Drawing - on the Walls

It’s Blogthirty. It’s cold, it’s warm, we’re having an ice storm, no wait, it’s 50 degrees outside. It’s been an unsettled week and as you can tell, I’m hard up for subject matter this morning. Trying to jump start my engine by reading other people’s opinions has so far been no help. The banality of Ikea furniture? Blah. Lily Tomlin’s brother’s go at creating a sectional by sawing his mother’s sofa in thirds? Nah. Remember drawing rooms? What sort of furniture does one put in a drawing room? How about no furniture at all and you just strip off the old wallpaper and draw on the walls?

Drawing is either a process or a goal-oriented activity. Someone with a narrative imagination is required to come up with formal inventions which allow the narrative to proceed and be manifested for the viewer. A manga artist could do wonders for the walls of that drawing room. If it were my room, I would start by letting the materials generate the result. A process drawing happens because of the artist’s curiosity about how things get made, and what materials will do; and the inspiration for this may lie - either or both - in the physical inclinations of the artist and in the processes of the natural world of which the artist, who is a life-form with just as much potential for art as Johnson grass, is a part. Things grow adapt change, get moved around come into being and disappear. The challenge for the artist is to be as inventive in making process work visually, as nature is in inventing form.

My hope is that whoever stripped off the wallpaper left the mess behind, along with some cans of paint, so I can get started.

I'll be busy drawing for the next two Mondays - and back here in the New Year. Have Happy Holidays!