Sunday, March 21, 2010

Is Horizontal Necessarily Landscape?

Long before the computer print settings of Portrait and Landscape, for vertical and horizontal respectively, modern art grappled with whether or not the orientation of an image carries a particular connotation. It is for this very reason that I often chose to work in the square format: preconceived connotation, if any, is eliminated. There will be those who look at this drawing and swear that I have done a landscape drawing, by the very nature of its horizontal aspect, as well as components that could be interpreted as earth, water, or sky.

When I began this drawing, nothing could have been farther from my mind. I was working in my current method of letting one stroke and color lead to the next. Additionally, I wanted to employ a technique that I had used in many of my figure drawings of scrubbing out the highlights with the eraser, and erasing areas so that only the barest hint of color stained the paper. Only when I finally stepped back and surveyed the result did it dawn on me that I may have drawn a landscape. For the record, it is titled Sunday Morning.