22 February 2010

Some drawings

These are from a book called Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (published 2005), which is kept "in the cupboard" at City Lit. A lot of the images are off-putting until you take the time to read something about the artist and find out "where they're coming from". But others are immediately appealing, like this one by Trenton Doyle Hancock, who "plays with racial stereotypes and America's fear of otherness" -This by William Kentridge, "a storyteller" -
and this by Marco Maggi, who I've encountered before. In the work shown, piles of copy paper are laid on a floor of paper (visitors take their shoes off); the top sheet in each pile is drawn on with a scalpel -
Drawing, as it is practised now, is baffling; it rather eludes me as a concept. It seems to encompass everything that isn't painting or sculpture - and some things that might be. Categories are fluid ... artists work in several categories, several media ... sometimes their main category is drawing, their main medium a "traditional" one - pencil, charcoal, ink. And it's not always "works on paper"...

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