Seven Sins IV : ink drawings (2022)

The following step was an artistically 'logical' one but also inspired by the analytical logic: since the perlaborated (durcharbeitet) painted versions did not give convincing results, I had to continue the process. In this case, it meant evolving from the worked through versions to renderings of their further reduction, reconnecting with a size and matter more evident to me: A3 ink drawings. I would copy-reduce each half of the A2 paintings on a copy machine and recombine these halves into seven black and white photocopies of the paintings. Using these seven copies on the lightbox, I would then make new ink drawings, necessarily discarding color and textural information, but also certain details and interpreting painterly aspects into inking technique. These A3 ink drawings are rough and bold but have a strong and vivid quality to them that felt right toward the treated topics. Some of the more 'precise' inking effects remind me of the work I did for the post-comic Hoe was de toekomst vandaag.
Reducing and reinterpreting the oil paintings led to significant intensification of certain motifs and textural fields within the scenes. It also led to new findings (often exaggerated) concerning the use of ink and brush, such as variations in dry line patterns as an ersatz of or a derivative for other textures within the oil paintings. Funnily, manually translating the A2 color paintings into A3 black and white drawings corresponded to another 'momentum' in art history when graphical techniques gathered new significance with the rise of printmaking and the increasing dissemination of reproductions - to the extent of the contemporary situation in which we generally 'know' works of art by their reproductions in books and online only. Reducing size, color and matter made me make more 'graphic' interpretations, in litteral and figural sense: coarser, rougher, bolder, more explicit. Aspects of repetitions and codification (e.g., lines and dot patterns) emerge as the content simplifies. Independently of the artistic quality of these ink drawings, a clear 'gain' with these reductions is their vivacity, due to a cartoony forcefulness and baroque quite unfit for contemporary painting (to my taste), but also because of the re-duction: leading back to...

Seven Sins V:  ink reductions and co.

Academic research & education