The following 33 drawings were completed within a period of six days at the end of May/early June. A number of factors contributed to their completion. First, I had recently completed the paintings in the previous post as well as a group of paintings viewable in process in the post Both Sides Side By Side [a posting in the current state to come …]. Second, the weather had finally shifted from the cold and rainy to a consistently warm and sunny mid-to-late Spring hospitable to the oleander and geraniums that winter over behind my easel being moved outside meaning I was ready to conduct my semi-annual deep clean and reconfiguration of that half of my studio which in turn freed up the basement half of my studio after I moved the paintings/crura into the greenhouse to play with and photograph. Third, I hadn’t begun the next paintings yet, nor was I driven to do so or even to finish the one, smaller painting I began during painting What Comes Next . Fourth, both my recent viewing of the exhibition of drawings Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions at UMass Amherst as well as the death of painter Thomas Nozkowski, whose own drawings came after the paintings, were fresh in my mind. Both of these painters have impacted my own painting and drawing practice since its beginning. Finally, most of the past month I have been re-immersing myself into writing, originally for the written component of this project’s dissertation. However, this past week my writing veered in unexpected directions. I felt the need to make visual work as a balance to the mental work I was also doing and the following drawings are the result.
In the basement half of my studio throughout the past Fall and Winter I have had one table dedicated to making smaller scale drawings. On this table I have collected a pile of paper - also residuals from other parts of my practice, both writing and painting. Throughout this time I made approximately 30 drawings simply because I felt the need to draw. There is little coherency to those drawings other than the period in which they were drawn. My process during the time was when I felt like or when I did not feel like painting but felt the need to make I would sit down at the table and draw. When I was done drawing I would throw the drawing onto a pile with the previous drawings on a shelf. But something happened when I sat down last week and began these drawings, a coherency began to emerge. What's more, the drawings seemed to relate to the recently completed paintings in ways I had not set out to do. And, they picked up on some drawings begun by Petra Nimm this time last year but put aside as other events got in the way.
The first 29 drawings are all made on 20LB, 96 Bright, 8 1/2 x 11 inches (21.25 x 27.5 cm) multipurpose copy paper that happened to find its way onto my studio table this winter. This is not my preferred standard printer paper so I began to put it to use for writing, taking notes, sketching out ideas on, and lifting paint off of the paintings I was making in the greenhouse. Although I tend to paint in thin layers there are times when I want to make them thinner, doing so by removing some of what I have painted on the surface as if I were making a mono-print by placing a sheet of paper gently on the area I want to thin-out and using a Japanese bamboo buren gently rub the back of the paper to remove the paint. Of the paintings I was painting this winter many of the sheets of paper that were put through this process of removing excess, mostly Mars black paint, after drying landed on the drawing paper pile on my table.
The drawings I have been making were a mixture of media, at times using paint markers, colored pencils, Sharpies, conte crayon, gesso, ink stamps, and graphite pencils/sticks. I also dabbled in collage by tearing apart and re-combining some of the drawings in the process of their making. However, with this group of drawings I used only the graphite pencils and sticks and worked with a Staedtler plastic and a kneaded erasers to blend, remove, and make marks. The drawings were made in rapid succession, I spent less than 10 minutes on each focusing on making quick decisions rather than overthinking. An additional technique I applied was frottage. My table is covered in rosin paper that is ready to be changed. Over the past months it has developed a bumpy surface and areas covered in blue painter’s tape. Using a broad graphite stick I began each drawing by rubbing the thin piece of paper at various spots on the table. The accumulation of eraser dust also contributed to the character of the marks that formed on the surface of the drawings.
Now for the drawings. Photographed on the studio wall in mid-day sunlight with sunshade on.
The final four drawings done immediately after the last of the above differ in the size, type of paper, and the paint that was printed on to them. The paper is 11 x 14 inch (27.5 x 35 cm) light weight tracing paper from a pad, the paint on all four sheets is an 8 x10 inch rectangle of Titanium white. Otherwise the drawing materials and process was the same, however the results contain less detail and emphasize the field of marks more than the shapes and marks emerging from it.