Drawing

Graphite
12 x 21

Drawing

Drawing

Interested in purchasing “Drawing”? Contact the artist here.

This is graphite. A friend suggested I get a chunk of it which I did. Holding the medium in your fist is a very different experience from holding a graphite pencil. That difference affects the way I approach the drawing process and the surface. What is the difference?

Graphite let loose in its raw chunky state is messy, grimy, and dusty. A chunk of graphite is capable of being “scrubbed” forcefully onto the surface and once you’ve built up a slick oily layer, the deep black becomes shiny silver as that scrubbed and smoothed layer reflects light.

“Drawing” is a celebration of my use of the medium. The underlying notion was what I had once called “situational geometry”. A fascination with how our geometry seems built into the growth patterns of nature.

This is fairly easy to see in botanical terms. Trees of a particular species have a certain visual form yet each individual is unique, growing in a specific place with specific circumstances that alter the appearance while maintaining the geometry.
My next logical step was to see the raw landscape as a series of circumstances (rockslides, glaciation, erosion) and similar effects as a demonstration of the same process.

I took that on with the graphite studies, exploring the precarious balances of mass with the overall fragility of a landscape in process. Each drawing focuses on a particular “feel”.