drawing board is called magnetic because it uses a magnet to draw on iron (?) powder caught in between the cells of a wire of hexagones. The fact that the wiring is not on suares is really amazing!
(There is a clean state, where does the powder come from when drawing?)
So, then i would imagine myself being powder in the hexagones:


Ok and i noticed, strange enough, that indeed, not much drawing is possible on this board, mine was especially not working too well. And besides, the hexagones and the powder was not too well distributed. See the experiments on top.
So in the end i made most of my drawings on paper. Imagining what it would be like to live inside such a cell.



Then i searched on the internet and found out that they even sell board with three colors!
Because of the color seperation i was able to make a good drawing on one of these boards...
It seems to me that the theme is worthwhile exploring further. I have the feeling that i must just find that switch....it could be very revealing....saving humanity (to start with) ....maybe the universe.....maybe more.....:-)