Drawing a Photograph

graphite & watercolour/30x20cm

Another 'blank' sheet of paper - folded & lightly crumpled to provide its surface with texture & a wealth of incidental detail for the purposes of contemplation & active study - serves as the obvious subject for this drawing, but not as the actual thing to be represented, which image-object, rather, is an A4 print of a photograph of the original object, taken in early morning light.

The drawing as processed, then, is thus a representation of a representation, a re-mediation (possessed of Bracewell's "dense aesthetic values", perhaps?), & appears to betray its photographic origins in the depth of its tonal values, the particular intensity of, which clearly differ from those of the object itself as observed empirically, from life.

However, as ever, the evidence of the drawing process is intended to be explicit, as a mark-making endeavour, the resulting image being the cumulative effect of such, allowing the drawing, as image as well as object, to display an autonomous, aesthetic distance from source.

Soundtrack:


Belle & Sebastian 'Tigermilk' & 'If You're Feeling Sinister'
Throwing Muses 'In a Doghouse' disc 1
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds 'Best of'
Lambchop 'OH(Ohio)'