Drawing Notes: Dots & Lines
Lines, wiggle and cruise, surge and loop. They can do anything. In between slow and fast, the middle gear says the most.
Since January I’ve been focusing on making my work with lines. I have been drawing with dots for almost 10 years, since graduating with my BFA. I decided to mix up how I draw for a couple reasons, but mostly due to a wrist injury that’s left me with some sensitive scar tissue. For now, at least, I’ll think with lines.
Dots and dashes are interesting to me to say the least, they seem to perpetually be forming, marching, expanding, and at the same time, about to vanish. An inauspicious experiment got me started drawing with dots during my BFA. I decided to make a rubbing of a cinder block with graphite. Burnishing it with a sheet of paper, the raised granular bumps of the cinder block left behind these organic looking dots and dashes. Unexpected of an industrial material, but beautiful. I sprang excitedly into action from there, exploring with my own hand-drawn dots and dashes. So far, my work has grown and changed from thinking about what drawing is to letting the work be influenced by patterns in nature, water, ecology, and wrestling with colored pencil and graphite to make it work together.
Detail of “Snow Flora, Falling”.
I have to say it’s been odd, working in one way, almost exclusively, for a long time and shifting to another has been difficult and interesting. It’s been like coming out of a deprivation chamber, or riding a bike when you’ve been walking for miles. I find that lines seem to keep pace with me. Dots are more fretful and mostly concerned with getting from A to B without misfire. Not to say that was my entire experience with them, but that was a decent portion of it. With dots I also felt I had to imagine what was going to happen next far ahead of time. Lines can be limp as a noodle or dancing lyrically, easily, changing and vetting the page as I go along. It’s so wild and new to me right now.
I like maps, I like getting lost in them. I had this assumption that where dots obscure or point in many directions, lines would give it all up, like a bumpy rocky hiking trail using a printed map vs. cruising on a major highway using GPS. This is kind of true and kind of not. I find that my mind turns anyway, gets lost, and more quickly with lines. And maybe where I thought defection was interesting (possibly brought out by art school critiques in self-defense) showing the major routes feels necessary.