Openwork. An ongoing series of drawings. Thoughts on the vulnerability of making and the further embodied sense of what making means in a body.
The way we have been taught to think and talk about art is in the context of groups, series, collections, exhibitions. And artists, we are told, are defined by movements, periods, and ultimately oeuvres.
But day to day, artists’ work is made in fits and starts and often without planning or forethought. That’s not to say that every artist works the same way and some people have far more structure around their work than others.
I am definitely in the seat of the pants, sit down and see what comes, artistic camp. While it was become a bit of a buzz word, I do think about how I work as intuitive.
I’m thinking about this recently because, while I am not a planner, I have been working on what is becoming a series or a sequence — a body of work.
A single artwork is the artefact of any number of choices, accidents, thoughts, actions, reactions, emotions, and discoveries. Between each single artwork, a branching network flows. Bodies of work, like bodies of water connect and find each other based on the circumstances of topography, weather, and intervention — or in human terms process, temperament, and intention.
The current series I am exploring draws from all of the creative, intellectual, and emotional work I have been doing over the last decade or so. My art in that time hasn’t been consistent. I have jumped around between styles, mediums, scales, tools, and motifs. But everything feels like it interconnects in some way.
These recent drawings, on square Masonite panels from the dollar store, have themes and patterns that I have revisited many times but there is something new in them for me. A greater sense of intention than I would normally have.
Or maybe it’s that they “just click” for me. That’s the way of art making and viewings much of the time. That mostly impossible post-liminal sensation of things snapping into being — crossing from a state of flux into the contextual finality of being a “piece of art”.
Last year I explored drawing digitally in a way that followed some of the currents from drawings I made on paper in previous years. I wanted to see what “translating” those drawings to digital processes would mean and how it might either suggest a different course or simply tell me something about where I was going.
Those drawings led back to more drawings on paper and then, after a chance purchase of some vinyl transfer letters at a local thrift store, a fairly concrete (for me) set of forms started to emerge.
These drawings are paintings / are collage / are design. They have structure and mess. They have abstraction and then the legibility and plainness of text.
The words, applied in half-inch vinyl Helvetica, aren’t the first time I have used typography in my work. That has been something winding through my drawings for many years now. As a designer, type has always been both a tool and a means of expression.
In these drawings, the type and the text are more purposeful and connect more with the grid and the space of the drawings than they have consistently before.
I haven’t changed how I work and I still approach each drawing without any plan. There is the same starting point of each blank square panel but beyond that and the repeated white type, I don’t have any secure sense of where they will go.
Once I started seeing these drawings as a series there was both a pressure and a release. I can be more intentional in some ways but also have a structure to play within.
I recently started thinking of these drawings with the working title “Openwork.” I’m borrowing the term from another form of art-making that usually refers to architectural, ceramic, and metalworking motifs where matrices of holes and perforations allow light and air to flow through forms.
While this current series of drawings is not literally perforated, I think of the latticework of the grids I am using as establishing a clear structure — a way to move things to define an open visual space. The same is true of the words written with the vinyl lettering. The white letters are like light punching through the panel. The contrast and clarity of the letterforms sit apart from the torn and rough cut shapes of paper and the smeared, scribbled lines of pencil.
The text in each of these drawings is a primary element in holding them together as a series. But it is also just one intuitive collage element. It adds no more real meaning than the paper and paint around it.
But I do realize that many people feel when they “read a painting” that they are being told something. It’s a danger in many ways because I don’t want to force anyone’s hand if there might be some other meaning in my art.
I’m so self conscious sometimes that I find it hard to assume that anyone will feel anything connected to my art. It’s part of a struggle that makes me step away and question myself — which leads to me not making art which only hurts me in the end.
Having the sense that a few drawings that become a few more drawings could “be something” shoves against that vulnerable part of me that lowers my head and tries to hide.
The body of work. My body has to do the work to take feelings and inclinations from head, heart, and hand and translate them onto some square panels.
So I want this to be openwork. Open work. Open to me and open to whoever might see something or hopefully feel something.
I have no sense of where this will go. There are 17 drawings I think of as being in this series so far. And initially the number of cheap panels I bought at the dollar store felt like the limit. They don’t seem to have more in stock and I think I have 7 panels left. That could be it or maybe how many panels I have is a weird way of defining a body of work.
Who knows how this works? It’s art. There aren’t supposed to be rules I guess.
Okay, thanks for following along. Or if these words simply echo in my own chamber, that’s okay too.