Drawings Part Two

       Drawings Part Two

        Lyrical Drawing

Please look at the lyrical drawing called Destination by Margaret Neill.  Notice the gentle toning of the background.  Some of the drawn curves are heavier and start to look like cables.  

The work seems to indicate gesture, intuition, and exercise of judgement while drawing.  That spirit is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings.  In fact a drip trail of paint is rather like a drawing stroke.

What do you think as you look at it?  Is it a jumble?  Is anything dominant?  If you think in 3D, what is in the foreground, middle ground, and background?  Would it look better upside down? Or without the toned background?  Then it would be a purer drawing with no toned areas.  Good?  Bad? 

            A Reserved Drawing

In Drawing Part One we saw a simple and surprisingly energetic drawing by Steve Keister.  In contrast, all of Agnes Martin’s drawings are minimal, low key, reserved, and contemplative.  They don’t appeal to everyone but have recognition and a following.  Recall Giorgio Morandi’s paintings have a similar quietness.  See Martin’s drawing called The Great Rise of Evening, which seems stronger than her usual low contrast grid based drawings.

            A Collage Based on Chance

    Background and reference

Making or arranging art by chance, that is, by a random process has shown up, off and on, for decades.  The artist Jean Arp, part of the DaDa movement after the first world war, was a pioneer of art made by chance.

See his collage from the Museum of Modern Art, NY.

For an excellent presentation about him I will direct you to another blog. Make a google search for,  Jean Arp: Chance Collages.  It is on the research blog of Marjolein Van Herk.

        Two Morellet Drawings

Our task at hand is to examine and explain the Francois Morellet drawing called 10 Lignes au Hazard which means Ten Lines Made by Chance.

We don’t know Morellet’s exact process but here is a feasible method.  To draw a random line inside a square, we realize the line starts at a point on one edge and ends at a point on another edge of the square.  So, put four little squares or tokens in a bowl.  Label them top, bottom, left, and right.  Blindly reach into the bowl and select two.  Suppose they are left and top.

We need a random starting point on the left edge.  Use a game spinner or make your own spinner with cardboard, a pin, and a self made pointer. The spinner tells you where on the left side to put your starting dot.  If the spinner has 5 regions and you spin 3 then place your dot 3 / 5 of the way along the left edge. 

 Or avoid the physical spinner and use an internet search for ‒ random generator.  You will find many sites.  If you like ten intervals on the left side, you could ask the generator for a random integer from 1 to 10.  If you get a 3 then put - estimate - a dot in the third interval on the left side ‒ about .3 of the way along the side.  Do the same process for the top side.  Draw a line between the two dots to make your first line.  Do this ten times to make the ten lines.

There is another easier approach actually used by Morrelet. He uses as random digits the successive digits of the number Pi = 3.14159265 .. You can find it to hundreds of digits by internet search for Pi.

Why make art by chance?   Chance patterns can  produce results we find attractive and we might not think of.  Our own acts are biased. But we might select results we like from the chance outcomes, which is a bit like evolution.

              A Drawing with a Color 

Just to show the start of many possibilities see another Morellet work called ‒ Strip Teasing.  Note that it has only four lines.

                

      

You could make the lines by chance, then choose and apply the color and its position.  Yellow paint is hard to cover over black, so for all we know the yellow is tape.  Or he might have used masking tape around the yellow areas and painted yellow a few times.  Do you notice any tell tale signs of tape use?  Or he could paint the yellow first with no black underneath then draw the black lines.

Is it true that the yellow strips end at a horizontal line through the center, and at a vertical line through the center?  Then there are four quadrants and two have yellow and two do not.  Can you see them?

Is it true that a work might have characteristics that appeal esthetically even if you don’t consciously notice them? 

The yellow, the thin lines, and only four lines seem to make the work look light, airy, yet bold.  What do you think?  What would more lines, thicker lines, different color, more color do?

There is a famous saying by the architect Mies van der Rohe that less is more.  What does that mean to you?  Can you produce your own examples in art or anywhere else?