From Rhythmic Scribbles to Figurative Environments
The collection of drawings that appear below, as well as those that appear on the Instagram page called “sevenfold.scribbles”, start out as exercises in creating harmonies through arm movements. Attention is given to the relationships between movements and counter-movements. There are various tempos, and passages between tempos. There are changes in the pressure of the pencil on the paper. Dots, lines and hatch-worked planes are spontaneously laid down. There’s a constant vigilance against falling into habitual patterns of movement. Midway into the exercise, the paper is turned upside down, and the sequence continues. Contrasts of scalar relationships are explored. At some point a certain musicality may be felt in the distribution of marks.
As these purely abstract visual elements accumulate, I open myself to perceiving identifiable objects within the dense network of lines. The process turns into a Rorschach ink blot test. An apparition is experienced. It may be that a pose that the live model took at last month’s drawing session suddenly comes out of this linear network, and the two-dimensional marks quickly turn into a three-dimensional entity in space.
These drawings could be said to connect strands that are as diverse as the gestural ink drawings of the 17th century Han Chinese painter Bada Shanren, the figurative harmonies of the Italian Renaissance painter Titian, and the present day graphic novel drawings of Kevin Finney.
The narratives between the human figures (or the figures and the environments) are unplanned and, often, deliberately left unclear. One might wonder: “What exactly is taking place here?”