Drawing with ink and brush is more like ice skating than it is like walking. The lack of friction frees the movement to express the bliss of bodily momentum, making great looping explorations of space. Smaller strokes can zigzag or oscillate. If you think of the large flowing lines as low frequencies and the small vibrating ones as high frequencies, there’s a kind of musical sense of harmony and timbre going on in these ink brush drawings.
Because of my regular practice of life drawing, all the lines I make have the curves of organic forms and the energy of living movement.
Sometimes Asian calligraphy shows this kind of loose, dashing, impulsive stroke. The drawing above is inspired by looking at people dancing. The simple brush strokes suggest figures but communicate their energy while only suggesting their form. The drawing below uses the same simplified strokes but is drawn more slowly and composed more consciously. Here you can make out many figures and fragments of figures. Some of the brush strokes may belong to more than one figure.
Combining the musical abstract approach and the calligraphic figurative approach produces more ambiguous images. I often like to keep the figurative elements of the drawing from getting too specific. Something that can be read in more than one way is more evocative.
Every vertebrate is a snake at its core. Sometimes in movement we can experience a hint of that slippery freedom.
Smooth and constant motion is inertia, the same as stillness. We experience movement only through changes in direction or through acceleration or deceleration. As in every aspect of experience, change is fundamental.
All of these ink drawings were made at GreenSpace in Queens, New York, during their Cross Pollination events, open sessions where the studio is made available for free improvised music, dance and art. The drawings are infused with the energy of the music I’m hearing or the moving bodies I’m watching, or from my own movement, as I tend to alternate dancing and drawing. The movment is too quick to allow for the kind of figure drawing I practice regularly in timed sessions with models, so these drawings usually go more abstract.
The energy flows in from the music and dance, and manifests in the movement of the hand and brush. Another factor, one that becomes increasingly dominant as the page becomes filled with marks, is an intuitive sense of composition, a feel for dynamic asymmetrical balance in the plane of the drawing, balance of light and heavy, simple and complex.
The elemental forces of the world are constantly moving and changing. We move to be a part of the process, and we draw to trace its fleeting passage in a lasting form. Cycles within cycles, changes upon changes, make a world, a life, a body of work.
All of these drawings are ink on paper, 18″ x 24″. Other drawings from the Cross Pollination sessions can be seen in these posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.