How It Started, How it's Going

 

A few years ago I started making line drawings of the sprouted seeds I photographed. I wasn't sure that I was trying to produce finished work. It was something that I could do while my kids were playing and it felt like it was helping me see better. 

I drew beans too but I was most often drawn to images of corn.

I worked on these drawings for a couple of months. The first drawings felt busy so I worked to distill the images to more and more simplified forms. I would often cross section my sketch book page into four equal parts and work with one image of a sprouted seed at a time. I started out by drawing almost every line or change in the surface that I saw and from there I drew progressively simpler images until all the spaces were full and I felt like only the most important lines were used to communicate the image. It was a really fun exercise. I even bought a stack of frames for my favorite drawings. 

Then one day . . . 

                            I set my sketchbook on the shelf under my work bench.

                                                                                                                    And it sat there for 5 years.

                                                                                                                            

I don't know why.

Recently, I dug into the now piled high shelves in my studio in a fit of pandemic cleaning and pulled out the sketchbook and rediscovered loads of these line drawings. I was so happy it almost felt like a reunion. I stopped what I was doing and spent a lot of time looking them over again. I even cut the sheets up and put some of them in the frames I purchased.

Shortly after that day I was on a long drive, taking in the countryside, and thinking about my work. In the tranquil space of my car the images in the line drawings united with the landscape. I started to see the lines in the corn drawings in the same way that I was seeing the rows in the fields. 

I decided to experiment with adding color. 

I loved these colored images, but wavered on whether these vibrant colored pencil drawings were a finished product or another step forward. I decided that it was time to use some of the barn wood that I had been sitting on for a few years. I hadn't been able to use it yet because I had been waiting for the right idea to come. 

Three Cornscapes

Oil Pastel on Barn Wood

Three separate panels 9 x 12 x 7/8" 

March 2021