Text Based Drawing

The works that I'm happiest making are deeply personal, and this semester I've been fighting that comfort and attempting to make works outside my comfort zone, unsuccessfully. Creating art with text isn't something that I normally do, especially not with the assignment guidelines and implications. I was much happier with less freedom in this assignment, as I've realized that this semester I seem to be struggling with setting my own guidelines than I normally am. This doesn't discourage me permanently, I'm familiar with waves of success and failure, but my art is certainly on a down swing.
I began with researching artists. Christopher Wool, and Ed Rucha stirred my imagination but I couldn't land on one single idea. After my first page of notes, I'd decided on a scene of surgeons during an operation with text reading "better luck next time". After getting a second opinion that seemed less than confident in the content, I went back to my research... For several days. Flipped through pages and pages of what seemed like an eternity of looking at artists who had mastered using text in witty and thought provoking ways, and I was still drawing a blank. Attempting to use text in a way that didn't illustrate my work or make either the text or the image less effective because of one of the two components proved to be far more difficult than I imagined.
During this project, the suicide of a friend and the unexpected death of my grandfather fueled anxiety and nightmares that further my artist block, so I made myself sit down and draw anything to take my mind somewhere else. This forced me to look at my media options for the text based project, and made my mind up on what medium I would be working with. For the small piece, I began with a lightly spray painted background, a dark haphazard layer of India ink marker, a layer of chalk pencil, grey pastel, and then conte crayon for highlights, and a final sweep of dark India ink marker for the darkest darks.

 

I considered replicating this to a larger piece and turning it in for the text based project, but that didn't seem to fit my emotional needs at the time, so I decided to go with something more anxiety provoking. I contacted another student within the art department to ask about using a still from a performance piece she had created titled "Auto Cannibalism"; a video of her biting the skin around her fingernails and her lips. The video made me wildly uncomfortable each time I viewed it, and I loved that about her work and it always inspired me. 

I began work on the drawing. I spray painted a thin layer of black spray paint as I had for the smaller drawing, and got to work on the India ink. So far so good. 

Putting down lines that were simultaneously planned out and careless seemed to put a visual image to the panic I was feeling within my life. It was highly therapeutic to begin resolve this piece and my anxiety at once. 

I hit another wall, but a different kind. Anatomy has always been something that comes somewhat easily to me, but something wasn't quite right about my drawing. I finally concluded that because my peer in the video has dimples and femininely beautiful features, the still that I chose didn't convey the anxiousness that I perceived. I had already seen the content of the video, which gave me enough context to draw that conclusion from my drawing as well, but that would not be true for my audience. 

I consulted my peers and another professor about my options. A professor suggested that I alter her anatomy slightly instead of trying to draw so closely to what I was seeing in the picture. That had never really occurred to me, but allowed me to separate the idea that I wanted to depict from the still that I'd chosen, and I began to make more progress. adjusting the corners of the mouth completely changed the meaning of the drawing. 

Adding the text was the final step. I chose "I.O.U." because of the guilt I'd been dealing with when mourning my friend and grandfather. Time is something that you have a lot of, until you don't. I deeply regretted the plans that had only been half made and were never seen through. IOU references all the "I miss you"s, and "we should get together soon!"s that I'd said to those people, and the image depicts the mental weight and regret that it carries.