Drawing vs Painting: Preliminary sketches are one way to think about drawing. However, given the mixed media possibilities, stand-alone drawings can be as rich and varied as any artist’s imagination to exploit the medium.
Pictorial space is more likely sacrificed in my drawings. No doubt due to my love of assemblage. The artist working on paper feels less inhibited in dissecting and embellishing objects in novel ways. Drawing is to painting what chamber music is to the symphony: Away from creating war horses and other monumentally significant work, the intimate mood that surrounds a pencil and piece of paper is liberating. Often in these settings one finds an artist’s most daring ideas.
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The Scale of Markmaking: My drawings are denser in detail than my paintings due to the scalability of the mark. Watercolor, pencils, ink, and markers offer little inertia where the brush, nib, etc. makes contact with its substrate. Only pigment suspended in a thin fluid is involved. Little residue spreads outward around the mark, which would prohibit scales of the finest gradation. Alcohol-based markers are a special case, although their bleeding is mostly limited to the backside of some drawing papers.
Oil painting is incapable of tiny marks unless the medium is thinned with a solvent, or one uses a ‘fine-detail’ medium or refined linseed oil. Here one imitates watercolor or airbrushed acrylic by applying thin or transparent color. My preference of oil to watercolor lies in its irreducible dimension: Oil paint does not merely reproduce an object faithfully, it recreates it as a tactile surface which extends outward from the canvas toward the careful viewer.
Tree Rings and Coffee Stains: I can only group my paintings and drawings into relative periods. Much of this work dates from when I drew at coffeehouses, so I am able to identify these pieces by which coffeehouse I frequented at the time they were created.
Light in cafe environments is poor at best, and as my eyesight has deteriorated over the years, my ability to pursue a course of drawing outside my studio has decreased.
Paintings 2009-2002/ Back/ Home
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