Make a drawing as if you are not making a drawing at all and please don’t draw directly on the wall

October 6, 2015

If you are an artist: imagine the drawing you just made off (in the sense of not on) the art paper you were working on and stick it virtually on a wall. But you are not drawing, you object to my suggestion, you are reading right now. Okay. May I invite you to stop reading, go wild and draw for real.
Do you hear me? Make a drawing.
It is simple, grab a pencil, put a piece of paper in front of you and go! Close your eyes if you are not an artist. When you’re done, open up your eyes.

Stick your freshly made drawing on a wall. You wonder for a moment if you should have drawn your drawing directly on the wall. But then you realize that it
has been done so many times before that you get sick even thinking of the multitude or frequency of the action of drawing directly on a wall. No, the mural is a different category, a rather old one to be honest. Creating a mural has nothing to do with the compulsory urge to draw directly on walls.

While making conversation, I should talk directly and seriously about my latest drawing called ‘Bridal Room’, a work on paper (90 x 100 centimeters) that plays a modest part in the art exhibition Come-Go-Stay. Can a static work play a part, one may wonder? Yes, it can. Like the static coming alive in a nightmare, patterns and figures on the wall starting to move, slowly. ‘Bridal Room’ mocks the traditional wallpaper patterns with all their stifled and reassuring symmetric geometry and abundant flow of über feminine florals lost in repetition.

Meet ‘Bridal Room’: at first look it looks like a piece of wall is taken out of the house inhabited by a certain Emily and a certain Silas, whose names float on the bottom of the drawing, this impression is reinforced by a sturdy thick Dibond background, the clean distance, the drawing floating in front of the wall. Safe repetition chimes a nostalgic tone, then strikes one, even two, but when the surface of the drawing is examined carefully one discovers little irregularities, the hat on the head of the woman (modeled after me, Emily), is tilted the second time it appears. These odd denials of the evoked repetition are made (by me) on purpose, of course. After a period of research and ‘academic’ analysis, I handpicked several motives in the text Sacred Emily by Gertrude Stein and drew them. I made a distinction between what I can draw, technically, and what I can’t, being very realistic about my artistic (im)possibilities and daily practice.

For instance, the word ‘yard’ was not considered as something I would draw at all. Come to think of it, I never have, when one takes into account my life as an adult artist, not the doodling pencil driven daydreaming (the house of the family, mommy daddy brother, dog and cat, the sun with beams larger than the hair of Goldilocks) actions of a young girl.

Tomorrow I will write about Imperativo! Femina e canino, a book especially made for the show Come-Go-Stay, published by West, an edition of 100 copies. But maybe I will write about the six video loops that are almost edited, first.