Shore (Tide) - 2/7/17


The word for this week was "Shore (Tide)." I drew the mountains by Azusa (part of the San Gabriel mountains). I didn't want to include a seascape in the drawing to more explicitly link it back to the word for this week, but in thinking about what a shore is (the boundary between the land and sea), I wanted to accentuate borders/boundaries between elements in the drawing. I was also thinking about our discussion about the relationship between linear and painterly qualities in art -- and how the first can be related to perspicuity, and the second maybe more related to atmosphere and mood. My understanding is that this distinction in terms of the way a painting gets created/formed can be political; for example, Anselm Kiefer's rejection of the linear in his 1996 painting Bohemia Lies by the Sea. Kiefer didn't use paint brushes, etc. for this and his muscular application of the paint in a really dense, disorderly way can be related to a rejection of morality and what is rational. (Did I get that right?) My drawing is not meant to be political, but I did find the conversation interesting, especially in light of the dark times that we find ourselves in today. In my drawing I wanted to explore a less clear composition that has a patterned effect kind of like the Kiefer landscape (but not dark/wayward as Arthur Danto suggests it is). My drawing this week is mixed media again -- I used marker, water color, and colored pencil.

Anselm Kiefer, Bohemia Lies by the Sea (1996)

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