City Peeps, 2006
Last fall I did a project where I offered to draw anything for anyone for a $25 donation to a Hurricane Katrina charity. Several people took me up on the offer and we raised over $600. The above is the first drawing which has been delivered so far - I'll post the rest as they get finished and delivered.
The instruction from the donor for this piece was:
...maybe a drawing of a neighborhood with buildings, filled with people, a community, and maybe some of it could be in collage if you have time.
5 comments:
Great idea! very nice of you as well. Kudos. I have been trying to sell drawings on my site to no great avail, perhaps I will do a similar project.
Mark
I like this collage (the jpeg at least) best of all the ones I've seen of yours. I'm trying to understand what makes this one work better than the others I've seen posted or printed.
I think it is that the elements other than the white paper are in this piece very specifically descriptive of a forms that are relevant to the scene. The presence of bits of felt or string or card or whatever often seem to make me wonder, "why is that there?" and ask, "does it need to be?" They often feel like the extraneous things, the "other".
But in City Peeps these things work, and the reasons for being included at all are self-evident, which makes a cohesive
I think that the lack of material substance along the lower edge of the picture is a compositional problem. The image is top heavy. The figures and their ground in the lower half fade into relative obscurity. Maybe add value to the sidewalk, or maybe heavy-up some line weight in the lower left corner.
I intend all my comments, even critical ones, to be affirmative. I hope they are received so.
"...which makes a cohesive picture."
I intend all my comments (...) to be complete sentences.
Mark - thanks. I did a project like this for the Kerry '04 campaign - actually it was started by some other pals at usscatastrophe.com and I joined in. The only people I know who have had luck selling their work on their blog are Duane Keiser at "A Painting A Day" and J.T. at "Thinking about Art". J.T. has his prints up and they're pretty reasonably priced...
Ahab - First, no need to be gentle with any criticism - I'm glad to hear any good, constructive talk about my work in, of all places, the comments on a blog. Esp from someone whose work I like and respect.
You're astute - this piece, along with some other newer ones, has a closer relationship between the stuff glued on and the things depicted. I've been looking a lot at Stuart Davis, who, like other cubists, seemed to walk a thin line between representation and abstraction. Every shape and line in his work is a shape in a composition, but is also a rope or a ship or a word.
In the past I've added stuff with the ideas of adding to the visual density while not always referencing something in particular. Under it all I figured that there WAS a relationship - bits of string and insides of envelopes are the flotsam that surrounds us and therefore fits in with the bits of landscape I'm drawing.
But in this newer work I want to try to add another layer, that of representation a la Davis or Picasso or whoever. So I draw something, representing it. I glue on shapes (and string or whatever) that also represent something. And those glued on elements are also themselves, like the best papier colles of Braque and Picasso.
We'll see how it works...
Thank you for the compliment, w.
Your collage is indeed both/and - both a thing in its own right and a representation of other(s). There is no rule, I don't think, that says one should overrule the other, but in each sort of artwork or style of artmaking one does seem to achieve prominence.
It is an odd thing, but my observation is that white paper (and graph paper though less so) is generally ignorable as a collage element - it requires clarification by inscription (drawing on). The strip of felt or slab of scrubpad requires no clarification and little manipulation, but needs integration into the picture, and is most easily unified by acting as a descriptive compositional element.
Post a Comment