Completed the second week of school…I’m teaching Drawing 1 and 2. We are studying line, inner and outer contour, the edges of things.
And I’m reading the 6th edition of Drawing, A Contemporary Approach. It talks about drawing as extending both the mind and the spirit by promoting a deep respect for looking and thinking. Drawing allows for a heightened awareness of the visual world, the authors say. Drawing is complex, energetic and consequently exciting. I see myself as someone who draws. Though I work on canvas and some of my tools are paintbrushes…I draw with them.
In my studio I am completing the final composition for my upcoming solo, only a few weeks away now. The last 2 works I completed are the last 2 works for this exhibition. They also represent a beginning. A change has occurred with this series. One I have been patiently awaiting. Looking and thinking, thinking and looking, at another level. I wanted to express it. I wanted the evolution to show itself.
Notes
Final image begins with drawing tools. Water soluble graphite. Water soluble crayon. Powdered graphite. Draw shapes. Rework. Powder graphite rubbed into negative spaces of lower half of composition…rich silvery quality. Enhanced with light application of an egg tempera pewter . Casein paints into positive spaces. Detail with fine brushes using egg tempera.
Is work complete? No. Need finer detail…with other materials. What other material?
Figurative. Abstract. Scientific renderings. Esoteric philosophy.
Content is formulated at a deeper level. Materials are taken to another level. Work is larger. Imagination utilized. Reference material important. Weeks have passed, months have passed.
Look, think….think, look.
Observe, distinguish, relate.
Draw and paint.
Monica Aissa Martinez 
Thank you, I have a Google alert for everything egg tempera andyour site came up. Your work is beautiful.
Just writing my dad, who is a painter. He has a painters’s block so I sent him excerpts from Robert Motherwell’s article from 1944, “Motherwell, the Modern Painter”. He describes our dilemma as artists of distractions internally and externally and the difficulties we have shaking them off like a dog shakes water off when he emerges from water. I like what you say about Draw paint observe…Thanks for the lift!
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you’re welcome.
a google alert for everything egg tempera….very cool.
those words come from the book i mention in the post.
i teach drawing, and this is part of what i teach. i have other ways of saying it…but this is very direct, isn’t it?
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