In the air

in_the_air_web

Liquid Pencil is a medium I keep returning to. It has an unpredictability that I like, surprises emerge that I can take further. This drawing is on Yupo paper, which has a plastic-like surface, not at all appealing for regular drawing as it is slippery and resists most media, but Liquid Pencil pools and smears in ways that I can use by drawing into with an 8B graphite pencil. I used an old, poor-quality paintbrush to apply the Liquid Pencil. Hairs were coming out and dragged behind adding to the unpredictability of the resultant forms. I twisted and flopped the brush in an uncontrolled way. The only level of control that I imposed was to have the marks diminishing as they came down the sheet. My favourite marks were those that were very light, they offer more opportunities for working into.

The resultant forms are reminiscent of animals, birds, insects, underwater creatures, but none are identifiable with anything we recognise.

Within our world are many other worlds, tiny, incomprehensible, outside our imagining. In a cloud of dust particles may be creatures and lives we cannot know. The creatures in my drawing come from these other worlds – I do not know what they are, but they have a beauty of their own, a history we can create for them but never know the truth of. The truth is what we make, and everyone who sees them will have a different truth.

The paper is 50 x 40 cm. Below are detail images – black and white images on Yupo are very difficult to photograph well, so I apologise for the uneven tonal qualities.

In_the_air_detail3webIn_the_air_detail4webIn_the_air_detail7webIn_the_air_detail8web

Author: anna warren portfolio

I draw, I paint, I am a printmaker. Always searching for the interesting detail in the world around me.

17 thoughts

  5. In one word – ethereal. I do like the title of your post as the page of floating shapes makes me think of dust particles seen in a beam of light. Interesting that you made the shapes smaller and lighter as you went down the page. Equally this could be reversed with the heavier particles lower and the lighter ones floating higher (light as air).
    Despite the random nature of the mark-making there is still a strong sense of design here and definite diagonal direction giving a unity to the whole.

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    1. I think this is another work that could go up or down (or even sideways). As I was working on it I constantly turned it, as each object required. Dust particles in a beam of light was EXACTLY what I was thinking about, and that gave rise to wondering about just what is inside those tiny, almost invisible scraps. (I’m sure a scientist could tell me that it is nothing like my drawings, but that doesn’t matter, I have moved out of the realm of reality!) Isn’t ethereal a nice word?

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