BSA215, drawing statement and end of semester portfolio, 17 June, 2016

Working in the media of black conte’ crayon, white colour pencil, and grey water-soluble pencil, my portfolio is comprised of eighteen pieces selected from my first semester of Drawing 215. 

Tutored work:  As an animation student and as a professionally practicing costume technician, I work to create and refine characters.  The drawings completed during class seek to further my understanding of composition and the dynamics of the figure on the page.  While we did not have many opportunities to work with a dedicated model this semester, the classmates that did pose were interesting subjects.  The focus of in-class work is on quickly capturing form, gesture and contrast so I work with grey newsprint and black conte’. 

 Independent and sequence work:  Inspired by the illustrator Edward Gorey’s book The Gashlycrumb Tinies, I took a series of photographs of 11-year-old schoolgirls lined up on the ornate wooden staircase of an old Victorian boarding house.  In the four studies based on those photos, the children fade in and out of the light thrown out by the stained glass window that dominates the scene.  In the largest drawing, grey water-soluble pencil on heavy white paper, the strokes of the pencil recreate the typically heavy woodwork of the period and lead the eye to the window in the upper right hand corner.  The children are rendered in slight lines with little shading; they appear as both paper-thin apparitions and dark spectres when exposed to the light.  In two of the smaller drawings, white colour pencil on black paper, the children’s ghastly white faces float out of the darkness and detail is scantly rendered.   I treated them like a series of panels in a graphic novel: the scene begins to spin and the apex of the composition, the window, ceases to form a central column and becomes a diagonal anchored to the far right of the page.  In the final image, grey water-soluble pencil on grey paper, the children cluster en masse on the staircase as one ominous figure lurks on the upper staircase, her features “blown out” by the harsh light from the window.  At no point is the viewer left with a feeling of ease or charmed by childhood; their position in life, like on the staircase, is one of being in the middle and on the cusp of going somewhere, or nowhere.