Category: Being
Figure Donning Waterproofs
This is one of my favourite ways to initiate and complete a sketch.
I don’t want it to be photographic so I am relying on a memory of a situation I thought had great visual impact: a fisherman pulling on his waterproof pants. A photograph of the action would actually impede my drawing because I would get entangled in its details; when I only want the completed drawing to focus on abstracted essentials memory is the best tool as it will leave room for a creative remembrance.
Drawing with a dry/semi-dry pen allows me to lightly indicate the figure and work out good proportions. After which I go directly to the heart of my intent—fluid pose and positions of arms/legs plus the lines of the clothing which will describe the critical motion. Those centres of clothing stress I build into strong visual presences with a very careful eye to placement, to composition, to textural variation, to maximum effect created with minimal input. This allows ample room for imagination and suggestion to complete the work in the viewer’s eye.
Fillière © Apr 5 2019
Shoreline Form
This is a sculpture made using basketry reeds as armature to sketch out its form. It was made without pre-planning as I wanted a form that would freely evolve, and one which would work visually from all positions around it. The armature was covered with many layers of plaster, paint, and paper towels all bound together by the wetness of the paint, until it became this curious fish / skull-form with a dangling, floating, paradox of an eye that can be both pendulum and rotational.
The surface of the materials dried out to a firm bone-like density that can be worked in many ways. So I considered it all-in-all a satisfactory artistic experiment.
The drawing followed after the sculpture—a record of the project as an illusion of a 3-D form on a flat paper surface; which is in fact what the photo also does to the skull: both presenting and denying at the same instant, its existence as a form in real space but eliminating the dimension of time. It’s for the eyes only: only in your imagination can you now move around the object or set its eye in motion.
Fillière © March 22 2019
Palette Figure
When I made this sculpture in 1987 I couldn’t help myself from inscribing a little poem into its plainer side. I had chosen to give its two sides as thorough a contrast in treatments as possible; hence, one side got a brilliant burst of contemporary colour and texture, while the other got my signature, tonal/colour/textural restraint, and an original poem.
As the inscribed version of the little poem cannot be read in full from the sculpture, I’ve made the words visible by arranging them in the thumb-hole of this “palette”.
Figure Running
The paper on which the abstract markings were made had some transparency. Then the several pages were chopped randomly and the cuttings assembled and reassembled until they began to evoke a recognizable image, in this instance a male upper torso from behind and to one side. Once a figure had, with my selective choices, more or less created itself, the segments were, one by one, pasted into place on a stiff cardboard; you can actually see and count the individual pieces, and detect the overlaps. The original is about twice up in size to what is viewed here.
A second stage was to photograph and enter it into the computer darkroom and apply colouration. This revealed some gorgeous tones in which the pasted over markings came through as of the opposite part of the colour wheel. The end result is a gorgeous, original, creative piece.
Fillière © Mar 8 2019
Winter Figure
Winter Figure
Draw. Erase.
Draw. Erase.
Draw a symbol of renewal
: crocus, baseball, robin. No. Rub it out
: too romantic, too sentimental, and much too soon.
Draft instead the black-plumed preacher
in the back woods—be-sooted raven, riled fundamentalist,
that besotted Cassandra high in the black back woods,
who frets over winter’s excesses and counts/curses/condemns
every person, dog, cat that comes and goes below it
on the road to hell in a freeze-dried world.
Sketch cats agoraphobic that slink/crouch/slide
with flattened ears from barn to bush to shed
, schizoid from nightmares of being fed
to a fanged and hackled open space.
Draw euphoric people multi-hued and mechanoid.
Scatter them helter-skelter on wheels/tracks/skis,
ecstatic hearts pacing the harangue of oriental pistons.
Trace the stubble and tattered stems of Queen Anne’s Lace
where it decays and smudges the drifts of the paper white back lot slope
: charcoal remnants / trace reminders of seasons long erased.
Youthful Form
fillière 