Marker sketches · drawn from life
Practice
425 sheets in marker30 sec to 20 min a posesince 2017
One practice: a person, a sheet of paper, markers and a clock. These are the places it happens; one is a proposal for a year.
How a sheet is made
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1
A person
Someone is there: a model on a stand, a sitter at a table, a dancer in rehearsal. Nothing is drawn from a photograph.
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2
A clock
The pose is set before it starts: between 30 sec and 20 min. When it ends, the sheet is finished.
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3
Markers
Marker on paper. It does not come off: a line that was wrong stays, with the better one beside it.
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4
The sheet
It is dated, numbered in its night and kept in the order drawn. Each one is the original.
Where it happens
The nights →Gesture Drawing
The body reduced to movement, balance, rhythm and line.
Short poses limit what can be seen and force attention toward the essential. The drawings keep the instability of the pose and are one of the clearest expressions of working without erasers.
Read →Portrait Booth
Portraiture as encounter.
Visitors, residents, neighbours and passers-by sit for short portrait sessions. Each portrait is both an artwork and a record of a meeting; over time the booth becomes an archive of the people around a place.
Read →Live Drawing
Drawing events while they are happening.
Musicians, dancers, theatre, readings, fashion, rehearsals and openings, drawn alongside the event rather than reconstructed afterwards. A way of working with artists from other disciplines without asking them to become visual art.
Read →A Year in Residence
Proposal · twelve monthsOne year, one medium, one subject.
Twelve months in a shared live/work building, spent on one thing: marker drawings from life of the people who live and work there, and of the ones who come through. Several hundred dated sheets, a portrait of the building, and a wall of the year.