Artist Statement
“Drawing, with each stroke, re-enacts desire and loss. Its peculiar mode of being lies between the withdrawal of the trace in the mark and the presence of the idea it prefigures”.
Michael Newman, “The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing”, in “The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act”, ( London and New York, Tate Publishing and the Drawing Center, 2003)
Drawing has always been where work starts for me, and where it is closest to thinking.
In 2005, I first made drawings that began with photographs. By a chemical process I started transferring ink from photocopies of photographs onto drawing paper. The representational precision that the vestige of the photograph brought contrasted with the action of the transfer process itself, (which has a pressure and a speed). I liked the accidental marks that occurred, they seemed useful in relation to what the drawing was about. For example, I made a transfer of an aerial photograph of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station. I wanted in the drawing to give some sense of the science of the place; to indicate the inconceivable speed of what happens inside those huge, still, silent buildings. So, the drawings fizz and crackle with lines and erasures that become available through the physicality of the transfer process.
I wondered if there were aspects of this drawing process that could be applied to painting. How this would go over the extended time of making a large painting.
The direct relationship to photography was, and remains, the province of the drawings I make. The paintings examine drawing without that external reference, they are concerned much more with process.
The precursors to these large paintings were two small drawings, made from photographs of houses under construction. The drawings were of the beams and rafters forming the structure of the roof. There was a repeating pattern of presence and absence of light in the drawings, (and in the photographs). I began drawing these out onto large canvases. Because I had used an oil and wax ground, I had to switch from a regular pencil to a grease pencil, or china marker. In the drawings form is made visible by the accumulation of marks, not by things having “an edge”. That’s what I wanted in the paintings – my experience of making paintings told me that the imposition of the figure on the ground in my work was the biggest problem. Now that figure could be realised slowly from many marks, and it could be erased – just as it could in drawing.
The marks in the paintings soon didn’t correspond to the pattern of marks in roof beams. This work is not concerned with representation, but rather, as I’ve said, with a consideration of a process. How does that manifest itself? What’s the meaning of that in the context of the paintings?
The drawing marks in the paintings essentially correspond to loose grids. The drawings are erased, (inevitably leaving traces), and the grids are re-imposed. Colour is mostly behind the white or off-white oil/wax ground. I am interested in experimenting with colour in this work, but need to put down the predominately white ground before drawing each time so that the marks are visible.
As Emma Dexter put in her essay in Vitamin D, “[drawing] is a locus for signs by which we map the physical world, but it is itself the pre-eminent sign of being. Therefore, drawing is not a window on the world, but a device for understanding our place within the universe”. That feels right to me. These paintings are not images of the world as my drawings are, but a kind of record of the experience of making.
Martin Pearce, April 2011 |
