Jean-Michel Basquait was recommended to me based on how my final tricycle drawing was turning out. His work is ‘child like’, and that is the only phrase i can come up with how to describe it. It is a style that I am especially drawn to, and aspire to pull it off as he did. Basquait was a Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s. He is best known for his “primitive” (this word was used to describe his work on a site but in my opinion it should be used loosely… that was not my impression of his pieces)  style and his collaboration with Andy Warhol.

Mark Bradford plays with color and a lot of negative space. Normally the color would distract from the form but it is so subtle that it creates its own grey value, if that makes sense. He is an installation and conceptual artist and “is presented in multiple mediums such as collaged paintings, videos, installations, and sculptures.” (artnet.com)  His work interests me because I am not yet able to create color and depth at the same time without becoming distracted or fall in love with a color, and think it fits when it doesn’t. Color romanticizes my pieces and I think something looks underdeveloped when I add it.

Here is my tricycle drawing, completely covered in that white stuff who’s name escapes me…

anyway I tried to recreate the form study drawing and make it work the way it did in that drawing. I took that weird chicken looking head that was found not by me, but in a critique and I fell in love with this shape. It is gross but interesting, and I wanted to repeat that throughout the page. At first I was “designing” a platform, but I was less controlled and let things just happen, and the result is more of a risk but a lot better than the original.

Emma McNally’s work plays with ‘grey areas’ in my opinion. They are structured to the size of the frame, but can continue on. McNally thinks of “these drawings as fugitive, heterogeneous gray areas. They are the turbulence between noise and signal. They are a space of difference and deferral, a weather system of graphite.” (artforum.com) When i read ‘weather system’, I understood that her drawings are unpredictable, and can be read very fast or very slowly, just as we read works of other artist, trying to take in the whole image. Here is a piece that interests me, and plays with space and the negative areas  to create a ‘weather system’.

Jennifer Wroblewski’s work moves, as if they are always vibrating or spinning out of control. Her piece titled impala especially seems as it is being vacuumed into itself, or that it is rapidly growing out of control. Her work interests me because not only is it chaotic, but extremely controlled. They are large and intimidating but also so soft and inviting. Wroblewski describes her pieces as “an investigation into ecstatic mark making and performative drawing as contemporary shamanic practice.” Here are some videos of her drawing process.

Sonya Berg creates a “sense of divided space that is both alluring and disruptive.” She uses a lot of negative space and the white of the paper, and what i find especially interesting is how she takes the context of a snapshot away, therefore creating an abstract “window of color and space.” Her piece titled “Missing Man” is my favorite of hers, based on the way she creates color in values, almost like it is a negative of a photograph. It glows in a way. Here is a link to her site

http://www.sonyaberg.com

This is pastel and Fiber Castell marker over the drawing we left outside in the rain/walked on/ rubbed in the grass etc. I was told to research an artist and imitate a format that was balanced and figure out why it worked that way. The overlapping between colors and the way they shift from one space to another is what works, and the round shapes canceling out the hard edges, and the continuation of certain shapes. It balances throughout the space it is given.

This was my process in creating an abstract shape/shapes that should “complete” the drawing. But throughout the process it was way too safe, even for me. I was too scared to cover all the work of drawing those trycicles, and the result is controlled and not taking any significant risks.

This was my process throughout picking good and bad areas throughout the tricycle drawing. After overlapping sketches of 2 trycicles ten times, this was the result

Jack Southern and Mick Maslen have been evolving as artists and lecturers for over 20 years, and are sharing their experiences through this book. They hope the projects encourage an “open-minded sense of discovery” and becoming familiar with the unfamiliar.  The most encouraging thing in this reading is that Maslen quotes, ” we can all draw in our own way, but what we sometimes fail to do is recognize the things that are particular and special about our way of drawing.” And that is true, because we can never know how someone is going to react, or how they look to others. And I always tend to compare my work to others which is good and bad seemingly at the same time. I hope this book encourages me to see drawing differently and take my work to another level.