Today i’ve been working on two drawings with the same subject in preparation for the work I will do in Schiedam. The first, which I finished today, I have been working on over the past 3 weeks, the second i started and finished today. Both drawings are a continuation of my ‘One Minute’ series that I produced in 2008, and are based on 60 seconds of video that I filmed at a fantastic bookshop in Porto last month.
The Lello bookshop (google it – it’s amazing) has the most amazing architecture, with a staircase that contorts and twists back on itself. It was only because there was a rule on no filming that i made some sketches which led to a colleague of mine suggesting that I make another ‘one minute’ drawing based on the view from the top balcony. I returned and asked permission to make a 60 second film – the owner told me to be quick and now I have these drawings.
The first drawing followed the heavily worked fashion that the other drawings in the series did, and within it I started exploring my use of hand cut stencils to create graphite powder shaded areas – it has resulted in a drawing somewhere between the others in the series and my more recent PWWF drawing. I felt that this first drawing focused to heavily on the architecture and the context of the space and not enough on the lines documenting the movement of the people through the space.
Today’s drawing has just used stencils and graphite for the background, and I’ve tried to concentrate more on the lines – I’m not entirely convinced by it, but I think that the more restrained use of detail in the backgrounds will be something to draw from when I work in Schiedam next week.
