In this painting from 2021 I made a spontaneous drawing of asemic writing in white on a deep gray background and then with a translucent white glaze highlighted between the lines to pull out forms from the negative space.
I know this is changing the subject, but I am fascinated by the consistency of your mark. No matter what is in your mind driving the work (and it’s all extremely interesting to me), what your hand produces is always clearly your hand producing, like a signature. How early did that start to happen? Did you cultivate it? I see your line as highly energetic, ebullient, joyful even and imagine it as expressive of your personality and joie de vivre. Is there any truth in that? Is it my projection? I hope you don’t mind. A viewer (or reader) can’t help bringing their own reading to what they encounter.
Hi Elizabeth, Thanks for your very kind comments. Those are interesting observations and good questions... I observe the 'line quality' in other artists too and it seems to reveal something about the nature of the individual's personality of being brash or shy or tentative or uncertain or clumsy or angry or decisive or hasty or well practiced, sophisticated, spontaneous, detail oriented, organized, disorganized, etc. searching for the gesture, trying to capture the essence, exploring the detail. You can read it in the way artists make lines and the feeling can change even in the same drawing. For myself, I try to watch the rhythm of how my hand wants to move, what its limitations of movement are, what give it flow and the kinds of shapes and forms it naturally makes. I watch how the mind decides to repeat movements or follow a trend. So I notice I have to keep a certain speed for the lines to be as smooth as possible and not shaky and for them to not be inhibited by thought or judgement. Sometimes I don't watch what I am doing. I just feel an impulse and respond to it with the hand. I study different drawing tools and surfaces and how they each have a certain way they make marks caused by smoothness or 'tooth'. In the end, since I have made thousands and thousands of these kind of drawings trying many different ways to approach it and be as expansive as possible in breadth, I have settled in, I suppose, to a certain range of expressive marking that satisfies the various criteria I am comfortable with. But still, I would say the 'signature' you mention was there from the beginning as a default way to work - to make marks - and I am always questioning it and trying to expand the range of the expressive quality but I don't seem to ever get very far away from my own natural default. Since I am at the epicenter of my activity it is not possible for me to see in the work what might be inferred about me as the author from the viewer's point of view. We are all our own blind spot.
I know this is changing the subject, but I am fascinated by the consistency of your mark. No matter what is in your mind driving the work (and it’s all extremely interesting to me), what your hand produces is always clearly your hand producing, like a signature. How early did that start to happen? Did you cultivate it? I see your line as highly energetic, ebullient, joyful even and imagine it as expressive of your personality and joie de vivre. Is there any truth in that? Is it my projection? I hope you don’t mind. A viewer (or reader) can’t help bringing their own reading to what they encounter.
Hi Elizabeth, Thanks for your very kind comments. Those are interesting observations and good questions... I observe the 'line quality' in other artists too and it seems to reveal something about the nature of the individual's personality of being brash or shy or tentative or uncertain or clumsy or angry or decisive or hasty or well practiced, sophisticated, spontaneous, detail oriented, organized, disorganized, etc. searching for the gesture, trying to capture the essence, exploring the detail. You can read it in the way artists make lines and the feeling can change even in the same drawing. For myself, I try to watch the rhythm of how my hand wants to move, what its limitations of movement are, what give it flow and the kinds of shapes and forms it naturally makes. I watch how the mind decides to repeat movements or follow a trend. So I notice I have to keep a certain speed for the lines to be as smooth as possible and not shaky and for them to not be inhibited by thought or judgement. Sometimes I don't watch what I am doing. I just feel an impulse and respond to it with the hand. I study different drawing tools and surfaces and how they each have a certain way they make marks caused by smoothness or 'tooth'. In the end, since I have made thousands and thousands of these kind of drawings trying many different ways to approach it and be as expansive as possible in breadth, I have settled in, I suppose, to a certain range of expressive marking that satisfies the various criteria I am comfortable with. But still, I would say the 'signature' you mention was there from the beginning as a default way to work - to make marks - and I am always questioning it and trying to expand the range of the expressive quality but I don't seem to ever get very far away from my own natural default. Since I am at the epicenter of my activity it is not possible for me to see in the work what might be inferred about me as the author from the viewer's point of view. We are all our own blind spot.