I’m guilty as charged of painting, frame, still life, table construction, room colour, photo. This is the east wall of my kitchen.
Tag: Drawing
Rumour of Humour 5
A visual definition to trump visual definitions.
Luncheon on the Grass
Rumour of Humour 4
or: The Simple Geometry of Endearments.
Whistler
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.
Figurehead
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.
Daffodils
The daffodils were executed in pen and ink combined with tones of a rolled-tissue brush without preliminary pencil work—with an underdrawing the artist loses the advantage of the freshness of risk taking: too many decisions are solved ahead of time, everything is visually too safe and secure, too posed and poised, and not as much of the artistry is revealed as in a direct, aggressive, confident problem-solving-hand/eye-attack-as-you-go.
If an image has narrative the story I most want it to relate is the visual directness of how the artpiece is constructed.
Cap & Hand
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.
Living In Future Tense
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.
Dylan Dayze
Honoraria: Baez/Mitchell/Harris
fillière 