Filed under: 2012.NOVEMBER, SCRAPS | Tags: art, art technique, California art, calligraphy, China, chinese art, contemporary art, ink, scroll painting
The above detail is about 2.5 inches across. One thing my ongoing show in Laguna has taught me is that my current works look much, much better in real life than they do in photographs or on a monitor. The most basic problem is that the plane of our eyes’ focus changes constantly, and this is impossible to achieve with a camera. Even line art on the slickest vellum looks much better to the eye than it ever could in print. In a previous post I noted how happy I was that a friend and collector chose to hang my work at the end of the entrance hallway of his house; the pride of place was flattering, but I also know that people entering his door will see my piece from a distance first, and then their focus will change as they approach the wall on which it’s hung.
Below are five works I’ve completed since sending pieces for my current show to the framer. I’ve been experimenting around with my Pedestrian Series:
Now here’s what I love most about this series. Each figure is composed of rough, abstract lines and forms that together add up to the images you see from a distance. In a photograph, these forms are only visible in a close-up view:
In these details, you can see how the ink is sometimes jammed down into the porous watercolor paper, while at other times the pen has been roughly slid along the surface, and still others, the ink sits atop the paper in a layer:
I’ve been playing around with introducing color into these works. Below is a detail of a piece that includes marks using Prismacolor Premier markers, but I’m not sure if I like the way the ink soaks into the paper so easily. You can tell the difference between the thick orange lines (Prismacolor) and the fine red lines (my usual Sakura pens) flaring out from the figures:
Here’s another experiment. For this piece I coated the paper with a layer of black acrylic paint, and then scraped the white forms out with an X-acto blade:
Another view of the same piece, showing how the individual images look up close and further away. Only with the naked eye can you see both views of the same image at the same time.
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
BLAKE CARTER | GERMS 