Jottings

COMMENTS BY ARTISTS WHO TOOK PART IN THE EXPERIMENT

KAREN HOWSE:

It feels like a privilege to take part in someone else's place. I like the Bachelard quote about a room being "a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining".
In making the drawing I aimed to suggest the atmosphere and feel of the place as well as the physical properties. I chose to draw on gessoed surfaces rather than smooth paper. This was an attempt to evoke the context of the room, like drawing on walls. Everything seems separate in the description, in the written word, but I knew from describing my own room everything is really inter-meshed. It was a challenge to show some of this overlapping in the making of the drawing.
The project was also about absence and not knowing. I had not met my collaborator Rosemary or been in her room. This absence became a felt presence, the room became present in the description and Rosemary became more present as I explored the room through the drawing.
The description of the room being a place for tea stayed with me and worked on my subconscious until I found myself making a box to make the drawing on, a tea box. The fact the room was also described as a 'container' reinforced this. The description included the view from the container and this guided me to look at the tension between inside and outside, light and dark.
I found myself using real things from my own life to furnish the room, like the garden tools. Sometimes I had to draw on memory eg: for the field and oak wood beyond. Sometimes things became stylized and symbolic or fragmented, an impression of reality like entering a dream. Drawing became a search for common ground.
Taking part in this I felt I had to be true to the words written. To give respect to the place and my collaborator's relationship with that place. To find the place through another's description. The words being the bridge. The drawing being the tool for exploration and discovery. The drawing is a personal perspective based on another's perspective! The project lent me a small window into a stranger's life. By making the drawing and spending time with the description, listening to it, I felt a connection.


RICHARD SNYDER:
 

Here are words about my visual responses to Janet Passhel’s description of the room. The collage technique answered the problems I had making my drawing.

The house is as clear as the panes in their steel frames:

At first I took that as the term “Window Panes” which is high quality LSD. I tried to maintain the translucent description in my drawing. After three false starts, I finally found the window panes and central circle as a fractured structure to work with.

One room if for eating, sleeping, singing, sex and accounting:

This line made me imagine a very compressed drawing space where many disparate activities are forced to take place. The circular nature of Janet’s room description (like a poem) demanded forcing the clashing elements to interact in space accounted for.

There is a desk, a music stand, a thin brown mattress and a white rug, across which to navigate:

I had trouble with this line. I found some old hand written sheet music in my file cabinet. I may have written it, or maybe someone else made it. Anyway, it’s a kind of drawing. I combined the brown mattress and the desk in two different panes. There is plenty of white for the rug so I didn’t address that specifically.

spillage and regret:

This is my favorite line because my day to day work deals with just that. Dripping images that go outside of the boundaries like precocious children aren’t supposed to do.

A child, bowl and fork:

I really tried to draw a child with a fork, but it took way too much time. I found a stock image that fit the bill. I defend my use of the stock image because everyone else uses terms like “mash up” and “sampling” and they get away with it.

Yellow dishes, hair-dye, old newspapers and crayon drawings of the moon:

Old newspapers are a no-brainer. I collect them and use them all the time. I enjoyed making crayon drawings of the moon, and I may introduce them into my regular work. Hair dye put me off because I am bald. Yellow dishes became disks that talked to the central circle and flat responses to the moons.

A sinuous pot-bound tree mimics the form of antlers of a young buck, pregnant red tips so tender:

Pot bound? My answer was to place the tender suckling red antlers of the young buck next to the blue image of ecstasy.

This is no room for a human:

This line confused me, and makes me want to make another drawing.

Conclusion:

This project was literally a Rhinoceros in the room of my studio. I was forced to work outside of my normal thinking about visual depiction. This beast disrupted and mangled my studio. Its shit is still piled up in there and I finally shoveled it into place. Perhaps I will compost it and cherish it another day.

Drawing is paper and the marks made on it. Here is my list of materials: 100% Rag papers, Color Aid paper, bond paper, The New York Observer, The Village Voice, The New York Times, gesso, graphite, charcoal, acrylic paint, pastels, black Sumi ink, sepia ink, white crayon, Sharpie, ink jet and acrylic resin.