Fragments
|
|
Over the last few years, I've been working on a series of drawings called Fragments, sepia ink on paper, and small in scale. I first started making these drawings as a way to develop an alphabet of forms that I could draw from, when composing a painting. I scan them into the computer, and there the shapes become a fixture of my palette choices. At first they were no more than rough sketches; but as I continued to draw, the pleasure of the act of drawing resulted in works that had a more finished quality.
The simplicity of the ink on paper was a refreshing break from my labor intensive paintings. I started feeling like I was getting at something essential in relation to these forms. I extracted some motifs and shapes from previous paintings, isolating them from the original context I had created for them. There is an 18th century anatomical wax museum in Florence, La Specola, where wax sculptures of "dissected" human body parts are displayed inside glass vitrines, on white silk draperies. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I feel like I'm illustrating a taxonomy of forms whose logic is known only to me.
Some of the shapes are inspired by definable sources. I have a large library of books on decorative languages of all sorts: architecture, textiles, folk art, graphic arts, ephemera. Other shapes are invented entirely be me. I like the flow between the two: I've always subscribed to the idea that our creative activities are the result of a cacophonous conversation taking place over centuries. It is difficult to articulate what are the qualities that make a shape worthy of inclusion in my alphabet. It could be the swing of a curve, an irresistible interlacing, or my feeling about a given shape's ability to play well with others. Their bold and graphic qualities led me to see them as a way of activating a space and enveloping the viewer, if rendered in a large scale on a wall. Ancient and baroque illusionistic, decorative frescoes are evoked in a new way, and brought full circle from the fragments back to an architectural setting.
archive | drawings | wall drawings
|
|