The people in Global Circle 3 are:
Parul Gupta, India
Jim Dawkins US
Marta Kot US
Eli McBett has recently left the Circle, unfortunately.
For this page I am pasting images down the page, with first ones at the top, and where possible I am also inserting the iterations of indiv drawings next to each other as well. Brew.
One of Jim’s first drawings, in the book he originated:
….which then went to Marta and then Eli.
Jim Dawkins, Global Circle 3:
Love the images of gdc5 (Global Drawing Circle 5) you just posted. Attached is one from my sketchbook. My work is fairly ‘touchy feely’ – meat and bones or steak and potato stuff. I struggle with the metacognitive rabbit hole of drawing, such as the path the gdc5 drawings seem to blaze…making marks or drawing or sketching is more memory interpretation for me, a sort of expressive impressionism if you will, but not in the vein of Impressionism itself. I’m still working on what I do and why I do it. Perhaps it is just as simple as it looks.
And:
I know there is some kind of bridge or link between my drawing and my thinking, and I can verbalize it on occasion. But that link isn’t a visual one just yet…if that makes sense. Expressing that link in a graphic manner eludes me. It is kind of like drawing the wind: I know it’s there, I just can’t put pen to paper in a manner that describes the phenomenon appropriately. Last year in NY I saw plenty of our group who seemed to have managed their way into that particular dimension of drawn thought expression. Those were moments when I totally felt a disassociation with my thinking and my drawing, or at least how to represent what I knew to be true in the space that separates (or joins) the two.
Parul’s drawings, sent to Jim:
30th March
Parul,
Here are a few shots of one of your drawings I interpreted in more three dimensional form. The intersecting lines call to mind one of those dusty, empty intersections in a desert town in the southwest United States. After pulling up the buildings, the cut-outs had their own life, as if they were hollow shadows of ghost buildings – a faded 1,000 foot view of a bygone road map.
I would like to know more about your lines, both front and back of the page. Clearly there is something running through your mind as you lay down those lines. The “front” page lines are crisp but have a weight, digging into the paper and creating a raised line on the “back” page. However, on the back side, the line is covered by a furry charcoal-like texture as if created by snapping a chalk line on the page. The contrast is significant.
Have a great week!
Jim
– what Jim did:
31st March
Dear Jim,
Lovely surprise to see your interpretation. The side where white & black lines are embossed is MY “front” side. Never made this clear before because i wanted to see others way of seeing. Have attached the actual images now.
The idea is to understand space and visual weight of color. i usually work around the physical lines (corners of walls, ceilings, floor, pillars etc.) of the built environments, not just with the visual sense but also with tactile sense. Thus the feeling of touch equally becomes important apart from seeing, for the work to manifest itself completely. with these drawings, I am trying to inhabit the space of the paper which is already marked by proportionate edges (sides of the paper). considering the edges to be walls/ boundaries of the two dimensional space, how do I respond to those edges and how do i inhabit that space. I am also inquiring the visual weight of light and dark. white line merges with base in contrast to black, responding to the attention shadows get and again questioning the existence of shadows – with the geometry it creates and subtlety divided the physical space.
What is most interesting is the response to straight lines through architectural buildings when i never mentioned the reference before. This analogy was also made by Tim Ingold in his book “lines – a brief history”, last chapter – when the lines becomes straight.
Parul
9th April:
Parul,
Attached are some of my ‘habitations’ in your drawings…Hope you enjoy the interpretations! The drawings are on their way to Marta (yesterday).
Jim
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13th April:
Hi Jim,
Good Evening (here in India)
Would like to share my thoughts on particularly last image where you have bend the paper according to the drawing. It looks like model for some architectural building incorporating directions and if the directions on it are not there, it might just look like a sculpture. And thus, questioning the association between drawing and sculpture and contemplating on the idea of ‘objecthood’ in relation to drawing. This is also interesting to understand how drawing has become pathway to sculpture formation, something for me to think about more as i am already working on this co relation.
Best
parul
13th April
Good afternoon Parul (lunch here in Florida)! Interesting comments on the bent paper. When I saw and felt the score lines on this particular piece of paper, I had the urge to fold the paper along those lines. I created one additional score to give the paper some additional bend. I don’t think I had any thoughts as to a movement up or down with the resulting ‘object’, but just followed my reaction and added some notes to explain (loosely) my thoughts. I could have turned it upside down just as easily and made notes for descending rather than ascending – didn’t think about that until right now. I believe my own predilections to drawing revolve around form. Perhaps that is my architectural education and professional experience as well as my pursuits teaching at the university level. I find myself starting with cubes when I doodle. I start with cubes when I critique students’ design work (interior design students). It seems to be some kind of fundamental building block (literally and figuratively) for my thinking. It is a form and mass that I know well, so it is ‘friendly’ when I start with it. Even drawings and sketches that don’t start with a cube somehow are explained later relative to a cube. I have a thought = I draw a cube. Maybe it helps give form to other ideas and concepts that develop. That’s a bit simplistic and perhaps wide open for examination, but it seems to make sense right now. So, bending the paper with the implied ‘guidelines’ I interpreted in your score lines seemed the right thing to do.
Jim
Images in the book Jim began:
Eli wrote:
I send you here my interventions on the 23 pastel drawings sent by Marta Kot. They belong in fact to the 6 years old boy Sasha.You do not see the drawings, but mostly the rear of them (they came folded individually, so I mostly intervened in the front empty page) on which I worked, generating a consequential world on a opposite dimension.The drawings being made from a child, allowed me to explore a different media. First approach, I decided to number and bind them, so I started sawing the central lines of each of them. I painted numbers even as I did not see the small ones drawed by Marta on the back soon…This connected me with my early childhood though, where at a Montessori creche we learned to create drawings by sawing on paper. My main experience in this case has been to transfer the details of the drawings to my own other dimension, catching single forms or scribbles and sawing them freely, to create totally random abstracts, interesting as surprising. The inside drawing would instead produce a tactile quite invisible surface on the chosen small parts. They are almost unnoticeable, as you can see with the figure n 13 where I saw the gray inside of the red flower. As further intervention I used guache to intervene on most drawings to number them on the front and, like on figure n 19 (which is not sawn), to add some coloring filling to the actual drawings: another pleasant childhood experience. I would like to thank you Sasha – through Marta – to have given me the opportunity to intervene on his work and regress to childhood, as I am sure I will work on sawing on paper and front/back conception again.
Eli’s drawings:
