This first piece is called 'Darcy's Moon Ladder', and is a mixture of charcoal and resin on paper. For the lower section of the piece, containing the loose ladder structure, I adopted a more frantic and child-like approach to drawing, which I found quite primal and liberating.
Charcoal and resin are an interesting mix to work with
- depending upon the order and how you apply them, it can sometimes work like a
drawing, and at times the process can take on a more painterly aspect. The
resin lends the charcoal a depth that you wouldn't necessarily get with a
traditional charcoal sketch. That isn't immediately obvious in this images so
I've included a photo at the bottom of the post that shows a cluster of
drawings, where the sheen is more clearly evident. I'm a big fan of very dark
(as in not much light) works (a great example being the early prints of someone
like of Ana Maria Pacheco)
where I, as a viewer, am forced to search out the details - so I am looking
forward to pushing this process further, and producing even denser, darker
pieces.
Another great thing about working with resin and charcoal on paper is
that, until it sets, the resin is continually shifting so it's possible to
scrape into it, creating new highlighted areas and textures. Although, because
of this temporary state of entropy, you have to keep an eye on, and rework certain
areas until the resin dries, as the line work you do is constantly wanting to
melt away.
This second piece is the more experimental of the three I'm showing here. It even retains a fragment one of the disintegrated Nitril gloves that I was wearing when I created it - disintegrated because towards the end I'd abandoned drawing with charcoal or brush, and was frantically scraping the charcoaly resin mix with my gloved finger tips. Even before I picked up a charcoal stick or resin brush I screwed up and then unfurled the paper (stapling back together any tears) so as to give myself a nicely creased, non-flat surface to work on. I eventually plan to work on more screwed up pieces that will be rigid from much thicker coatings of resin.
Although simpler, and less worker, I am really happy with this third
piece, which retains whole fragments of charcoal sticks that broke up under
the heavy-handed drawing process. One of the discoveries that I made, and an effect
that I greatly like, is the evidence of the small pieces of charcoal and
powdered charcoal trapped in the resin, slowly travelling down the paper.
