I intended to have and thought I had included this drawing among the eight I posted the other day. This is another one of the drawings for the dummy print. It is a portion of a much larger sketch I did while talking on the phone. Yes, I was doodling. This is way back at pretty much the beginning of my output. At the time, everything I made had to be run through at least two processes: a process of discovery and a process of copying. Oo it sounds so rich and suggestive when I say it that way. To me anyway. I redrew this portion once more and clarified it, calling it Winged Antaeus. That was a third process I’ve tried to ditch since: everything I made had to be further made by an obvious allusion to classical Greek mythology. Classical Greek Mythology which may or may not have been in olden times attached to a common store of images with which artists might knowingly address their audiences. The common store of images is still there, of course, it’s just that rough old name by which each image was called have mostly been forgotten. At least, I think they’re mostly forgotten. Is there any way to hurry the process? Artists are better off having to create meanings that must be felt rather than merely identified and checked against a list.
But to return to the question of process. In this case the process of discovery was the doodling. And the copying — oh so mysterious to say — was done before I drew. Oo, deep! Drawing as copying when there is no original. I’m not in the mood to explore such an idea right now (my last post is clever enough to last me awhile) but maybe somebody should explore it if it hasn’t already been explored. Which is a big if.
Okay, you can sit back in your seats: I’m ready to share the whole truth. My process for this and many pieces at the time was this divination I’ve spoken of before. I’d soaked paper towels in watercolor, rolled them into a ball and then rolled the balls onto white sheets of paper. I took these sheets to the corner drug store (which was the only place one could find a copy machine at the time: at the time they were known as Xerox machines.) and enlarged them until I saw something interesting.
I thought I saw something interesting in this:
I attached a piece of heavy tracing paper to the top of it and the next time I was on the phone, I kept half my attention on the conversation and half on the ambiguous shapes the photocopied watercolors had created.
Now, at this size this doodle is a muddy mess. The original doodle for Winged Antaeus is dead center on the right edge of the drawing. She is nicely lit up I think. Some people can’t see her at all. She is a nude who spreads her wings to take flight though her legs are encased in earth. Poetical.
The rest of the page is full of other winged people, children climbing up vertical beds, people suspended and crucified, and couples embracing. What I guess is the main subject of the drawing is visible in the detail below. A seated figure tugs at a noose around his neck while a couple enjoys some wanton time beside him. What always fascinates me about this kind of drawing is that, while it is inspired by random marks, the many individual passages are united by a common theme. The theme was in no way pre-meditated. More like precognitive.
I liked the “lit up” quality of W.A. so much I scanned it again at full size. I had completely forgotten about the green smears. That was some kind of accident that happened years later. I don’t remember what happened, but I think it works.
To view this post in light of the previous one regarding Seurat’s marks, I can say phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny — my own course as an artist has repeated the course of Modernism — where first I threw off storytelling to let my rendering of object’s be my meaning, then I abandoned representing objects altogether. The image is really the only bit of Winged Antaeus I still admire as drawing as opposed to idea.
Still paddling down the stream of recent Art History I’ve since abandoned my previous abandonment and have happily returned to storytelling.
