Part 1: Feeling, memory and imagination

Exercise 1: Expressive lines and marks  

I remember reading a similar drawing exercise in an art textbook years ago. Ever since then I have used this exploratory activity to expand my students' experience of the expressive power of mark making and media. The power of this exercise was once again brought back to me as I re-experienced emotions and then tried to impact the A4 paper with abstract evidence of these emotions. Where this exercise has extended me is in the fact that I had to find four different ways of expressing the same emotion, using differing media. 

Anger - The emotions that I evoked in order to express anger were so intense that my flimsy paper ripped from its taped moorings. The charcoal and conté crumbled in my hand, shattering across the countertop, and the inked stick gouged through the paper. After each panel, I found myself chuckling nervously. The intensity of the emotion was rather startling and seemingly out of place in what had been a restful day, without events to evoke the anger. Each image uses a heavy, unrestrained explosion of pure media. Jagged abrupt movements explode or spiral from a centrally located point. Adrenaline, power, uninhibited, potentially destructive and explosive are words which I associate with this experience.



Anger

Calm - Being fairly frenetic in nature calm is a real discipline for me. The forceful act of causing myself to still, allowing my breathing to regulate and my jangled nerves to de-stress. My marking making shows this act of slowing down and settling as my lines show an incline to the left and then slowly sink as they move horizontally across the page. I chose landscape for this format as it is more restful than portrait. My conté drawing, due to the heavy nature of the media, shows a rectangular block set in the lower section of the space. I find symmetrical, flat uncluttered shapes to be calming.



Calm

 

Sadness – Today we received the sad news that one of our friends has finally passed on, after a valiant fight against cancer. When sitting down to try to evoke the emotions of joy, I found I was not able to do so. I eventually took stock of what emotions were just beneath the surface today, and I realized that a deep throbbing sadness was lying like a slumbering dragon. While portraying sadness, the different media seemed to speak a different language. The conté evoked a feeling of a deep fissure break through the white of the paper. I loved the way the conté dust settled on the page – this is hard to capture in the photograph. The watercolor pencil gave me a sense of a whirlpool of emotions sucking me into its center – yet its outer limits swirls invasively into the boundaries of the surrounding spaces. It is robbing the energy from all in its vicinity. The charcoal made me think of blobby shapes which start thin at the apex, but become heavy and burdensome as it forms. The ink gave a sense of jagged feelings stabbing down into a melted puddle just above the baseline. Sadness does suck joy and life out of all in its wake.

Sadness

 

Joy – Joy is deeper seated a longer lasting than happiness. It leaves a bubbling sense of hope and vitality. It invigorates one, lending its expression to the flourishes of dance. It delights, twists and spirals upward and outward. It is infectious, evident to all.



Joy
 

Depression - I remember a time of extreme fatigue, which caused me to slip into a depressive state. At that time I completed this drawing in my sketchbook. It has some of the feelings of intense anger, but implodes in on itself. This is the drawing on the left.

I can't remember what the drawing on the right connected to, but it has the lines and feeling of the explosion of life, of renewed power and energy.





Sketchbook 2013