A new semester started this week and to get things moving, part of the set drawing program is to do a drawing a day. Thought about doing this many times, but it can be tough on the self motivation skills to get the habit established – and I never have managed. So having it a set part of the course will be great because I will do it. I don’t plan to put them all up here but here is yesterdays. Graphite pencil on pine veneer, and a feather.
A simple little drawing, but I found it rather interesting the way in which it developed. Found a strip of pine veneer during a workshop tidy up. I rather like bits of wood so I claimed it. At the same time I noticed a feather on the floor – quite how it came to be there I don’t know. The last couple of months whenever I see a feather on the ground I photograph it, and I’m on the lookout for them now. Usually I leave them there but this one I picked up. So then I was playing around arranging the black feather and the light strip of wood spatially on the wall and this is the arrangement I settled on – for no conscious reason. Then I came to thinking about the days drawing and it seemed obvious to do it on the pine veneer, and of course the obvious thing to draw on it was a pine tree – both because of the material and because it has been a subject I have been using lately and there were photos and prints of pines right there on my desk to refer to.
Now what I find interesting is that having completed the drawing in this seemingly playful, ad hoc sort of way, I realised its relationships to works by Anselm Kiefer that I have looked at before and which turned up in a theory class the day before.
Untitled 1996 Anselm Kiefer
This is the image shown to me this week, but there is another one that I can’t find at the moment where instead of giant sunflowers, withering and bent but full of dark ripe seed, seeming to grow from the prostrate man, there is a young pine tree.
Time I got off here and did todays drawing.
Untitled, 1996
Anselm Kiefer (GeUnrman, b. 1U945)
Woodcut, shellac, and acrylic on paper, mounUntitlested on canvas; 11 ft. 11 1/4 in. x 8 ft. 1/2 in. (3.6 x 2.4 m)
art out and about 