Majestically bellyflopping into a sea of drawings

I took a break from painting for a while. Thought I´d do some drawings as a form of relaxing hiatus, the drawings of course grew to become their own kind of obsession. The plan originally was to do some fast sketches and try to remove as many pictorial elements as possible without hurting the dynamism of the composition. So pretty basic plan: make a bunch of fast and simple drawings. Maybe one or two of them would work as a large scale painting as well - who knows?

No sooner had I asked this rhetorical question before finding myself in a mental state of Perfectionist Render mode, compulsively drawing away on a series that became more pedantic by the day. As I got more and more used to the charcoal medium the technical side of image making started imposing itself more: that’s not smooth enough, that black isn’t black enough, that line is off by some length! The drawings were not the fast and funny pony ride I had hoped for, at all.

However! I really like the series that came out of it, and I think they occupy an interesting middle ground between the geometric paintings I made 2017 - 2019 and the pointillistic paintings of the last two years. I think a bunch of them are hovering on the impossible and desirable midway point between silly and monumental, so all good there… If you’re interested in getting one, they´re available through the shop.

Painting timelapse of “Bird’s eye”

As some of you already know lately I´ve been doing these great structures that I methodically cover underneath layer after layer of dots, sort of slowly dissolving them into dust visually. I try to look for the point where it's in-between categories, that's where it's interesting. Between being solid and being air, between being monumental and being silly, between the physical and the metaphysical.

I've been working on this piece for about six weeks. Everything else has been put on hold. The pointillist technique is a slow grinding death-march-test of character but ultimately very rewarding when you arrive at that point where it just... glows. This minute is made up of around 100 hours of filmed material. Now I´m just gonna take a week or two of drawing fast charcoal drawings to reset my soul.