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

Part 4 A
exploring the digital landscape 

With the guidance of Paninat Roper, one of the interns that stayed and became my studio assistant, I returned to video, which had changed from analog to digital. This time I was documenting my marking activity, which would lead to using other digital devices such as a scanner. Quickly, I learned that a scanner could capture not only current marking activity, but also past episodes as well. This opened to new directions for self-discovery, expanding my practice in ways never imaged.

By 2010, my exploration of drawing through and by digital means would follow varied but related routes shown either in video, or as drawing panels, or prints.

Three other series that used a motion capture process with debris from my sculpture practice as drawing tools were Phantasm, Idiom and Lace. They along with other explorations in digital drawing produced as prints on paper or plexiglass continues in “part four-b: exploring the digital landscape” 

Captured on video, the redistribution of marking episodes are interpreted as an act of drawing.

Initially video was used to capture and record marking activity. It was subsequently employed as the lighting source for the installations such as Filament and Drawing Curtain. Realizing its potential for the further exploration of marking systems including those which incorporate sound, I produced two drawing videos, Shadows Trilogy and Double Dutch: The Wedding Feast. 

An interaction between light and line, Filament combines the sequenced light simulations of Bill FitzGibbons with Creighton Michael’s fiber drawing creating an environment, in which the viewer encounters the tangible nature and intimacy of drawing. As the primary light source, a collaged video of both artists captured in various drawing activities, Filament fuses the viewer’s participation in real time with the artists’ historical marking pursuits.

Tapestry * was created with a patchwork of video stills from Filament** and became the lighting source for The Drawing Curtain. The flickering shadows from the video projection animate the space while  suggesting a metamorphic time lapse.

ShadowsTrilogy, was a two-year remote collaboration with a graphic artist and two animators. The piece reveals the limitations of communication, which leads to a sense of isolation often followed by despair. In ShadowsSpeak, one hears someone typing repeatedly; Can you see what I am saying? as the shadows of someone signing the words, Can you hear what I am saying? The typewriter’s cadence paired with the rhythmic passing of shadows further helps in creating a space that is as curious as it is anxiety provoking.

 Shadows Trilogy (Shadows Speak, Shadows Weave, Shadows Past), 2014. Sarah Campbell, Production Manager; animators: Mitchell Williamson and Yan Zhang. Premier screening at the Ho Tung Visualization Lab, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York.

DOUBLE DUTCH: The Wedding Feast video still selection

Double Dutch: The Wedding Feast, 2015. Stills. Jennifer Macdonald, hand-drawn animation and editor; David Biedenbender, composer (original musical score). Premiered at the Allentown Art Museum exhibition PAST/PRESENT: Conversations Across Time, February 22–May 17, 2015. Collection: Allentown Art Museum.

Transdimensional Motifs is a category of digital patterns used in my practice to add context, dimension, and history. Morphic patterns occur by digitally redrawing images of current and previous work from several disciplines with varying degrees of visual connection. Produced by accident, corrupted image patterns happened when I used an obsolete application to open a raw image file. Instead of an image, the application generated a barcode like pattern, which I interpreted as the computer’s “drawing” equivalent to an image. Known later by its abbreviation c.i.p., these algorithmic like patterns would not only expand my marking vocabulary but also give additional definition and associations to my work.

Examples of morphic patterns

Examples of corrupted image patterns or c.i.p.

By using a combination of deferred and direct marking episodes within a single work, Backchannel begins to expand my visual language. Adding digital transfer* as collage to my process, these drawing panels become an album of personal marking history with residue from my sculpture process and motifs digitally distilled from earlier three–dimensional drawing installations. Backchannel, while employing much of the conceptual and tangible information acquired from earlier explorations within drawing’s jurisdiction, continues to pursue novel pathways of discovery with unique mixtures of analog and digital techniques. 

In the summer of 2003, I met Patti Brady while teaching acrylic painting at the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado. A few years later, her book Rethinking Acrylic: Radical Solutions for Exploiting the World’s Most Versatile Medium, with its information on “image transfers,” opened exciting new approaches for mark-making, including the ability to combine marking episodes from various time periods, creating new contexts for interpretation.

Illuminated is the first series that combines translucent layers of past marking activity with trans-dimensional motifs to create a fluid integration of text and image. Expanding on a deferred marking process that originated in the Ply series, Illuminated would set the stage for further exploration with such drawing series as Aperture, Syntax, Screenplay, Orb, Vernacular, and Chronicle.

Aperture is a series of drawing studies that uses digital transfer as both process and content. With this process, I am able recycle my studio history while expanding a visual vocabulary with unseen connections to my current work. Using morphic patterns as marking units, each drawing is constructed layer upon layer, producing a flicker-like effect reminiscent of early cinema. 

 Syntax was the first panel drawing to incorporate c.i.p. as the primary marking element.

Vernacular, a multi-panel deferred drawing series, continues the processes and image content used in Orb and Screenplay.

Phases is a multi-panel, deferred drawing series following the technique of digital transfer used earlier in the Aperture series. In this case the patterns are derived from details of two pen and ink drawings, Rhapsody 1700 and Rhapsody 1800.

Babble is a pattern visualization of competing conversations. By deconstructing sentences into phrases that are transformed visually into linear structures, then arranged into fluctuating motifs layered over previous marking, Babble attempts to capture the energy of multiple conversations occurring simultaneously.

My exploration of drawing over the last four decades began with the relationship of mark to pattern followed by a marking episode (drawing activity completed during a measured time segment) as a mark to pattern as a mark to collectively construct a new pattern. My accidental discovery of a marking system, which I titled c.i.p., has added another element to my vocabulary. Its impact and that of future discoveries will continue my inquiry into the relationships that exist between mark and pattern, gesture and language.