Thursday, June 26, 2008

Nearing the End


I am nearing the end of a set of restrictions I had put on myself for the drawings I have been making. Those being the limited use of materials. I have been inadvertently collecting pencils, pens, markers, and hi-lighters while I was in college. After finishing school and emptying out my former studio, I had discovered an unusually large stockpile of these materials. Still not knowing what to do with them, I carried them with me to New York and it was here where I finally decided to put them to use. I decided to remain working with these specific materials that I had collected until they had been exhausted. 
As I was in a new time in my life, my former work no longer applied to the situation I was in. Not knowing where to begin and not being able to produce the work I was accustomed to I took the quote of William Stafford as a starting point, "A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them." 
So, I started to speak with the materials I had and came to an unexpected area with my art. With the materials running low, I am preparing for the next movement. 

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Finished or Unfinished?


These skull drawings started with an agenda that changed on me as I was making them. They have each gone through different stages of finished. As I now see them on my computer screen I feel they have not been worked to the extent that I had originally desired. Which is that none of the white of the paper appears through the areas that have been filled in with ball-point pen. I want the areas of pen to rely more on the direction of the mark-making than the values created through overlapping lines. It is the impression that the point of the pen leaves on the paper that I am interested in with the pens I am using.  

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Obelisk Drawings



I am working on a series of drawings that deal mostly with obelisks, skulls and stars. The compositions remain unified by the placement of the horizon line and the column. I have done this so I can explore different treatment of the surface of the paper in relation to the shapes that have been created.  This gives me a constant denominator in each of the drawings so I can eventually compare them to each other and decide how the surface treatment sets the 'mood' of the drawing.

I find a mystery in the images I am using in that they leave me with more questions than answers. They cause me to look into myself and reflect on what a human skull signifies, and to examine what stars mean to us today and for those who lived long before, with the obelisk linking it back to society. 

The three drawings pictured here are a few examples of the most worked surfaces in the series, combining ink pen, felt tip marker, highlighters, graphite, and gauche. The very dark one is also part of a series of drawings that uses only ballpoint pen. All are 25"x19" on stonehenge paper. 


Tuesday, June 3, 2008

One of my heros

I was looking through my photos to find something to post and ran across this photo I took of Rauschenberg. He has always been one of the people that had really excited me about art and I was lucky enough to be in the same space as him for a night. This photo was taken outside of PaceWildenstein gallery shortly before his death. He looked so happy at the show but also very frail. 

My infatuation with the obelisk


The obelisk symbolized the sun god Ra and was said to be a petrified ray of Aten, the sun disk. It was also thought that the god existed within the structure. I am drawn to the obelisk for its simplicity of form and for the associations the the astronomical phenomena connected with sunrise and sunset: the zodiacal light and sun pillars.

Monday, June 2, 2008

 This is my first series of drawings since getting to NY.