"Mother", colour pencil and pastel 30.6.06
This is the drawing that I am submitting as my final assignment for the Drawing in Colour course that I've been doing since November. It's supposed to be a piece that shows how keenly I look and reveals what's important to me. Have I done that? It's hard to say.
I spent more time working on this than I have any other drawing. I started with the pencil outline on Tuesday and have been colouring it in bit by bit since then, taking the time to look at it from a distance, over and over again. I finished it this evening. I worked from a source photo but the application of colour is not a direct copy of the colour in the photo. I decided to fill in the colour by intution.
It's hard for me to articulate what I hope to express in my drawings. I don't start from that point when I draw. I tend to feel my way along. I also think that the people who look at it will probably see things in it that I wasn't even aware of, and that everyone will have their own interpretation. But I can say that while I was working on it, the main word that kept coming to mind, over and over again, was ambivalence. It could have meant my own ambivalence towards the drawing, a feeling of ambivalence from the mother in the portrait towards her own child, or towards motherhood, or my feelings of ambivalence towards my own mother, or towards the idea of being a mother.
When I showed it to Paul he commented that the child in the drawing seemed to be the only sign of life present, that the mother seemed cold and dead, almost like the mother was a doll, holding a child, who is, incidentally (?), holding a doll. The child looks at the doll with liveliness, but the mother doesn't look at the child. I don't know what that means, but it was interesting. I'm sorry that the photo of the drawing is a bit crap, which means you can't see the detail of the expression on the child's face.
Anyway, I'd love know what you all make of it. Comments will be much appreciated.
Thanks for looking.
2 comments:
... i love it 'T', but i like all your work, i don't get 'it' what pauls talking about. man your making art all the time and its growing and growing. don't look back just keep doing it.
Thanks! I'm so glad someone finally commented on it, I was beginning to feel paranoid.
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