I tend towards compulsive refinement in my drawing process, and although I feel I am a good judge of when enough is really enough, it very often happens that a new phase of development requires a difficult sacrifice. Because my process usually involves a very rough ink sketch in the initial stage, there are often beautiful surprises that emerge as the ink is layered and then washed away - distressed calligraphic passages, or sometimes just one line or accidental drip that seems to put my deliberate marks to shame.
This drawing is full of such things, mainly because I struggled a lot in its early stages (if you look closely, you'll see I even had a compositional rethink: shifting the whole parasol from the right-hand edge to the left, where it just looked better.)
As a result of these struggles, I find that the drawing has a slight vibration to it, as though it is trembling in the breeze, about to cartwheel away, but kept just-anchored by an outweighing gravity. It doesn't carry so well in the photo, here, but in the studio, where the drawing is about one metre square, the shabby marks around it seem to give it an energy or tension that is quite captivating.
So, the dilemma is how to develop the drawing as I want to, without sacrificing this strange and rare quality. I'm not sure if I can do it. I could leave it as it is, but the floppiness of the parasol would irritate me. I want to achieve the crisp folds and brittleness of the translucent paper. I am thinking that the best option is to work inwards, tightening the detail within the form, but leaving the background in its raw, quasi-erased state... but will the two parts then seem incongruous?
I'll keep you posted.
No comments:
Post a Comment