I have been making figurative drawings ever since the tail end of my degree, following a trip to the Whitney Biennial in 2004.
At art school, especially at college, I felt very discouraged from making anything which could be seen as illustrative. It wasn't really until I saw the work of artists such as Zak Smith, Barry Mcgee, Ernesto Caivano, Amy Cutler, that I decided to explore the other work that I had been doing alongside my abstract paintings. At this point I made the decision to step away from the canvas and I have never really felt any desire to go back.
Recently, I documented a lot of my old work from Uni and by doing so I started to think about where I am now in relation to that relatively short burst of work that I made for my degree show. The conclusion that I came to was that the work I am making now, although obviously more accomplished than those previous drawings, had lost an element of spontaneity and variety.
The reason for this I think is simple enough, that my drawings rely increasingly on sampled imagery which make it more and more difficult to sustain. The selection process for the images themselves is too laborious and too random, which was having a negative impact on the time that I have to actually make the drawings as well as impacting the critical ideas that underpinned them. In short, the selection method was too subjective and so was too broad to allow any exploration of ideas relating to a specific type of image. The slip in methodology can only harm the coherence of any body of work unless there are other factors which tie the images together. In the case of my drawings, it could be argued that the process did this job. Then you ask the question, how far does the subject affect the creation of a drawing and how much of it is actually reliant on process?
This is where abstraction comes back into consideration. If the subject is not absolutely necessary, then the obvious resolution is to dispense with it.
The conclusion that I have come to is that for the time being, I am going to return to exploring the potential in the application of process, without too much consideration for the end product. I have already been doing this in the automatic drawings, and I think this is where I am now heading.
