Moving on to Something Bigger.

After breaking for the holidays, developing some marketing materials, and updating my website, it is good to be back at the easel. During the process of reviewing images of my last six months work, I realized that I needed to loosen up a bit. I took a break from nude figures and did a series of drawings based on images pulled from current events. I focused on being gestural and less planned, with little or no under drawing. While I was not satisfied the final drawings, I was pleased with the way that I was drawing.

Two aspects that have been in my mind for a while are scale and series. I work at a four foot square easel and have been looking for a way to produce bigger drawings, without having the paper flop over the edges and become creased and stained. One solution is to break the final image up into sections of manageable size. An interesting by-product of this process is that, by working on portions of a drawing, I am one more step removed from the final image, less likely to be focused on "getting it just right" and more attentive to the act of drawing itself.

The latest drawing will be composed of nine sections, each measuring 20 inches square, and will yield a final that is five feet square: my largest drawing in over 30 years! Here is the first panel, and subsequent posts will detail the progress.