I recently made a few “line drawings” that are a break from the last time I made a drawings like these. In 2015, I finished a series of drawings that were based on the troop movements and skirmishes of the largest 10 battles of the Civil War. The first of those drawings I made was the biggest drawing and battle: Gettysburg. Then I did Antietam (which was also a big drawing and the bloodiest day of the Civil War.) Those two drawings were about six feet high, while others I made ranged from three to five feet. I started the Civil War group after I had completed some line drawing doodles. Someone observed that my doodles looked better when I just kept going on them. More time and complexity made for a better drawings. But after I made five or six of those on paper ( in the 12-inch range) I stopped because I wasn’t satisfied with having little concept behind them. Then I remembered something my dad had told me about the Civil War when I was a teenager. Many of those battles were won by attrition, meaning, they just kept putting more time and troops into the battles and hoped the other side would give up first. So I combined my process of throwing a lot of time and lines at my work with the idea of victory by attrition, and created drawings that trace the movements of troops in those battles.
The drawings I did a few months ago are abstract for the sake of design in a modernist sense. I have revisited Bauhaus ideas in the last few years and I wanted to make something decorative but also touches on a few of my main interests in my studio work: emerging forms by a result of my process, and exploring ways to create depth on the two-dimensional plane. The last image in this group is a woodcut print from four pieces of wood. I was inspired by a Titian print for this one and by exploring how to create waves of smoke with the printed line.
