Briony Wagstaff

. "Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These need not be exact. They need only to be tonalised on the mode of our inner space." - Gaston Bachelard 'The Poetics of Space' All images Copyright of Briony Wagstaff 2016 ©

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land lines

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worm-made landscape

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can you tell what eyes I’m wearing?

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elemental sandcastles

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“Françoise Gilot - Picasso’s friend, lover and partner from 1944 to 1953 - describes how, when he was preparing to reinterpret a favourite painting, he would repeatedly go to the Louvre and stare at it for ages. Only later would he start work on his own interpretation...

...Françoise also remembers Picasso adopting a similar approach before painting her. He would stare at her for extended periods of time, but produce his paintings when she was not there.

Picasso overlearned the picture. When you overlearn something, you don’t just look at it, think about it and try to learn from or remember it. You look at it (or listen to it) again and again until it becomes completely familiar. Overlearning enables memory to work much better and in much greater detail.”

- Christine Temple, Picasso’s Brain

I would like to employ this technique more and more. I think the results would be interesting and hopefully insightful. I often feel I have already repeated myself before even reaching this stage, so it would be valuable to have a justifiable reason to push things further.