Drawing, the hard to answer questions

I wanted a tattoo of a fish, a carp or as it’s said in Chinese 鯉魚 liyu.  There are many stories about these fish, my favourite comes from Zhuang Zi “I know the fishes are happy because I am happy walking beside them.”

Drawing, it’s like time, we know what it is but getting it down to its essence in one sentence is damn near impossible.  Like all art it’s communication, however drawing takes up the atypical characteristic of communication with both the viewers and ourselves.  Many an art professor (myself included) have instructed students to draw as a way of keeping notes and ideas and to understand what we are looking at.  Drawing can also be a work of art in itself.  Admittedly, I don’t draw as often as I should.  My time is limited and when I do draw it’s in preparation for something larger; and as I tell my students, I use it as a method of study.  I believe, to make drawing a work of art, it needs to be grand in some way.  It could be scale, it could be impressive detail or photorealistic, and/or it could be pushing our idea about what is drawing.  One of my favourite drawing classes was spent with students who I had already taught for years, and we got experimental with the definition of drawing.
 
In this exhibit there are examples of each of the above.  Explorations and representations, and a little fun in one form or another.

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For a while I was interested in the novelty of how much information about the three-dimensional world we take in through two dimension e.g. screens.  When the images of Pluto were released years ago this novelty took hold and I wanted to explore something any of us would only see in two dimensions.

This is one of my favourite drawings because I used a very small source image from a magazine and drew this on an A1 sheet of paper.

Not sure how to explain the one on the left.  I took a photo of a random alleyway in Bordeaux and then graffitied my own tags, and those of my friends onto the wall.  On the right, I was talking to a colleague about riding a small motorcycle through the alleyways of Beijing in the snow.  This is the result.

There were a gaggle of geese who took up residence near my home in Georgia, which means I picked up some goose feathers on occasion.  I read that goose feathers make the best quills, so I had a go.  The poem is by a student of mine.

I ordered something from Amazon and it came wrapped in this long sheet of paper.  I also happen to have prints of a whole bunch of interesting images and nothing to do.  So …

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