 |
| Bug |
 |
| Cliff Village |
 |
| Bug |
 |
| Columbia Vultures |
 |
| What Lives Under Those Roman Pines |
 |
| Hiroshige in the Water Dec |
 |
| SEE-Attle |
 |
| Fishing Geisha |
 |
| Ellen Drawing |
This
drawing set works with the problems 1) no time to draw because of my job; 2)
love to travel; 3) terrified that I cannot draw well, even though I’ve been at
it for 35 years. Raúl Gonzalez 3rd once told me that he stains papers with
coffee to make them less perfect (less glaringly white) and to suggest images
to work with. At the time I was teaching myself paper marbling and discovered
myself in possession of may accidents of paper that needed a purpose. I bound
them for a trip and let the blobs on the paper suggest ideas, like you do when
you are cloud spotting or doing a Rorschach test. I have a very busy brain so
this part is easy. The drawing gave my hands something to do that is less soul
destroying than playing on my phone. The format fits inside my bag. The colors
are already in place from the marbling process. My rules are to draw only in
ink, so I have to live with every mark, and to draw the first thing I see on
the page, no matter how dumb it is. I use Faber Castel pens mostly. I’m also an
art history nerd, so I spend time with other people’s art and transcribe their
images too. I can tell where I’ve been when I was drawing by the stuff in the
image. Seattle? Bogotá? Rome? Or maybe the Fitchburg Art Museum. It’s all in
there. I’ve been working on this since about December 2015 and there are over
120. Sometimes I can do 1 per day. The ones with ring holes in them are about
7” x 11”. The work runs tangent to other visual research I’ve been doing on
Roman Grotesque decoration in architecture. The ancient romans played games
with depictions of space to make their rooms look bigger and to enable a
running visual commentary on the occupants of the space. Escher and de Chirico
key into this stuff in their images too. I use this strategy in my drawings to change
scale and perspective values as the eye moves across them, creating a dreamy
and chaotic surface.
See more at:
Comments
Post a Comment