Draw 2014- we were asked to show 4 images of artists that we considered influential and a final picture of our own. The quotes were for each of the four artists I chose and my final image was the watercolor of “Airport 1.”
“When I make my drawings... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.” Alberto Giacometti
I see the construction of image as a journey. Of getting from point A to point B– not as a means to an end, but as the result. I am excited by the idea of drawings as things that are arrived at. They are evidence of ones groping, and that evidence, though still, has the time of the drawing’s making embedded in it.
“Like drawing a straight line – you draw a straight line and it’s crooked and you draw another straight line on top of it and it’s crooked a different way and then you draw another one and eventually you have a very rich thing on your hands which is not a straight line.” Jasper Johns
Drawing does not need to be filled with pretense, does not even necessarily need to fall under the name “art”. The very act of translation, of passing from eye through body and onto a surface, must contain some aspect of a human, with all that implies, doing the interpreting. Even giving students a simple still-life, and asking that they draw it as accurately as possible, results in radically different drawings. One barely needs to describe “creativity” or “imagination”. It is already contained in the body. This student nervous, unsure. Small gestures. This one tentative, very light, almost hoping it didn’t have to appear. Afraid of failure. And why not. This one overly bold, confident but clumsy
“I see drawing as thinking, as evidence of thinking, evidence of going from one place to another.” Vija Celmins
However; If one is able to conceive of the journey, of the construction of image as an allegorical process, then you can begin to look at process as reflecting a belief in how the world works. One can move away from getting a drawing right, and conceive of how they think the universe is constructed, and they can build an image that way. Can consider the difference between addition and subtraction, and the various ways that an image might be arrived at. The white of a surface being light, or adding light into darkness.
“No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.” Marlene Dumas
Furthermore, If you can combine that with a collaboration with a material, something that teaches you as you attempt to learn it, something that has a material mind of its own, then the arrival will be unique each time you set the process in motion. You wait and see if the allegory reveals itself, and that one gets to stay. If not, then it is back to the proverbial drawing board.
Trying to get the image and its construction to speak to one another and become more than the sum of its parts.
Like darkness slowly creeping in.