He's drawn repeatedly from a Hogarth Beggar's Opera engraving: "The finitude of consciousness never knows itself entirely, so everything is always coming new, no matter how many times it's repeated."
"Drawing is perhaps the first contact with thoughts and ideas," he says, applying charcoal to paper. "The drawing goes through from the very beginning to the very end of everything I do" - drawing operating in tandem with painting, going from one to the other as the work develops, indeed in order to develop the work. It leaves a trail of thought.
(Image from elsewhere.)
I'm slow to respond to this, but wanted to say that I've read it three or four times and each time, I got a bit of something new from it.
ReplyDeleteToday I thought, "Yes!" To draw from someone else's painting is to embrace or pull within oneself both the art and the artist process.
It's of a piece with (my) discovery that drawing isn't a simple thing: it's like writing. To draw someone else's art is a bit like copying by hand someone else's writing -- a bit of Dicken, perhaps, or Virginia Woolf. I've done that -- started when I was teaching and making notes, but found a sheer sensual pleasure in the repeating of exquisite sentences.
In drawing, if copying a painting, the anxiety of precision would be totally avoided, since the two modes are so different. Therefore, one could sink into the experience without feeling inept or foolish.
What a great idea.
I can't look at the videos at this location, but hope to do so when we get home next week.