Drawing Primarily: Creighton Michael
 a brief and annotated history of my relationship with drawing

Part One
from painting to sculpture by way of drawing 

“Drawing is primary, not preliminary.”

“For over two decades Creighton Michael has challenged conventional definitions of the basic categories of art: painting, sculpture and drawing. Through a process-driven approach built around the activity of mark making, Michael has sought to expand the possibilities of drawing while exploring its relationship to other forms of representation.” 

Max Weintraub, President & CEO. Allentown Art Museum.

Early influences and Interests

Tower of Babel, 1972-74. Ink on stitched ironing board cover, 54 x 12”.

The idea that drawing could be three-dimensional came from viewing the work of Lee Bontecou, realizing a stitch is a three-dimensional mark. This insight would direct the course of my practice for the next few decades. Her constructions, hybrid sculpture fusing two- and three-dimensional elements, were equally inspiring and directional. I also admired her “soot” drawings, which suggested another relationship between sculpture and drawing. In this case, the material for her drawing was a byproduct of her welding process. The idea for my emery cloth process drawings probably came from this connection.

My transition from painting to sculpture by way of drawing begins in 1976 with Melmoth, a series of intuitively directed drawings (advanced doodles with a figurative reference). These drawings coupled with inspiration from Lee Bontecou’s stitched sculpture would ignite my interest in drawing dimensionally. Orgma is my first sculpture series to explore this new idea. At this point, I begin working serially, so that I can take an idea through time.

My transition to “drawing” three dimensionally started by reversing the canvases that had previously been paintings. It is also when I begin to explore stitching as an incremental marking activity.

Experimenting with surplus or discarded materials such as animal skins, inner tube rubber, windshield glass, and umbrella nylons, helped changed my perception about drawing and processes.

Treating the wall plane as a sheet of paper, I explored relationships between ephemeral forms and the act of drawing using suspension, tension, fragility and non-traditional material

Intrigued by Joel Shapiro’s discovery in the early 1970’s of spatial engagement with objects of reduced scale, I created a series of small, intricately constructed sculptures that activated positions on the wall plane away from the reach and slightly out of the normal viewing range as a means of controlling a specific area.

Monkey Tails, a series of three-dimensional, inverted paintings, referenced the fanciful forms that dominated my earlier, Surrealist inspired paintings. These colorful wooden objects residing behind stitched canvas, agitate the surface, protrude from different sides or peek through the central openings teasing the viewer as to their identity. 

One of my fondest childhood memories was of the mechanical displays inhabiting the store front windows of jewelry stores during the holiday season. These mechanized puppet shows were an introduction to the potency of a pictorial narrative that later would be the genesis for work like Salute to Asparagus.

I'm Late combines the whimsical nature of current work like Tchotchke and Monkey Tails with a tableau reminiscent of de Chirico’s prevalent palazzo shadows and an implied narrative as seen in to Salute to Asparagus.

Minimal forms replaced fanciful ones, constructed from a combination of found and randomly cut plywood shapes, covered with materials such as bicycle inner tubes, umbrella nylon and scrap sheet metal.

Covering with stitched bicycle inner tubes gave way to layering sections of umbrella nylon, which were harvested off the streets of New York City after a storm. The exposed seams of the nylon sections referenced stitching activity without involving the actual process.

As a visual parallel to stitching, escutcheon pins were used to fasten metal sections.

For less weight and more flexibility, linear shapes were cut from plywood sheets, internally supported by wooden dowels and covered with stretched paper.

My sculpture process now mimicked drawing activity. 

Between 1984-1987, my process for making sculpture was so much like drawing that I made only intimate studies mostly related to traveling in Europe. Emery cloth, being more durable than sandpaper, was used to smooth the tips of wooden dowels before becoming part of a skeletal structure. Partially erased, the cloth’s surface became the repository of glue drops, acrylic smudges, along with the activities used in construction, thus documenting the sculpture’s development. By 1987 my sculpture process changed, discontinuing the need for emery cloth.

Two of the studies made during my travels in Europe.

Drawing (constructing) the form to be seen inside and out and from multiple angles simultaneously.

Bringing the viewer into the drawing process by puncturing the form and exposing various developmental stages. 

The materials and process used to create the patterned membranes for works such as Tep and series like Shell and Spiderwing would itself become a series of acrylic resist drawings titled, Trace, from 1995-1997.

Tor, 1988. Pencil on paper, six panels, each 17 x 14”; 16 x 70” installed.

To capture a sense of history, I created a drawing that were in sequential episodes. The inspiration occurred while traveling in Europe where I became aware of how history can be viewed through layers of process. The most common example was seen in the structure and condition of stone walls.

Alef is the first series in which the paper membrane is replaced with graphite drawing as a surface, making the sculpture a drawing within a drawing. Erasure is seen here as an act of physical removal and replacement.

Here amputation and substitution function as erasure.

Series such as Draughon and Harcourt examine drawing as a construction of multiple marking units.

A series of parallel concept drawings of the same name.

Moving to the Hudson Valley from New York City in 1990 had profound effects on my work. I returned to painting after a fourteen-year hiatus but continued to make sculpture as well as works on paper. Each of the disciplines would continue be informed by the dazzling array of natural patterns and structures, the mechanics of drawing, as well as the discoveries learned from various explorations.

In the Consort series, conifer branches are joined with cut plywood shapes to create forms whose existence seem momentary. Pairing a gesture with agitated marking activity helps to achieve this tenuous balance.

These two parallel concept drawing series examined emergence and structure as the related sculptures were being developed.   

Following the surface drawing that began with the Alef series, Conifer combines pine branches with plywood and stretched paper to simulate marking activity and erasure with resulting ghost images. 

Shadows not only aid in the spatial perception of an object but they also mimic the movements and motions occurring during drawing activity.

Double comparisons: marks and lines; thick and thin; static and fluid; graphite and ink.

With a commission from the Katonah Museum of Art for their sculpture garden, I began the use of maquettes with fabrication. The maquette for Vector 694 allows the viewer to arrange and rearrange the sculpture’s configuration creating a possibility for multiple outcomes. This added element of viewer participation will reemerge as a cornerstone in the development of dimensional drawing, specifically with the Grid series in 2002.

This limited group of pedestal sculptures, titled Narrative, incorporates as well as references the materials, processes and influences from my last twenty years of making sculpture. Five fifteen-panel concept drawings with the same title complement this chronicle of my sculpture practice.

From 1996-2002 I made no sculpture, focusing instead on developing my painting and works on paper.