Admittedly i am only on the second of these ‘spaghetti’ drawings but I have been thinking about the issue of repeating the same subject matter again and again. It shouldn’t present a problem in a sense, as many other artists do precisely this, Jane Harris being a case in point.
Writing about Jane Harris, Tom Lubbock in the Independent (2005) says “Restless-minded as I am, I find it quite hard to come to terms with the way that some artists confine themselves. How can they be content to do basically the same thing, over and over again?”
Sometimes I cast about for “something to draw”; worrying that perhaps I should try this or that or do more “observational drawing”. To quote Simon Morely in an article also about Jane Harris (Art Monthly 1994), “The problem of subject-matter still persists as the most important dilemma for artists.”
Not having to worry about subject matter provides a kind of relief. This is not to say that the issue of subject matter is thereby wholly resolved, for the subject is not simply the thing apparently represented – in other words Harris’s work isn’t just ‘about’ ovals and ellipses – but at least, for me at the moment, I don’t have to fret about what to draw.
