Two traces, two trains, two tracks of thought.
One emerges directly out of my own near total submergence, through January, February, and March of this year within the artistic and philosophical writings of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, specifically the first five books of his My Struggle.
Each and all of those books struck a deep chord within me that he so wanted to track and trace deeply, profoundly, every possible living structure, the almost invisible threads of personal relationships with him and around him, the impossibly entangled webbings of every aspect of his own life, just as all the trees in a forest have an interlink (my metaphor), and actual delivery of sustenance through their own roots and those of an underground fungi, so does he come to understand what and who he is as a single person (or tree), and consequently, just who we all are as humans. He doesn’t self-aggrandize; he doesn’t ennoble himself nor anyone else; he doesn’t offer the least bit of self-flattery but by his tracing of the infinitely subtle influences of his experience via his very life and relationships, he does arrive at a powerful portrayal of self and of us all.
The second route traces my own interest as artist in most new technologies as they arrive on the artistic scene. In this unlikely instance, and using something as small as an iPad, one of my prime questions in 2017 has been: is there the faintest possiblity and potential to create something non-commercial, something artistic, something that might actually embody real artistic qualities — like Knausgaard’s– qualities one could truly describe as “painterly”, or “expressionistic”, or even full-body “gestural”: as in Picasso, Pollock, de Kooning?
It’s all too easy to find on the internet many thousands of illustrations that use digital means to come into being. Most are fantasy based. Often they are of a Gothic nature or of a Dragons and Dungeons genre, or are indistinguishable from artwork used in Digital Games. Generally they appoint heroes/anti-heroes and go out of their way to romanticize and even deify them. Invariably they are, in the way they are produced, enslaved to a photographic rendering that is extraordinarily high on craft but entirely missing in the free flowing art qualities I aspire to.
My experiments with iPad drawing have little resemblance to others I see on YouTube. But I am enthusiastic and pleased that I did find an expression very close to “painterly” and “gestural” in the larger art world sense of those words. Here is a link to my earliest results. Sample three directly merges my reading materials with my artistic search:
https://youtu.be/PpH-dL1mhFo Time-Lapse Drawings Fillière Fine Art V7
fillière 