This, a half-year later, was the second and only follow up to the previous drawing.
It is also with mechanical pen on a Japanese printing paper, but this time it’s a male head, not a personality study, but focuses on those parts of the face involved in the sensational act of producing brilliant, flute-like, bird-like, sun lit tones.
The female head shown below is an experiment drawn with a mechanical drafting pen. It is on an oriental printing paper with a considerable nap to its surface, which in turn pushed the pen into an unexpected, unpredicted character of line. Essentially the tool was suspended vertically between my fingers and thumb and moved lightly enough above the paper to create marks without ripping the fibres, which likely accounts for the poetic restraint and the rhythmic, arcing of lines.
No model was used, either in the flesh or by way of photo reference. And no preconception followed, other than to aim for a face, and allow the accumulative marks to determine which personality would arrive, and begin to grow on the page. After the fact I realized that my sculptor side had responded by laying down course upon course of contour lines; that both Giacometti, in his studies of Annette, and Henry Moore, in his studies of sheep, and in some of his war-time subway figures, had arrived at similar approaches before me; hence, though I loved the powerful result, I made only one other companion study.
The most startling aspect of this drawing though, even a dramatic personal surprise for me several years after this drawing, came when my relocation from one Canadian province to live in another, brought about numerous encounters with a local artist-writer of whom you could easily have said this was her singular, penetrating pose.
The presence of tides with scent of kelp and seaweed speak of an ocean’s edge.
Add these particular mosses, lichens, and nearby evergreens stunted by salt spray, and more precisely the location is Kiley’s Cove, Roddickton, NL on the North Atlantic Ocean.
The area features an in-draught of sea in the relative shelter of, and mid-way along a long, narrow bay with today a calm benevolent morning wind at zephyr stage.
A memory cell whispers, “seize the scene.”
A moment in time, a decade ago: Surreal summer image from a passing thunderstorm.
The drawing below is only incidentally about the flash of a hurrying workman’s hand to retain his cap in a gust of wind.
It’s really all about the scurry and placement, the dance of the artist’s hand, across a page to enable and register, at high speed, the correct distribution and pressure of soft charcoal lines in the best possible composition; the art of artless effort.
Mine this careless calligraphy of hand, heart, soul.
My right hand draws my left but the only meaning resides in the marks of the pen as the nib contacts the texture of the paper surface; the accumulation of the marks are in the form of a hand but the content and context are transmuted into artistry.
House, tree, and north-side neighbour, having each spent its/his every physical resource, have each, by time, at different times in the past decade, now been removed.
My eyes, and my camera, were entertained, and miss the J.K. Rowling effect of that earlier full-blown winter roof-line with its magnificently gnarled, pruned, decrepit maple fingers / hands / arms choreographing the full range of winter skies: a Harry Potter house with raccoons and bats; a wonderful wonky-eyed tree.
This monoprint, created two decades after I knew the woman in the poem—and wrote the words, has always seemed to address the content of her inner life so directly that now the one always evokes / embodies the other.
Five components, all of different irregular sizes, have been cut with ruler and knife from several different pages of random ink and pen or brush markings. In each instance the markings suggest that they continue outside of its local edges.
The individual pieces are then collaged into a new image which in itself also implies an existence outside of its boundaries. A male torso prototype, or perhaps it’s an alligator lurching after prey, or, it becomes whatever the mind wishes to see though it has obviously gained much from the artlessness of abstractions.
Collage, and abstraction, are now of course both century old artistic techniques but obviously they can still energize one’s imagination, and provide a solid workout for compositional skills.
Fillière © 20th 3 2018
fillière 