Let’s begin with looking at lines that look easy, comfortable, flow because of the line drawn before them. The drawing is a Meditation Drawing Attempting Perfection, that’s what the title reads. Meditation, repeated a rhythm, start at one end of the paper--end at the other. I got this. But attempting perfection? So the lines need to be perfect, the same line, each line? Or perfection of the meditation, to breath and relax while drawing the line?
Let’s have a conversation. If you make a line across a sheet of paper and add another mimicking the line above, and you continue this but after several lines you notice your line is now a new line, creating a new shape. What do you do? Are you going to continue? The artist stated “What I love about this piece is the poetry behind it. If I were perfect and this drawing was done perfectly, it would not be interesting. It is my imperfections in the drawing that create interest in this piece and it’s the imperfections in who we are that make us human." Let’s try it. Take out a sheet of paper and a drawing tool. Check-in with yourself, how do you feel about the process of the Meditation Drawing Attempting Perfection?
This drawing you might call a long line drawing since it looks like only a few lines were used to create the whole drawing. You can make out a few cartoon-like faces with big noses and several more faces in the background, it looks crowded. The artist only needed a few lines to draw the eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and a shirt collar with expression. Because of the free-spirited lines swirling about, it makes me believe I can hear their conversations, well part of the dialogue, since I think it's loud in the room.
Let’s have a conversation. Lines are not all equal. A busy line can be expressive and imply there are sounds or noises in the artwork. Let’s imagine that this artwork is the cover of a book. What would the dialogue sound like?
We are looking at a sculpture, a three-dimensional artwork. It’s made of metal and wood. The metal is holding the framed wooden logs together creating the shape of a rhombus. But how does this artwork fit in with the theme of lines? One of my favorite lines in nature is the lines in a tree trunk. You can count the circles, the rings, to find the age of the tree. In certain zones, a tree will grow a ring each year and the newest line will be adjacent, closest, to the bark. The ring pattern builds up, reflecting the age of the tree. But what makes these tree logs intriguing, are the imperfections, the cracks in the wood. The cracks may be small but they create the tension of the artwork, a core idea of the sculpture.
Let’s have a conversation. The cracks in the wood logs look like hands on a clock, telling time, or Studying Time which is the tile of the artwork. The knots, the darker circles, become a marking, like a personal identity. They distinguish one from another and tell another part of the history of the tree. An interesting exercise is to draw this sculpture including the cracks in all their directions and not to leave out the blemishes on the wooden surface.