Whoa, who did that?
I did. I don't know what to call it, so "Untitled #1" will have to do for now. It's charcoal on paper, 18" x 24".
Now, don't get all up in arms about this. It was strongly suggested that I experiment, so I did. Oddly enough, it was quite fun, and I'm glad I did it. Of course, the real "fun" of it was the process itself; the evolution of the image from very basic mark-making. Turns out, in order to make a successful abstract, you really DO need to know how to draw. At least, you need to know the medium well enough to get the effects you desire. Making the forms fade, coalesce and turn while overlapping and ribboning away from one another was not as simple as it may look. This was a 3 hour session.
Of course, once I was done, my reaction was, "So?" It doesn't hold much meaning other than that of a technical exercise, which isn't too much different than, say, a nude figure study from life. Nevertheless, it is different in terms of my overall process in that I usually ascribe an image to an idea as opposed to the reverse. So what meaning(s) can I ascribe to this?
While still in the studio, I sat there with a Guinness in hand and just looked at this thing on the easel for a while. I turned it in all different directions. There was something, but I think the surface tricks were getting in the way. To be sure, I knew there were some frightening things, but I needed to look past the obvious. I took a crappy photo of it with my phone and brought it into Photoshop. There, I turned it, cropped it, blurred it, colored it, solarized it... all kinds of wacky things. After a few passes with some filters, I think I landed on something. It's bizarre, but I think it can gel with what I need to express in my MFA work.
We'll see. I'll keep you posted.
