It’s been a couple months since I’ve written about my artwork on this blog. It’s not for lack of material. If anything, I’ve been drawing more than usual, but since the project I’ve just finished is a commission and its intended recipients haven’t seen it yet, I can’t share any of it right now.
After a brief hiatus though, I started sketching for myself again, so today I’ll share what I’ve been drawing.
A few weeks ago Brandon came home from work with a handful of oak leaves he’d found near the collections building where he works. He’s been finding things for me to sketch for years, and he thought I’d like the variation in color and texture. While I probably wouldn’t have collected these particular specimens for drying or pressing (I tend to favor red leaves), I did think they’d make for an interesting sketching challenge.
I originally planned on drawing one or two of the leaves, but over the course of the week I ended up sketching all of them. Initially I started out drawing the leaves at a diagonal, but soon switched to a vertical stance that resembled a portrait. I liked the new format so much, in fact, that I redrew the first leaf so that it resembled the rest.
For these sketches, I challenged myself to work in a much looser style. I didn’t do any preliminary pencil sketches, and made use of splatter, scumbling, and other brushwork to both define the texture of the leaves and highlight the materiality of the paint itself. Treating the acrylic paint like watercolor, I approached color transitions by saturating the paper with water and then adding paint to it, letting the colors bleed into one another. Rather than shy away from the messiness of paint, I embraced it, taking the lessons I learned from my 2019 experiments and exploring the opportunities for abstraction. Only at the very end did I let myself use a pen, and then only for minor details.
The results are some of the loosest, most painterly sketches I’ve done in a while. Instead of hiding my brushwork, I made a point of showing my process, letting the textures remain raw. I let the washes, splatter, and even finger painting remain visible. And yet, my parents thought they were photographs when I showed them pictures. I was aiming for overt abstraction, but they’re also more naturalistic than what I’m usually capable of producing.
I’m excited with the results of these sketches. After more or less working on commissions from July through October, it’s good to draw for myself again. Especially with so much going on in my life right now between dissertating, curating, and other obligations, it’s important to have this maintain this space for personal sketching. I’m also content with leaving them as sketches for the time being. While I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to enlarge them into bigger watercolor paintings, I’m also okay with never expanding them beyond sketchbook studies. For all my aspirations for creating bigger projects, I’ve also accepted that the sketchbook is a medium unto itself. And if these leaves have shown me anything, it’s that in terms of experimentation, the sketchbook is the medium that lets me be my most uninhibited.