Tuesday, December 14, 2010

MOBY-DICK, Page 475

Title: On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles...

8.25 inches by 11 inches
charcoal and ink on wallpaper sample
December 4, 2010

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8 comments:

  1. steveDecember 15, 2010 at 6:10 AM

    Oh wow, love the simple suggestiveness of female form here, intermingled with the green leaves. Your work is always amazing.

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  2. Sean McGurrDecember 15, 2010 at 11:39 AM

    Very nice stuff. What is included in the original wallpaper sample, the leaves?

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  3. TitusDecember 15, 2010 at 11:57 AM

    Beautiful. Sometimes your work seems such a departure...

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  4. Matt KishDecember 15, 2010 at 12:57 PM

    Many thanks, Steve, that means a great deal to me. I really enjoyed thinking about this piece in a very different way. Generally, I am much too intimidated to try anything this minimal and nearly abstract. But I was unhappy with all of the other ideas for this piece that were coming and going in my head. In an almost unbelievable stroke of luck, I just grabbed the wallpaper sample, drew a few sweeping curves, and the piece was just about done. It was almost euphoric.

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  5. Matt KishDecember 15, 2010 at 12:57 PM

    Sean, the only elements I added are in black. All of the leaves and color are part of the sample.

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  6. Matt KishDecember 15, 2010 at 12:59 PM

    Titus, this really was something different for me. One of the many things that has been so thrilling for me about this project has been freeing myself from any rules or styles and simply doing whatever I want visually. I am taking everything I have ever seen throughout my life and simply channeling those influences into these pieces. Perhaps it's some kind of quest to find my own true inner voice. I don't know yet. But it has been strange and wildly enjoyable to search this way.

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  7. Dan NelsonJanuary 2, 2011 at 3:07 PM

    Yea, this is one of those images out of left field--from unexpected angles of attack--that happen more and more as this project goes on, Matt. In one way, it's freeing yourself of constraints, but in another way it's probably the result of the discipline of the daily drawing. It's maybe not boredom so much as your ideas getting depleted steadily until you get to the point where your mind is forced to go somewhere new (to you). Like Zappa said "Necessity is the mother of invention, but boredom is the mother of creation."

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  8. Matt KishJanuary 3, 2011 at 11:00 AM

    It's been a weird thing, Dan. This whole project started with me basically deciding I wanted to draw differently. So I plunged into these hundreds of pages and, as you mentioned (really really wise, that part), my ideas did steadily deplete themselves until I was forced to consider anything and everything. I entered a kind of free space in my head where all things were viable artistically. As I need the very end though, I have found myself drawing more and more often on plain white watercolor paper or Bristol board, and returning to some of those techniques and styles that at first I was trying so hard to escape. Initially this troubled me, and I wondered, had I completely run out of ideas? But it feels very...right? That's a poor way of explaining it, but believe me, I cross-examined myself over and over again to make damn sure I wasn't being lazy and falling back on what felt safe. I think, in a strange way, this has been more about really discovering who I am when I draw, and what I want to draw, than I ever suspected. And the answers have really shocked me. I am starting to feel like I am capable of just about anything, so now it becomes more about doing what I WANT to do with pens and paper and not doing what I feel like I just might be able to do.

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