Drawing to me is the most primal practice. As humans we’ve done it since we figured out burnt wood could make marks on rocks. As a child I’d spend hours drawing robots, monsters, dinosaurs, so my first experience of art, of making anything at all, was through drawing.
On thinking about it recently, I noticed that the principle reason I drew was to manifest the things in my imagination, . Tto bring into the world, those things that really only exist in my mind. I think this is both beautiful and natural, but also set me up for the idea that a picture needed to be fully formed in my mind before I touched pencil to paper…something I would eventually have to unlearn for my own sanity.
And there’s lots of historic precedence for this. Many old masters had a process that used drawing in their ideative and development phases of both painting and sculpture. In painting, they often brought drawing all the way to a full-size cartoon that they would then transfer onto the support for the final piece. Drawing, in this sense, is where composition is developed and worked out before it’s committed to the “real” artwork.
I believe in inspiration. However, when it arrives it must find us working.
I usually define drawing for myself as “dry on dry”, which is to say that both the mark-making device and the support on which I’m working are dry. This makes it possible for drawing to be the most immediate method of image making, requiring minimal preparatory work and no time for drying or curing afterwards or the need to set aside enough time to use up paint. I can literally pick up and drop drawing on a moment’s notice.
In the early 90s, I got into a really productive practice of “journal drawing” in the evenings after work. I’d sit down with a stack of paper and an HB pencil and just start drawing without any real intention other than making marks. As well as being an amazing source of spontaneous ideation, it introduced me to the relationship between the body and art making, and was a first hint that perhaps the idea of a picture doesn’t need to be fully formed in my head before I start work. Finally, I found it deeply relaxing, even meditative to see and feel my materials. In the case of drawing, it was the feeling of the graphite ablating itself across the texture of the page.
Before this, I’d thought of artmaking as a strictly intellectual (maybe intuitive) process – almost entirely of the mind with the act of making relegated to “realizing a vision”. My journal drawings were how I realized that the act of drawing could be its own thing and required nothing before or after to enrich my life. By the end of this incredibly productive period in my life, I was left with boxes and boxes of drawings which I did nothing with but which I also didn’t want to throw away. You can see some of them on this site, published as “echoes”.
If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
I’ve recently started up this “Journal Drawing” practice again and find that the more I do it, the more I learn about myself, my art, and the world as a whole. It’s during these sessions that I allow myself the freedom to explore not just the visual world, but the embodiment of this act of creativity. I love the feeling of pencil on paper. I become aware of how and when my fingers, wrist, elbow and even shoulder get involved in the process.
Recent work
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Past work
Recent work
Recent posts
Past work
Paintings, Prints, and Drawings
I gratefully acknowledge that the place I work is situated on the unceded lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən People, known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations, who have hunted and gathered here for thousands of years, and whose relationship to the land continues to this day.