I had an important learning experience during a weeklong investigation in my studio prior to midterms. I decided that I was going to engage as intensely as I could with the intuitive moves that I find easily while in my studio.
In this iteration, it involved drawing on stacks of papers that I placed on my studio floor. I’d work on several simultaneously. Sometimes I’d place old drawings in the stacks, meaning they’d appear if I bore through the page on top with an aggressive or insistent gesture. Sometimes I’d rip part of the top page off altogether. Sometimes photocopies of things I’d drawn worked their way into the stacks.
The gestures I engaged with were visceral and corporeal (the head is part of the body). They were not concerned with representing images held in my mind’s eye. While it’s hard not to engage in a self-administered Rorschach test sparked by the marks made on the paper, I find it somewhat repulsive and tried to steer clear of something akin to Surrealist automatic drawing. Though the process was somewhat automatic.
I used paint and ink. I let puddles accrue and leaks run their course. I sprayed and watch ink bloom into shapes. I drew with a razor blade. I got acrylic paint on my black washable Crayola markers. When things got too muddy, I burrowed through to find a new, open space. I discarded the things that were no longer workable. Or that no longer interested me.
Here were the things revealed to me during this practice:
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TRASH PILE
THE UNEXPECTED APPEARANCE OF THE IMAGE
PILES OF PAPER
DEFER IMPOSITION OF OVERARCHING FRAMEWORK
MY HAND NEEDS TO MOVE IN ORDER TO MAKE DYNAMIC MEANING
In this iteration, it involved drawing on stacks of papers that I placed on my studio floor. I’d work on several simultaneously. Sometimes I’d place old drawings in the stacks, meaning they’d appear if I bore through the page on top with an aggressive or insistent gesture. Sometimes I’d rip part of the top page off altogether. Sometimes photocopies of things I’d drawn worked their way into the stacks.
The gestures I engaged with were visceral and corporeal (the head is part of the body). They were not concerned with representing images held in my mind’s eye. While it’s hard not to engage in a self-administered Rorschach test sparked by the marks made on the paper, I find it somewhat repulsive and tried to steer clear of something akin to Surrealist automatic drawing. Though the process was somewhat automatic.
I used paint and ink. I let puddles accrue and leaks run their course. I sprayed and watch ink bloom into shapes. I drew with a razor blade. I got acrylic paint on my black washable Crayola markers. When things got too muddy, I burrowed through to find a new, open space. I discarded the things that were no longer workable. Or that no longer interested me.
Here were the things revealed to me during this practice:
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TRASH PILE
- This allowed material to leak out of the project
- Not everything can be included
- However, leaving the trash pile on the floor (next to the drawings that were in-progress), the scraps retained potential. The discarded could become important again if it needed to be (though it rarely did).
THE UNEXPECTED APPEARANCE OF THE IMAGE
- Some things I worked on a lot and paid a lot of attention to refused me.
- Certain things that I was sure were doomed for the trash pile would suddenly be transformed. A move would unexpectedly usher in an image.
PILES OF PAPER
- Dig through (reveal) break open
- Cover up (erase) patch
DEFER IMPOSITION OF OVERARCHING FRAMEWORK
- I was able to trust an action [draw non-figuratively on top of a stack of paper] long enough to produce a body of work that:
- resisted immediate imposition of framework, which appeared later in the process (they were ultimately threaded together - and made more coherent? - by text and found images)
- determined a framework that was more organic (it grew out of a rich process that I sustained)
MY HAND NEEDS TO MOVE IN ORDER TO MAKE DYNAMIC MEANING