Emily Welsh

*Edit* As much as I enjoy playing with these lines and shapes, I have discovered that this element of chance does not work very well with this particular medium and things need to be a little better planned out. I have decided to move towards these strange figures that I have been kind of toying with in the back of my head. These drawings show up in sketch books and are some type of characters for something, of what I am not sure, but I would like to try to start developing them here. There may be some political ties to them, such as with the group of heads I did for the third project, but they may also just be these strange things that I draw that have no rhyme or reason. Either way I am liking the mixture of medium and content that I get with them.
*End Edit*

Last semester I took Litho 1, which opened my eyes to the fabulous world of printmaking. The most difficult part of the class for me was this part. Deciding what I wanted my images to involve. I tried abstract things but I hadn’t learned enough about the real world to be able to abstract it the way I wanted. I tried a little bit of the real stuff but that also didn’t seem to work for the same reason. This semester I am going to try and figure myself out a little better in that regards. I am hoping to open up to new possibilities with the classes aside from this one that I am taking to draw inspiration from. I think that one thing that will help will be my advanced drawing class, where working from ones self seems to be a pretty important thing.
I wanted to try and draw from two of my favorite artists. The funny thing is, that these guys do (or did) exactly the opposite thing. One favorite is Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Neo-expressionist of the 1980s who got his start with graffiti in New York City. I love the expression he puts into his stuff and the movement of his lines and abstracted forms. The second is Irving Penn, an American portrait photographer gaining popularity in the 1940s and still going strong. Penn’s photographs have appeared everywhere from magazines like Vogue to museums such as the National Gallery in Washington, DC. These two artists contrast each other in a variety of ways aside from their mediums, Basquiat mainly focusing on painting while Penn’s specialties include portrait and fashion photography.
I’m attracted to each of them for exactly these differences. I love the vibrant colors and swift energetic movements of the brush/pencil/pen in the paintings of Basquiat. I enjoy the “sloppy” sort of plopping of paint on the canvas in a haphazard way to depict human form. With Penn’s work, I love the straightforward neutral backgrounds making the figure clearly the center of attention focusing on the individuality of each subject. I love the harsh contrast of the blacks and whites in his photographs and how he turns the most simple people and poses into beautiful telling portraits, the most harsh and grimy figures into the most graceful and relaxed moments.
I want to try and combine these two somehow, find a middle ground to these two opposite ends of the spectrum. I’ve got to figure out how to either have structure, or just let go and take risks in my drawings. I started experimenting with abstract landscapes comprised of squiggles and lines and dots and maneuvering the grease on the aluminum plates, and although my marks will have to me more thought out and planned with wood cut, I would like to try and explore this again, but maybe bringing in some of the ideas of Basquiat and Penn to try and harness my thoughts and give some kind of a structure. I think I would like to draw from the expressive movements of Basquiat and the simplicity of Penn’s figures, possibly trying to turn the figure into a landscape of sorts.
I don’t anticipate any of this being any easier than it was last semester, because it wasn’t. I do anticipate it moving a lot faster because I had the experience and the exploration and feedback from last semester. I hope to be surer of myself by the end of the first project, both with the medium and my own drawings.