Thursday 9 November 2017

Rubbish Bin Of The Mind

(Black biro on a 139mm x 89mm postcard)

In recent weeks, I've been experimenting with a form of random drawing based on the way dreams start to form as you fall asleep. Some melt into full view, some can be like small screens that appear which grow larger, whilst others can take form from the cellular shapes you see when you close your eyes.
It's some of these aspects that I've been trying to transfer into my artwork. I found the most effective way to do that was to lightly shade the area and then overshade, time and again to allow shapes to randomly form, then try and make sense of them in a kind of self-imposed Rorschach Test. Sometimes turning the card this way and that until some kind of basis for the artwork establishes itself. The first of these that you see above was done with a biro, and the nature of the shading for it seemed to dominate the boxy shapes which formed.
Some would call the style Surrealist Automatism, and it's a perfect example of it which isn't as doubtful as others in the genre. But I prefer to call it "Dreamscaping" to separate it from that doubt, and also because I think it's a better name for it. I've drawn transmorphic images before, but they've been based on specific themes which I've started with, whereas these have none with no idea how they're going to turn out. This certainly makes them ideal as skav artworks, even if they do take much longer to complete.

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