Drawings
Drawing for me has always been a creative process in its own right. While I have done my share of observational drawing, in itself it has never been satisfying beyond the technical means needed to render form in line or tone, or to create perspective depth. My favoured medium has always been pencil on paper. In my early days I joined the ranks of the Tascists in using calligraphic marks on a surface as something in their own right – efforts described as ‘intellectual doodling’ by a competition judge. I never saw them like that. For me, those msrks were personal, extensions of handwriting, calligraphic identity markers.
The recent collection of drawings have more to do with the beginnings of photography as exploited by Degas in the involuntary way that figures can be cut off by the frame and the way that a storyboard for a film is limited in narrative to a select few frames. Each of these drawings uses the ideas that the horizontal is the narrative and the vertical, the metaphor where events are recorded. In some ways, memories of city streets and malls where people framed, bisected and overlapped by architecture, come into play.
The Port Adelaide suite of drawings recall a time before the old jetties were removed completely. When I first saw the remains in 1994 there was very little left beyond the odd weathered and rotted pile. My intention with these drawings was to present them as monuments to a past wherein the piles had withstood 200 years of use and now sat proudly in the river defying time.
All drawings in this suite are framed using UV laminated glass to eliminate reflection nd refraction.