Sunday 31 January 2010

untitled rainbow drawing

This is the second of the two untitled rainbow drawings made in September 2009.
I read that Werner Herzog likes to think of the films that he makes as being children. They are to be cherished as expressions of the self. If they are lame or disabled in some way they must receive greater love.
It is difficult for me to love my own work. I am intimately familiar with each drawing, but that is not necessarily love. Many I destroy, some of which I later regret having lost, and the pain of their loss is a deep hurt, akin to self harm.
The practice of drawing is intimate and exploratory in a way in which I believe no other practice to be. One's first tool, as a child, is the crayon or pencil, or felt tip, all drawing instruments. Mark making thus is elemental, absorbing, although this early period of discovery is short. All too soon, one becomes aware of one's shortcomings, and frustrated by one's inadequacies. Who does not remember the struggle to render perspective, or to depict the limbs of a figure as accurately as possible?
The rainbow drawings allowed me an escape from these concerns. I drew as I may have done when first a child, the crayons bunched in my fist, the wax going down on the paper as though it were an enemy. The pencil marks over the wax are subtle, but entirely uncomplicated, just short strokes of graphite, no sophistication.

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