We use words to know better how we might speak.
We use images to know more how we might see.
This is part of what art does for us. It weaves aspects of ourselves together to show us ourselves. Not all art does this with strong intention but the effect is the same regardless. Art is a window framing humanity — sometimes a mirror.
This sounds grandiose and I don’t mean to say that that artists are some higher beings with a rarified viewpoint. Artists are just people with a curiosity for how words, images, sounds, and forms connect with each other and with us.
The art I’ve been making recently puts words forward in a strong visual way. I’ve been writing on my drawings for years now but these new drawings are meant to be read in a more overt way.
That doesn’t mean that they are necessarily straightforward or clear in what they say. I’ve said before that I consider many of my drawings to be visual poems and while they can have meanings to me (sometimes) I don’t expect that meaning to be someone else’s.
The words in my drawings are usually spontaneous like the rest of the marks. I almost never go into a drawing knowing what it will look like and certainly not what it might mean. I might come to a drawing with a phrase in my head but more of the time, words “suddenly appear”.
I found a few cheap packs of vinyl lettering at the thrift store. They’re the kind often used for making signs on the glass of a storefront window. They were something like a dollar or two for each sheet. I try not to spend much money on art supplies in general. But I have already ordered another sheet of half-inch white Helvetica since I ran out of some frequently used letters.
From a simply functional standpoint, the letters interest me because I can paint and draw below and on top of them. They are vinyl but matte enough that they don’t feel too unlike the paper or Masonite I’ve been using.
Visually, I like that they have the plainclothes design neutrality of Helvetica but because the are plastic and thin always apply with a bit of a wobble. Well, at least with my shaky hands.
Because I have also continued to pursue working with dominant grids in my drawings, the relative rigidity of premade text feels right. But I can, and do, make the letters pretty messy as I have been painting over them and then using a utility blade to scrape most of the paint back off. It has this nice feeling of dropping the stark white of the letters back into my drawing — like they are floating in a substrate.
For the words themselves and their placement, I already have a creative pattern of using words in lists and clusters that allow for multiple readings or associations. Like concrete poetry, I want the letters and the words to do their job as elements in language and to also act as visual blocks. This is especially true with the use of grids where the words feel even more connected as parts of a page grid.
As I am making these drawings I’m obviously looking for readings that can happen left to right but also hopefully there are visual and linguistic diagonals and vectors to be followed. I don’t follow any rules for how I want to guide a viewer’s eye. I have enough trouble even taming my own eyes as I draw — they jump here and there as does my mark making.
The space between words is where the eye finds meaning and forms connections. The liminality of a pause, a leap between interpretations, the threshold before a new understanding is found in those gaps.
Part of what’s interesting to me about both making and experiencing artwork is seeing where it finds me. Making visual art isn’t like keeping a journal but it can have the effect of marking how an artist might be feeling or thinking at a particular time.
Art making happens within a lived experience and, whatever its form, pulls at the edges of that life to complete its form.
It’s in the words I use in my drawings that I can be most easily pulled back to where my mind was when one was made. The words don’t tell the story but they make a connection back through me to a feeling or a thought and further in back. I thrive in finding connections.
This is part of the nature of art. A way to see ourselves to make a window back through ourselves.