Richard Tuttle

" Art is a discipline.... and discipline is drawing"
 Butler, H.C. (2000) The Art of Richard Tuttle. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, inc.

I came across this book today at the library on Richard Tuttle called "The Art of Richard Tuttle" written by Butler, H.C. I am influenced by Tuttle's  watercolour paintings, and how they link to drawings, Butler states that the "experience of the drawings is linked by the uniformed experience of the horizontal line, which bisects each sheet and makes a sort of synthesized time line of perception along which incidental marks tease and dance. The question of what Tuttle is representing is through the materials ability to create an 'object in space' A 3.D dimensional illusion, that resonates something of the everyday. Each glyphlike watercolour drawn on an everyday sheet of lined notebook paper is like a chinese character, but no sentence is formed, no logical sequence developed, they simply overwhelm with their unyielding recurrence.

"Often palled hues, patched - together supports, and loosely brushed shapes, combined with his liberal use of emptiness and dispersal" The subtly of watercolour in these works, makes them look quick, fast sketches of something bigger something Tuttle may of seen of interest in the everyday. I guess this reflects on a memory of what the viewer may or may not interpret out of these drawings. 
The drawings act "freely and grant the same freedom to those elements and to the viewer who enters into the sphere that they reframe, reconfigure and fill" The viewer becomes the context to these works as they display pencil marks and finely brushed watercolour, they are open to interpretation, through there 'light' aspect of representation. Tuttle "liberates the eye and mind to roam in the tandem from sensation to disinterested, even disembodied, thought and back to sensation" The works act casually with the surface being lined note book paper - an everyday material that does not normally have connotations to an artwork.

"If you can create a space between appearance and reality, you can do anything"
Tuttle imposes devices repeatedly in his compositions to suggest a layering of both space and consciousness." It is through this layering of pencil and watercolour that I am most interested in, they way in which transparency and the temporal material of the lined note book act with each other in contrasting ways. What i like about the nature of Tuttles work is that he plays off this very whimsy constructed 'child - like' freedom with materials, by combining art material with ephemeral plays off this push/pull of what we percieve as high art, low art.