Category: Drawings

Wish You Were There

Based in Manchester, England, freelance artist, illustrator and designer, Rob Bailey has created this beautifully illustrated series of thirty landscape drawings – Wish You Were There. They were originally based on the blank address lines on the reverse of a postcard.

These minimal illustrations, measuring 30cm x 50cm, successfully present a reduction of visual elements without compromising the space and shape of the landscapes.

I think individually these wouldn’t produce the desired impact, but as a collection, would make for wonderful wall art.

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Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

New York’s Metropolitan Museum is hosting until the 28th of August the first retrospective of drawings by contemporary North-American artist Richard Serra, presenting a comprehensive overview of forty years of his drawing activity.

The exhibition presents the evolution of Serra’s drawings throughout the 1970’s (when he turned to black paintstick, a crayon comprised of a mixture of pigment, oil, and wax, creating heavily textured works, frequently very large in scale) to recent times.

The show culminates in site-specific, large-scale works that, despite not yet reaching the monumental size of his maxisculptures, still produces a spatial effect that is equally disorienting to the senses.

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Sol LeWitt at Gladstone Gallery

Gladstone Gallery recently presented an exhibition of large-scale installations by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), an American artist primarily linked to the Conceptual Art movement on the 1960s and ’70s, but his influence on minimalism is undeniable.

Of Wall Drawing #792 (conceived in 1995), Gladstone Gallery says:

It underscores LeWitt’s early interest in the intersections between art and architecture, which he distinguished and admired as a practice structured by predetermination, empirical logic, and collaboration.

What an absolutely gorgeous work.

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Lines

I think the most successful artists that work with sculpture and installation are those that address and involve their work in a highly considered conversation with space. In my opinion, there are few others who do this as well as Fred Sandback (1943-2003), an American artist who was renown for his strictly geometrical yarn sculptures, prints and drawings.

Writing about his first experiences using yarn, Sandback says:

The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire, was the outline of a rectangular solid—a 2 x 4 inch—lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me. I could assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it.

And on the use of straight lines:

The line is a means to mediate the quality or timbre of a situation, and has a structure which is quick and abstract and more or less thinkable, but it’s the tonality or, if you want, wholeness of a situation that is what I’m trying to get at.

Much like the work of Margaret Roberts, Sandback’s work proves how drastic an intervention of something as subtle as string can have on the perception of space.

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Spacial Drawings

Like Karen Schifano and Brent Hallard, Australian non-objective artist Margaret Roberts makes great use of tape in her installation work. Roberts is currently a lecturer in drawing at the National Art School in Sydney, and calls her installation works ‘spacial drawings’. Apart from tape, Roberts also uses acrylic and string in an attempt to interact with the environments she installs her work, in a highly restrained and minimal fashion.

While her work may look a little bit random, it is often based on precise measurements of existing structures that are in the same space. For example, with Artefact at Cockatoo Island, Roberts measured the space of 6 permanent mounted walls for works to be hung on, and represented that space in a different form: a piece of red wool that travels along the ground, and up and down from the ceiling. Her choice of red wool in the installation is striking in that it fades almost completely into the background. Of this work, Roberts says:

It is also a free standing sculpture outlined in yarn and supported by the floor and roof. It has a chameleon-like identity with the buildings, because, despite its scale, it is nearly invisible.

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Elastic Straps and Drawings

France-based artist Julien Mijangos executed the use of elastic straps quite brilliantly in his Elastic Straps and Drawings show at Sebastien Ricou Gallery.

Leaving the majority of the gallery empty, Julien used elastic straps sparingly and quite drastically; intersecting and manipulating the architecture of the building. Superb.

His drawings are great, too, by the way.

Photography by Jacques Theys.

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Naoto Fukasawa’s notebook

(This is the second of a series of two posts)

Examine a paper notebook. Mostly, it captures our dreams around ideas. As if doodling on a notepad would be the happiest activity on earth. Detour notepad global exhibition, including fifty Moleskine notebooks showcased the creative discipline of architects, designers, and artists in 2009. Japanese product designer, Naoto Fukasawa’s notebook was featured.

Mr. Fukasawa’s Moleskine notebook sketches show the main attributes of his creative philosophy: Simplicity, objectivity, and modesty. He believes we can live with fewer objects. Instead of creating new forms, he feels we should rethink how objects are used. Some of Mr. Fukasawa’s iconic work includes a wall-mounted MUJI CD player and a humidifier for ±0 (Plus Minus Zero).

“I want to design the unnoticeable.” says Naoto Fukasawa. And no more. Call it human simplicity.

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Landschaft Mit Haus

Moscow based corporate identity designer and freelance illustrator Maria Zaikina creates landscape art titled “Landschaft Mit Haus” (English: “Landscape With House”).

Maria is inspired by travelling around the world with her camera and Wim Wenders‘ movie Alice in the Cities, in which the mean character Alice is searching the cities of Germany for her grandmother, whose name and address Alice can’t remember. The subject of journey is very close to her she says.

“Melancholic contemplation during a journey is evoked by landscapes drifting past the window, where details merge into stripes and colours. The scenery floats past in front of our eyes, changing our mood or remaining as a background for thought, leaving perhaps just an implicit impression in the memory. Our eyes glimpse a house standing lonely amongst the fields.”

Each of the illustration of the series houses is like a stopped frame of a film.

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Klaus Stadt

The work of German artist Klaus Stadt is governed by the systematic thinking of the Constructionist movement.

But although Stadt is a constructivist, because he sculpts his work with just a few elements or colours, his work has a beautiful minimalist aesthetic.

His reliefs, drawings and plastiks/sculptures are consistently built from simple geometric shapes, such as squares or cubes. Through thoughtful placement in the canvas or space, Stadt creates a sense of movement and depth.

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The Daily Figure

Every day, illustrator Kyle T. Webster posts a sketch he’s made on his aptly-named blog The Daily Figure.

The subjects of his drawings are often female figures, which he elegantly brings to life with just a few lines,  trusting the Gestalt principles.

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