Sunday, August 9, 2009

Projecting Past the Drawing


What is it that makes me take a perfectly good graphite drawing and cut and tear it to pieces and reassemble it into something new? I mean, it was a pretty good effort at capturing the running brook, the stones and the vegetation and I might have stopped there. But, I was encountering the same feeling that I have with a photo. It was flat. It failed to catch the sense of depth and time that I felt looking at the view. So I was driven to add more to it, to push it past the flat rendering, the sense of frozen time. It's all about capital S Seeing, knowing not just what I am viewing but its context, its position in relationship to the rest of the world. Nothing exists out of context. Its the process of discerning the context that occupies my attention and drives me to do something more to it.
How to drag the context into it? Good question. Multiple layers with different treatments might reference that the scene changes over the progression of the year. the use of color or not might call up the way things change when viewed under different light. (How might it look at dusk?) Part of the image on terra cotta pastel paper might bring up the way that it contrasts with other streams or places I have seen. I could go on but maybe you get the picture. We don't just look at one thing and see it. We also see the other things we associate with it. We can never look at one thing and see the one thing. Wherever we look we always see the world. A drawing ought to say something about that.

3 comments:

  1. Love, love, love the finished product! I also really like the statement about the drawing and the process.... HeatherM

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  2. Excellent statement. I can feel the Hockney/Weshler book in it (which I gave to Sylvie, btw... it keeps going around...) beautiful work too of course. i like the way you explore the surface.

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  3. Great blog - exciting to see an artist willing to push the envelope! Something I need to do a little more of...

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