What is contemporary drawing? (via Edel Assanti Project Space)

more thoughts on contemporary drawing…

Kitty Hudson examines the role of drawing in contemporary art practice. Drawings seem to be enjoying a modest renaissance. Maybe it is coincidental that I have visited a number of exhibitions in succession either focusing wholly on drawings or giving them prominence amongst other artistic practices. Not that drawing has ever slipped off the radar – it is at the core of all artistic practice, one of the basic building blocks of art. Yet there is a … Read More

via Edel Assanti Project Space

The Sketchbook #1: drawing experimentation

I have been trying to loosen up, take more risks and work on processing some of what I have learned while in China. While I have been continuing my normal style of drawing I am also spending part of each day “playing”: doing things that are spontaneous, reacting to my current situation, saying things I would normally consider private, drawing more hastily than usual.

In the States I often made art by finding a point at which I run into a wall, either a physical barrier or some form of psychological resistance. At the point where there is tension something is happening worth talking about. Why is the wall there? How far does the wall go? I am not so much interested in reacting to the wall as exploring the interface, the place where the tension is created, the stone against my hand. This connects to my interest in urban space.  I am fascinated by the space between people in a crowd and how pedestrians use space to their best advantage but are also sometimes frustrated by that space’s limitations. In my previous work I thought about how the infrastructure of Detroit ended up exacerbating inequalities and urban to sub-urban movement as the highways intentionally were built to bypass or bisect large areas of the city.

In moving to China, studying intensive language and starting lithography there were such a plethora of experiences (starting with the language barrier) that this sense of tension or focus was quickly drowned out in the every day tasks. If before I could say I metaphorically drew on walls, now I found myself in a construction zone where the walls are hidden behind piles of bricks.

These new drawings are not finished products but rather ways of processing my time in a visual form. One drawing is a rough calendar of my grant with conversations I have had plotted against it. In the process of making these drawings the events I am recording become illegible, covered over by other events. As I work the pieces destroy themselves while at the same time I start to pull patterns and meaning out of them. I don’t yet know how this will feed into the finished work I make, but I feel that it is worth recording here as a beginning of something…

Sketchbook #1: Process Sketches (incomplete/ early versions)

 

 

 

 

 

Tate Papers Issue 14 Autumn 2010: Ideas in Transmission: LeWitt’s Wall Drawings and the Question of Medium

Tate Papers Issue 14 Autumn 2010: Anna Lovatt. This paper is about Sol LeWitt’s Drawings.

One of my good friends here in China has been encouraging me to watch some of the talks at the Tate online. I just stumbled across this paper and realized that the Tate also has an online journal.

While in China I have been trying to soak up as much going around me as possible and learn first hand about the art scene. I often feel like I should take advantage of every minute I have here.

On the occasions that I have taken an hour or two to read about something not directly about Chinese contemporary art I have been surprised though. I find my time here has changed not only the way I think but also the way I see. It is only when I come back to look at artists I used to be familiar with, like Sol LeWitt, that I realize how much my perspective has shifted. It feels as if I am seeing these old works for the first time and that they seem startling, fresh and unexpected.

While this perhaps signals how much reverse culture shock I will experience when I return to the states, I have a suspicion that it won’t be until I try to make the transition that I will discover how much I have learned and will really begin to see the impact this experience has had on my own drawing and printmaking.

Daqing Grasslands Drawing in Graphite: Work from Dapu International Art Center

This is a large drawing I made while at the Dapu International Art Center in Daqing, Heilongjiang Province, China.

I started this image after noticing all of the different types of grasses that grew along the edge of the road between the art center and one of the universities. According to Zheng Xuewu, the entire area had been fields of grass the previous year. Now the buildings in the new “cultural” area were almost complete.

I remembered seeing large stretches of grassland as we drove in to Daqing. I grew up in the foothills and mountains of North Carolina and have always regarded “flat” as boring bordering on slightly frightening since a person walking through a field of grass suddenly becomes the tallest thing. But these grasslands were beautiful. Xuewu told us that this part of Heilongjiang was where the grasslands that swept through inner and outer Mongolia, all the way across northern China, started. As I worked on the drawing I began to appreciate more and more the great variety of grasses and the ways each type made different patterns and appeared soft or sharp and bristly even from a distance. In my room my windowsill was lined with plants I collected along the edge of the road.

I was reminded of my classmate from Michigan, Catherine Meier.  She used to work in  the great plains of the United States. During graduate school she made a series of woodblock prints based on the grasslands. Later she went to Mongolia to study nomadic culture. Much of her recent work has been stop motion animation based on large graphite drawings of  the plains. In the video individual blades of grass bend and move in the wind. As I worked on the drawing in Daqing I kept thinking about her work. There was something appealing in the ways in which something so apparently simple as drawing a field or a wetland was so infinitely variable. I realized I not only had to think about the ways the different species of plants layered, intertwined and created overall textures but also how invisible forces like  light and wind and water were indicated by the way the blades of grass bent or cast shadows.

I also later learned that the wetlands surrounding Daqing’s hundred lakes was the largest in China. We visited the wetlands once during my stay. Sadly the light was bad that day and it was already late for birding (11:00), but still I saw a wide variety of ducks and herons. I believe the wetlands are also a stop for rare cranes. The area is a very important habitat for migratory birds, on a rout through Russia and sometimes all the way over to Europe.

Visually there was very little impact of the oil industry on the landscape. The oil drills themselves looked like small bobbing birds in the distance, or like a child’s toy. Still, I remember how at Green River Preserve, a summer ecology camp in the North Carolina mountains, we found that even the presence of a gravel road had a significant impact on the diversity of small water insects living in nearby streams, which in turn could alter the entire food chain. Might the drilling and development have an impact on the beautiful grasslands and wetlands and the birds who took sanctuary their even though it appeared to be so expansive?

I was surprised many people I talked to had never visited the wetlands even though they had grown up in Daqing. It was such a beautiful place, especially after the crowds and traffic and pollution of a big city. At home I know we would have been taken to the wetlands on class field trips and would have had to fill out worksheets identifying birds and plants. I wonder if children will get to go on those sorts of field trips now that Daqing is prospering.

Arrival at Dapu International Art Center

 

So I am finally back to blogging again and have a lot to catch up on. I just came back from a wonderful trip out west to Dunhuang and Chengdu.

Now I am getting an opportunity to see a very different part of the country. I am at the Dapu International Art Center Residency Program in Daqing. Daqing is a large oil mining city in Heilongjiang province in far north-eastern China which I will write more about in my next post.

A group of international artists and the residency program director, Zheng Xuewu all drove up from Beijing. When we arrived in Daqing we were met at the bridge by a bicycle team and people from the art center.