New Art: (#7) Mechanical Man

Here’s the preliminary drawing I made.

It’s super late for me. Well, 3:30 in the morning. I had to finish this before going to sleep to keep pace with my self-imposed productivity schedule, which is, one image for three days (and it used to be one per day but the images got harder). Speaking of which, the drawing phase of this was easy and quick, but putting it in color was a long, arduous struggle.

This is the most abstract drawing or painting I’ve done in a long time, perhaps ever, and deliberately. Since starting this series I’ve become more interested in the power of line and how much can be communicated via drawing. And by drawing I don’t mean drawing realistically, but in other ways in which lines or forms suggest things rather than follow the rules of naturalism. There is nothing about this head that is remotely accurate, but it still reads as a head. There’s some Picasso, Francis Bacon, George Condo (who I learned about from another blogger named Jeff), and I suppose cartoons in this.

Notice that I kept the lines from the original drawing. That’s another new thing in this piece.

I’ve got two more I intend to do that are in this same general style, within the broader series. Part of my objective is to crack open new imagery, and abstraction is one of the tools. This drawing is in that zone between complete abstraction (or non representation) and representation. It’s a delicate balance that interests me.

I think I pulled it off, but it’s too unusual for me to really process how I feel about it. We’ll see how the next two come out.

Here’s the full series so far in a slide show.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

~ Ends