Posts tagged drawing

by Janice Wu

My work explores how meaning, value, and associations are placed upon things in the material realm. I am interested in how seemingly worthless objects have the potential for whimsy and how the ‘inanimate’ mundane can reveal poetic and narrative possibilities. Through re-imagining the mediocre, the ordinary can become playful and even precious. Working meticulously in pencil and watercolor, my drawings reveal the intricate, tender nature of this medium and reflect the notion of devoting time and contemplation in to the easily overlooked. Through this process of investigating the quotidian, I train my looking practice towards observing the subtleties in my own lived experiences. My curiosity also lies in what kind of ethnographic experiences I can construct through my work. By studying personal material cultures, I hope to reveal understandings or realizations, large or small, of shared human experiences.

by James Bills

The connection between the inner mind and the outer world inspires me. In my latest work, I am exploring this relationship within architectural drafting and information visualization techniques. In architectural renderings, ideas are transferred to paper in detail, laying the ground work for an object’s construction in the real world. Information visualization, on the other hand, collects data from the real world, forming a visual schematic that is subject to analysis and interpretation. There is a symbiosis between what is imagined and what is reality, each feeding the other and becoming dependent on the other’s existence.

Golden Parachutes, my latest drawings, refer to the nonsensical machinations that came to light in the recent recession. The huge payouts executives received when their companies failed reveal some of the greed and back room dealing that led to the downturn. Our economy is this large, uncontrollable system filled with both random acts of fate as well as focused, immoral manipulations. Like everyone, I desired a simple explanation, and so I asked myself if there was a graph which could explain the situation, what would it look like it? Using a column chart format, I first graphed a set of completely random values generated by polyhedral dice. The columns are then colored according to how many other columns they overlap, as if transparent, creating different depths and densities marked by color. Golden Parachutes RXRXR, the first drawing, is based upon a set of data, but since this data was generated by chance, the ability to create a straightforward, analysis of the graph is negated. You can see a system at work, but you can’t easily explain how or why. The rest of the drawings are variations to this system, setting some dimensions constant and keeping others random. The whole series alludes to the varying levels of order, chaos, transparency, and bankruptcy we are experiencing in this economy.

by Luis Dourado

My creation process it´s pretty much free, even though I usually explore the same themes and similar atmospheres with different visual results. I don´t see any point in exploring always the same directions so I´ve been pretty much jumping from series to series. Still, the themes that I work with are pretty much always related to each other, I mean, series are somehow connected, even if this relation only come up clearly to me after a year, but for me as an artist, in the end it always makes sense. I´ve always been a nostalgic person, always intrigued with time and memory and probably that´s what connects points.I do not follow any kind of rule or method and does not make sense for me (at least right now) to be only focused on one platform, like digital, analogue, etc. I might be a couple of months only collecting information, images, getting stimulated and then come up with two or three different series but the whole process is very natural somehow, I love and I also panic with this idea of randomness, that I´m actually not 100% controlling my own work, that “he” decides when to come up somehow.

Steve Kim paints everyday scenes from his life in an attempt to transform visual experience. Using photographs of seemingly mundane events, Kim renders them almost unrecognizable by employing a skewed perspective, leaving large sections of canvas blank and morphing everyday events into something uncanny and unsettling.

by Tara Dougans

I am a 25 year old Canadian-born, London-based art director and illustrator. My work is heavily influenced by the virtue of ‘taking one’s time’ and focuses specifically on handcraftsmanship, the value of process and detail oriented design. Following my Grandmother’s expression “You reap what you sow”, I am interested in exploring the fundamental role that time plays in the development of an object or idea. Accordingly, my work is constructed with love by hand.

by Iain Macarthur

My work can be described as surreal and unique in its own way. Using mostly pencil, watercolours and pigment pens, I create portraits of ordinary people but create them in a unusual way by, embellishing patterns and watercolour effects into the portrait to give a vivid explosion effect—transforming their faces from something plain to something entirely bizarre and wonderful at the same time.

by Nikki Rosato

Our physical bodies are beautiful structures full of detail, and they hold the stories that haunt and mold our lives. The lines on a road map are beautifully similar to the lines that cover the surface of the human body.

In my most recent work involving maps, as I remove the landmasses from the silhouetted individuals I am further removing the figure’s identity, and what remains is a delicate skin-like structure. Through this process, specific individuals become ambiguous and hauntingly ghost-like, similar to the memories they represent.

by Jules Buck Jones

My work deals with animals. The depiction of animals through drawing and lore is as ancient as the imagination. The impressions and ideas they provoke range from symbolism to science. I make large scale, 2-dimensioal drawings, sometimes bizarre and fantastic, other times simple and subtle. All of this stems from a long interest in the natural sciences. The work grows from thoughts and research on biological and ecological concerns as well as along narrative and mythical dimensions.

I depict my animals in various ways. I use techniques inspired by the clear careful illustrations of field guides, through a range of expressive and abstract artists. A lot of my work bumps representation up against its limits. Abstraction comes into play in many ways. At times an animal, drawn in larger than life scale will melt away into aggressive strokes of color and marks, robbing the animal of its form. Other times I assemble animals into geometric formations, or I’ll attempt to merge scientific diagrams with the myths that precede them.

My work is very much about drawing itself. The line plays a crucial role in the development of my subject matter. I draw with a quick, gestural, playful delivery, which I believe gives the subject a liveliness that often eludes a slower, more meticulous, depiction. I use a variety of media from all sorts of drawing tools, such as graphite, charcoal, and wax, to different water-based pigments as inks, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache. I team lines with washes to build or negate my subjects. I strictly work on paper, preferably larger than a person. To me, drawing has more of a romantic relationship to paper than to other surfaces, like wood or canvas. The paper allows my pencils to glide when they move and embraces my washes in some symbiotic manner. The grand scale creates a 1 to 1 ratio between work and viewer. Conceptually I think this is interesting and intrinsic to the dialogue between man and nature. The scale is also conducive to the loose descriptions and allows a greater arena to suggest the infinite details nature provides.

I revel in the idea of continuing the long inscription of drawing, painting, sculpting and believing in animals. I draw inspiration from prehistoric cave paintings, totemic symbols, the great artist/naturalists like Seba, Haeckel, Audobon, and a contemporary art world increasingly more aware and intrigued with issues of the natural world. Fact and fiction, past, present and the future, all play a role in my work. I aim to express and conjure the flesh and magic of evolution, classification, environment, bio-diversity, mutation, and extinction.

by Sam Winston

Through his explorations of language Sam Winston creates sculpture, drawings and books that question our understanding of words, both as a carriers of messages and as information itself.

“His methods of production are certainly of our time: statistics, data collection and analysis, computer programming. Yet he is dependent on craft as well: drawing, doodling, cutting and folding. Concepts are revealed and emerge through his interrogation, until they are utterly logical and clear. They are also inspiring, leading the viewer to a fresh understanding of an art that can be constructed from typography, opening onto a beautiful aesthetic composed of text as image.”

by Winnie Truong

These drawings feature heads floating in the disconcerting blankness of white space; carefully rendered hair playing a variety of aggressive yet seductive roles, encasing the faces of her figures as a soft, personal armor or twining around their throats with foreboding. The impressive work is created with pastels and colored pencils on paper, a mastery of optical mixing and a build up of cross hatching to reveal the intriguing forms.  (by JL Schnabel)