Throwing Caution to the Wind

Throwing Caution to the Wind

Late last week, a wonderful facebook friend of mine, Lorna Crane, encouraged me to participate in a drawing show opportunity in Ireland opening next month.  At the last possible hour, I decided to go for it even though this meant temporarily setting aside my painting, moving into a back room in my attic studio and digging out myriad drawing materials with just three days to finish the work. I love to draw, however what surprised me was just how challenging, but also fascinating, this  process proved to be in opening up new ideas about marking making and abstraction.

Throwing caution to the wind, and jumping into somewhat unfamiliar waters, I embarked a on a messy three day extravaganza with sumi ink, acrylic, graphite, charcoal and pastel. Everyone in “The Drawing Box Belfast” show is sending five drawings to Ireland at an A5 scale – a humble 8.3 x 5.8 inches. This guideline coerced me into working quickly and intuitively. I tried to move freely back and forth from one to the next and made about twenty mixed media pieces in three days. When something wasn’t working, I added more layers, turned it upside down, scraped away or started another one. Some of the drawings were made to scale and sometimes I worked slightly larger, looked at compositional possibilities and cut them to size. When I did the latter, I often worked back into them a little after they were cropped.

It was a pleasure to play with a constantly shifting palimpsested surface. I worked on seven or eight at a time striving for and finding relationships between them. As working in a series tends to do, the drawings started influencing each other. This kind of call and response between works happens with paintings in the studio as well, but the expediency of this project meant everything happened much faster and perhaps with more happenchance and unpredictability.