Painting After Art is Dead

So I’ve been drawing a bit more lately. I know I’m not the only artist to center. drawing in their practice, and I think there will be a couple of bodies of work that will spin off of this addition to my practice including more drawings that are finished works, something I haven’t done since 2019, example in last image.

Interestingly, I’m also seeing some of the lessons I learned from my most recent painting series (example in first image) in my drawing approach. I usually incorporate a “pattern” of 3 different, alternating tones that never touch themselves. In these series of small paintings, I abandoned the limitation of 3 tones entirely, which really flattened out the work and creates a nice dynamic with the implication of rendered space created by default when one draws a “solid” shape.

Another theme that has appeared in my paintings over the the last few years that’s found its way into the drawings is variation in surface reflectance, so the appearance of tones change as you move around a work (last row are examples of using flat, carbon black and shiny, graphite grey to get this effect).

One other material that I have rediscovered recently is pastels. The left image below is a drawing I did that is the reason I began drawing my way through Oblique Strategies when I was feeling stuck. I hope the reader will agree that the color in this piece was worth exploring as a painting study (last row) that I’m pleased to report has ended, and there’s now a 5′ x 5′ piece of canvas stapled to the wall of my studio, ready for me to embark on a larger piece. I’m happy with the framework I’ve built for this one- lots of room to make in-the-moment decisions- and the composition will happen the way much good abstraction does, by stepping up to a blank canvas and being present in the moment. I will do the drawing using the overhead projector but only so that I can make slight tweaks to the size of the cubes, by changing the distance between the projector and the wall) if I desire.