Category: Pen & ink

#658

35.5 x 43cm Pen & ink, watercolor. (black & white W.I.P. below)
All about the tension between almost random lines and splatters, and a kind of geometric containment, with light and color resisting. Anarchy struggling with the State. Can abstraction be allegory?

#658.JPG
#658 WIP

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#657

#657Working on visual ‘ideas’ for a larger piece. Would you believe I’ve been working on the this for 3 days? It’s only 15x17cm, but pen & ink (with my beloved crow quill nib (Hunt No 2) is labor intensive, and I need lots of time between working sessions to observe and think about where it’s going.

I feel a contradiction, a painful tension between the increasingly abstract art I’ve been making, and my desire to make what I do register as resistance, as opposition to the fascist coup and all the horrors it’s begun to unleash.
But I can’t… I can’t work like that–come up with an idea to show what I’m thinking–something with an intelligible ‘message’.
The message, if there is one, is there. But it’s in the tensions between containment, ‘authority,’ and liberty of movement. It’s all visual. When I feel the need to SAY… I write a poem. And even there, it will be elsewhere… as the world we need to make to survive… is elsewhere. Do you understand this? Does this make sense?

View portfolio here ART BY WILLARD
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