I received an advance pdf version of a friend's new book of paintings today. He dedicated himself to a painting a day for an entire year and published the results, which, even looking at on my laptop screen I have to say are remarkable, lovely, and improbable moments of joy in material.
Many feel like sketches. They have the hand-drawn rectangle borders to signify the parameters of an imagined canvas. The lines of pencil or ink bleed through the delicate acrylic washes in flirty ways that feel intimate and immediate. I love sketches. What we lay down in expediency is often so much fresher than the eventual works they may or may not become. Drawing (and I include drawing with oil stick, paints or other mediums) is such an essential and personal act for the artist. It is the unfiltered expression of the mind. I could look at my friends' sketchbooks for hours, we should all post more pictures of our drawings.
I come in and out of my drawing practice, but I don't do it nearly enough. It pays dividends in terms of creativity and productivity, and many expressions live solely in dusty sketchbooks along my bookshelves or stacked in my studio. My figure drawings number in the hundreds, dozens of them of the same model, Marge, with whom I worked for several years. It seems strange that I don't show my nudes, and despite the abundance of them in my house (my wife periodically stole some and framed them) I've never exhibited them.
With how I'm painting now, I'm relying heavily on the shorthand of drawing with oil stick on black paper. Some come from gesture and some come from a concept like a phrase or clouds I see as I walk through the world doing other things. I read a line in a book at the pool the other day and it will be the title of the next painting I make; sometimes it happens like that, like I can see something in words and it won't let me go until I paint it.
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