How would you describe your portray observe? Do you begin with an thought, with analysis, and with a line drawing that finally turns into your accomplished course of? Your methodology of accentuating the drawn strains in a few of your work is sort of a magic trick that provides refined however highly effective emphasis. Who would guess that pencil shavings would play an element (and what quantity pencil)?
There’s by no means a single path. For smaller works or drawings, typically it’s so simple as transferring the pencil till a picture surfaces. However with bigger works, the method has been extra assorted for the previous few months. I’ve been within the early levels of planning an upcoming exhibition at Charleston in Lewes, which has come from years of curiosity within the historical past of the Bloomsbury Group, however for the time being it exists solely in my head as a foggy assortment of colours and the concept the work ought to really feel like motion by a busy family. Concurrently, I’m making ready a portray for Frieze London based mostly on a smaller drawing that I simply completed and really feel might be explored additional in a bigger format. I’m additionally sketching a digital draft for panorama portray that can present on the Kemper Museum this fall. All this to say, every work or physique of labor has totally different wants when it comes to its beginnings and development. Some take painfully lengthy to sketch, some are drafted by hand, others digitally, and a few really feel like a puzzle that does not match till completely explored. The one fixed with bigger works is that there’s usually a protracted interval of drafting, projecting, nudging strains, and revisions earlier than I begin bodily engaged on a bit.
So far as materials, line is all the time a key component in my work, however its therapy varies with every portray. If a bit must really feel tender, I go away areas of the linen uncovered or flippantly dyed, as within the patterning in Nancy in Blue. For visually layered items, the place I wish to current two photographs as an overlay and create the sense of coexisting ideas, I’ll construct up the strains by sifting wooden from my pencil shavings and mixing it right into a paint that’s then sculpted off the canvas with the intention to create distance between the lined picture and the painted background, as in The Shell and Magritte’s Door. It’s necessary to me that my course of displays the essence of every work, and over time, my methods have advanced to help this.
How lengthy does this take, or do you perhaps work on a number of work that turn into a bigger opus?
Usually, I’ll work on a physique of labor collectively so that every piece informs the others. There could be one which acts as an preliminary catalyst, however it’s all the time rapidly adopted by works that I really feel need to exist in tandem. It’s like the primary piece operates as a query, and the next works are solutions, however on the similar time, they’re all iterations attempting to say the identical thought or temper in a distinct tone. For instance, the primary work for an upcoming present at Perrotin was Margrethe Summer season, a portray of a wide-eyed girl sitting at a desk, tongue out, and able to obtain a raspberry from an equally broad eyed fowl. The work displays each my childhood in Michigan and an idyllic reference to nature, although there’s all the time an underpinning of feverish fear. The sketches for the next works construct on this within the type of repeating imagery: nature represented as shadows and silhouettes; doorways or home windows as portals between the world of the inside and nature; and spirals symbolizing each lack of management, inside security, and retreat, like a shell.