Visual Handwriting

Above: 52.25 x 60 inches, crayon drawing. Below: 50 x 56 inches, acrylic painting.

These two pictures might look very different, but I see them as closely related. Though one is abstract and the other depicts a lilypond, they both arrange the space in similar ways. "Things" quite literally appear in the same positions, only in the first the things are discrete shapes and in the second they are subjects of the motif (water lilies, distant trees, different areas of the pond, etc.). Both pictures are approximately the same size, though the first is a drawing.

I made them at different times, was not thinking about the first, when I made the second. I was not aware of any relationship between them. And it's precisely this subliminal element that I find so intriguing about art making. You learn things about yourself, about the ways that your mind works, about how you organize things without even thinking about it.

I see one of the failings of the modern rejection of pictorial media as being this lost connection with the unconscious mind. Yes, it's true that one will find similarly telling repetitions in a video, or in someone's installation assemblage. But the act of making with the eyes and the hands -- it has a "je ne sais quoi." It is much more direct than the intermediate means so favored by artists trying to be trendy. Drawing and painting are more raw, less edited.

Drawing lets you use freedom as not other material does. The image goes from a mental impression to a gesture immediately.

And that makes all the difference.

I guess the next question I ask myself, upon seeing that the two images are definitely related, is: What does the abstract one mean?