This is why I recently fell in love with my fiancee all over again:
It started with a talk I had with Martyna, about the boxes I made for last crit, where I wrapped the stretcher bars in contact paper. She was talking about how she felt that they are objects, which I wasn't so sure about. To me, an object exists in 3 dimensions, and these boxes are meant to be hung on a wall and viewed the way a painting would be, which makes me want to think about them in a 2 dimensional format.
So I was explaining this to Jonathan when I got home, it evolved into a discussion about what drawing is vs what painting is. Jonathan is not an artist, but I tell you what, after living with me all this time, he knows his stuff. We had a battle of wits about this that I found very engaging, talking about calligraphy (writing with ink - is it painting because the ink is fluid, or is it drawing because its line based), and working with watercolor pencil, or oil bars.........(okay, I need to interupt myself here and talk about how pumped I was about oil bars last summer. They are oil paint in a stick form, so you can draw with it. Winsor Newton made the ones I have, and they were pricey, but they opened up all kinds of possibilites for me. I had a really hard time tracking them down, which is why I mention them).
So, back to my kitchen, where Jonathan and I are talking about drawing vs painting while making dinner. After we ate, I was looking through a book I have called VITAMIN D: New Perspectives in Drawing, which is a survey about contemporary artists who draw - and drawing is defined as linear based mark making, so people who work with calligraphy, watercolor pencils and oil bars can be included, so ha! I had the book open to the page about Nedko Solakov. One of the examples of his work that was included in the book was a photo of an installation of 36 framed images, suspended from the ceiling in a cluster so that they were all floating in front of each other, but still close enough to the wall that you could not walk behind them. I'm hoping to present my work on Tuesday in a similar fashion, but I doubt it will be as successful as his was (Theres only so much time in a day and only so much money in my pocket).
So, Jonathan looks over my shoulder at the photo on the page, and starts talking about how its not drawing, its a sculpture! - and how can it even be his artwork if he's got a framed dollar bill as one of his 36 images? And I shoot back, if I decided to hang my paintings in a similar fashion over the couch, would they stop being paintings? I wasn't able to defend the dollar bill as his work of art, but its marks are linearly based, so I argued that it was a drawing. We talked about installations being a way of displaying work in a way that has a dialog with its surroundings, since in the caption under the photo, it says "dimensions variable". And I dont think we were ever able to decide if performance art was fine art or theatre.
I don't care if it makes me a nerd, dork, geek, whatever, I enjoyed having that debate with Jonathan, and am grateful to discover that he really does listen to me when I get really excited about my artmaking and puts up with me enough to learn about the things that I'm interested in. <3
I've had fun talks about what makes drawing and painting different. and one thing i came to is that i feel painting is something where you add the lights ontop of the darks,and i feel drawing is something where your always taking the lights away by adding the darks,so drawing reduces the light parts,and painting adds the light parts.I know thats not a final definition and alot of projects could contradict that,but thats one difference i felt was pretty common. I feel you can draw with any material,liquid or solid.
ReplyDeletewhen i work in charcoal, for example (drawing darks on top of lights), i use my eraser as a drawing tool to carve lights out of dark places. i also like to draw with white charcoal / pastels on top of it. and when i paint in oils, my primer coat is white, and i try to add darks in, so that i dont ruin the lights (i work a lot with washes, and once it gets dark, its impossible to make it light again).
ReplyDeletei guess your definition of painting vs. drawing doesn't work for the way i work? idk. it makes me think of when people tell me, "wow, youre a great painter, will you draw me a tattoo?" because to me, my paintings are about large patches of color, which dont translate well into the linear nature of tattoos.
I feel you on the tattoo thing, i used to get that too.use of the eraser still counts in my loose definition of drawing because it is being used to uncover the lights below,and not adding lights on top,using white charcoal however doesnt fit within my definition of drawing,and i was trained to feel that a charcoal drawing like that is closer to painting than drawing, i think mainly not by materials,but by the action of it because your smearing pigment on a surface,as i was told,but thinking of it that way blurs the lines even more,and could cause contradictions.I know theres common definitions of what is categorized as what,but i think artists,critics,gallery workers,and teachers' opinions probably vary due to their opinion,practice,or purpose, and thats fun to me.
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