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Time is but the clockwork of a frightened heart

Time is but the clockwork of a frightened heart

Drawing on acrylic glass panes. It’s been about 6 months that these black and white, sometimes gold drawings keep evolving, taking up a lot of my time recently. Sometimes I almost despair of them because I don’t know where they are going, I don’t understand them the way I would like to and quite honestly they feel like a well disguised vice. Then again I feel they are too beautiful, too blank to be allowed to take up so much of my time. They started, simple enough, as a way to find back from painting to drawing for an illustration project. At first it was plain black marker on white paper. I had chosen marker because it allowed me not to think “small”, not to think “precious”, and as usual I was drawn to the ready availability and comparative cheapness of the technique which seems like a quality in itself to me. Now I am still using marker, but the creatures have freed themselves from paper, have migrated to glass panes, they cast shadows on walls and mirrors, they congregate to create 3 dimensional theatrical settings, and I still don’t know where this may lead me and why I still draw these night after night (instead of now taking up ink and the fine pens and engage in the illustration projects I had been meaning to prepare for). The saying “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans” seem to perfectly apply here. Some small insignificant but very persistent kind of original thought seems to defend its way against my larger ideas. Art is what happens when you are busy making other plans …

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shadows rising, three-dimensional drawings on acrylic panes, not quite dancing – yet

After drawing meditation for 12 nights I wasn’t ready to let go just yet. Supposedly it was George Bernard Shaw who said that every fool can undertake fasting but only a wise can break it properly – and it might as well be applied to drawing meditation. Certainly I belong into the category of the fool, not that I had doubts about this before. The mind readily plows through grooves already established – and so the last few weeks after drawing meditation ended I have still been drawing most every night – and feeling kind of empty if I didn’t for once. I am not implying that drawing practice is a vice, but it is certainly not the result of an admirable discipline either that I have been sticking to it.

Certainly the nighttime indulges my overactive mind and allows the shadows – kept at bay during the day with the sober diet my legal enterprises as an attorney  offers – the nighttime allows these shadow a freedom that seems acceptable only as I catch them in some way. Paper seemed good enough during drawing meditation – though my paintings usually find spaces on raw, un-stretched materials like coffee sacks and sail cloths, wood and metal. Maybe it was just a question of time until the drawings too revolted against paper as a traditional medium.

Also, I was looking for the third dimension of my drawing beyond the obvious addition of ink to paper which – of course – makes for a third dimensions if only one cares to look close enough. But how to make the shadows dance in the room? How allow them to leave the paper and let them emerge into space as line and shadow? The answer was simple, even quite elegant, if by no means original. For the last ten nights I have been drawing on acrylic glass panes, 12 x 25 cm each. Each one of the panes is support for one protagonist in this emerging theater of rising shadows. I am planning to hang them by nylon strings and place a light in front of them to project their moving shadows on a light surface behind. For now, I am not done drawing and I would like to try out adding larger acrylic glass panes. During the next few days I will post drawings on acylic glass panes in no specific order. Multiple images have required the title of “brain on fire – no heart” and that is what I will most likely call this series. Hope you enjoy it.

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12 nights – more drawings …

 

 

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I guess my illustrations to some degree could either be read as a successful attempt to ban those thoughts that are accosting us when we try to engage in meditation by giving them form, or as a document of failure because all those thoughts that in meditation are to be let through were instead allowed to manifest themselves in a permanent form. One of the amazing aspects of art is surely that is demonstrates that our mind is always, ALWAYS, generating images and thoughts unless we dedicate some time to some sensual deprivation and allow the void to fill the crowded space of our anxious minds. As an artist I live by generating images, not necessarily by letting go of them. And yet there is a peaceful, non-goal oriented quality to these drawings and I can conjure up the spirit of those nights just by looking at them.

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12 nights – samples

End of December I observe a yearly time of night meditation, roughly in sync with some old traditions but not necessarily bound by them. To keep awake 12 nights in a row and in quiet meditation is much easier when the mind is allowed an activity – and drawing is my very personal way of quieting my mind. Night after night I produced two to three drawings, taking a photo at the end of each night, recording the creatures of fancy accumulating … As a side-effect I switched back from painting to drawing to prepare an illustrated history of some sorts that I am starting these days.