John Pelham Black

from my perspective

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John Black

White garlic bulbs on white plate

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Four garlic bulbs and a ginger root, Graphite pencil on paper, 11″ X 14″ 2023-01-18

A pencil drawing of four white garlic bulbs and a ginger root on a white oval plate. The lighting is from every direction on the ceiling, rendering the subject flat. Every morning for several weeks, I have looked at that plate, white garlic on a white plate, and thought I must try to draw that. The white paper skin against the white pottery plate makes it hard to see what’s there. Even the cloves inside the open bulb are light, as is the ginger root at the back of the plate, providing little relief from the whiteness. It’s too much whiteness, so hard to see what going on. I had to draw it – to see if I could see it better.

Drawing from life

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Photograph of a pencil on paper drawing of three microfine eyeglasses cleaning clothes .
Three microfine eyeglass cleaning clothes; Graphite pencil on 11″ X 14″ bristol board;

I have been drawing still lifes from life since my mid-teens. I experience a transcendent feeling of connection to the things I draw. It doesn’t matter what they are or how beautiful or mundane they appear. The process of transcription of what I see to the paper is calming and spiritual. I am not competing with a photograph. I love to take photographs. But this is different. Every stroke of the pencil takes a special human imprint that the lens can never duplicate. Every mark has a part of me in it. And no matter how careful I am, I can never get it exactly right. So, I fill in. I have to improvise. I pull a little here and stretch a little there to make it look as close as I can to how I see it. But it never is. And those places where I’ve morphed and hidden are my little secrets. It’s no longer what is there, but what I had to make it with all my human limitations. But now it’s mine. It is a part of me on paper for all to see.

Recent Work – Drawings

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A pencil drawing of a dried tree leaf resting on a white paper napkin.
Dried leaf on a white paper napkin

Drawing is how I started with art. As a child of 7 or 8, I drew the face of a mean pirate and hung it on the wall in my bedroom. Later that night, when the lights were out, I saw the face in the dark and grew terrified. This was my introduction to the power of drawing. A quote attributed to Michelangelo is, “Let whoever has attained the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.”

But this is also a work of conceptual art, a la Duchamp’ Urinal. Here is the concept:

A dried tree leaf is placed on a white paper napkin on a flat surface. The lights from above are difuse, reducing the shadows and making the entire scene fairly, but not completely flat. Then using several different graphite leads of three different hardnesses, an artist makes many marks on a new piece of smooth, white bristol board. When satisfied that the marks on the paper resemble the scene in front of him, the artist uses a camera to record a digital image of the paper with the marks. This digital image is then placed on a website in such a way that any visitors can download it and view it in their browser. The artist writes about it that it is both a drawing and a work of conceptual art. And so it is.

Statement of conceptual art creation by John Pelham Black 2023-01-03 @ 11:23 EST.

Freedom of Attention

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A presentation by James Williams: Freedom of Attention is a great talk on the ethics and philosophy of the modern “Information Economy.” I found this author in an article in the Guardian, by Johann Hari.

Technology and Democracy

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I need some hope. This article from The Atlantic provides some.

Happily, this future democratic city is not some far-off utopia. Its features derive not from an abstract grand theory, but from harsh experience. We often forget that the U.S. Constitution was the product of a decade of failure. By 1789, its authors knew exactly how bad confederation had been, and they understood what needed to be fixed. Our new internet would also embrace all of the lessons we have so bitterly learned, not only in the past 20 years but in the almost two centuries since Tocqueville wrote his famous book. We now know that cyberspace did not, in the end, escape the legacy of John Perry Barlow’s “weary giants of flesh and steel.” It just recapitulated the pathologies of the past: financial bubbles, exploitative commercialization, vicious polarization, attacks from dictatorships, crime.

The Atlantic – “How to Put Out Demoncracies Dumpster Fire”