James Faure Walker: Studio Chairs

  • ©,

Artist(s):


Title:


    Studio Chairs

Exhibition:


Creation Year:


    2002

Medium:


    Giclée iris print

Size:


    24 in x 34 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.

    In Studio Chairs, there are two chairs, one a small model in cardboard. The “drawing” is laid around the floor, the picture surface, and I suppose the overall atmosphere is of uncertainty: the confusion and mess that is often the necessary prelude to a spell of creative activity.