James Faure Walker: Drawn Trees

  • ©,

Artist(s):


Title:


    Drawn Trees

Exhibition:


Creation Year:


    2002

Medium:


    Giclée iris print

Size:


    25 in x 32 in

Category:


Artist Statement:


    Lately, I have been thinking more and more about drawing, and some of these ideas are becoming part of the work I make. I draw the same motif (a tree, a chair) switching between a brush and a Wacom tablet, and play around with the differences. For someone like me, who has both a painting studio and a digital studio, drawing with line is one of the options that bridge the gap between media. I still don’t know the right term to use, because though I usually end up with a giclée iris print, I do not feel I am a digital printmaker, a computer artist, or a digital painter. If I identify this work as “drawing,” and my larger paintings, which use similar techniques, as “drawn paintings,” then I am getting closer. What excites me is the continuing convergence between painting, photography, and the digital. The processes, techniques, and, of course, software can be so rich and surprising I sometimes feel like standing back and letting the pictures make themselves without any interference from me.

    I have been using prefabricated components, sections of cardboard that I paint and build into temporary constructions before photographing. When I reassemble these drawings, which are overlaid with digital drawing, I may introduce quite arbitrarily an unrelated photo, a street scene. This may hold the attention and subordinate the rest of the picture, but it can also lift the mood of a picture and activate latent contrasts.

    Drawn Trees reflects on the interplay between the drawn and painted motif, which is more or less repeated, not by copy and paste but by my autopilot memory. Gouache drawings, trees painted on boxes, are photographed, and pattern brush drawings (sampled from the gouache) all coalesce in the same space.