ARTISTS REFLECTIONS

Doing this collection has focused my thoughts about drawing.  For me, drawing is the way into every craft and art form I have pursued.  Shop drawings for furniture and cabinets; Architectural drawings for homes; sketches on stone with chalk; and finally the hundreds of pre-drawings for sculptures and flat work.  This selection of all time favorites spans forty years.  What a delight to have been creating for four decades!  I am convinced the greatest thing an artist achieves over a long career is his visual vocabulary, and that enables the knowledge of beauty.  I had some great mentors in my University days.  Class room and studio drawing from models and landscapes, with the luxury of intelligent critiques, is a great way to learn the discipline of drafting.  However my greatest teacher has been the free hand mechanical drawings - the problem solving.  How you are going to do it sketches that proceed each task.  Visualizing before its there and studying the composition and forms before doing the flat work.

Using drawing as an everyday tool to make a living gives a new perspective.  It is not an artsy activity, mysterious and obscure.  Drawing in this light is simply using different language to explain how a task could be best performed, to work out problems in advance.  Through the years I have had hundreds of employees.  The best way to communicate how to build something is to have and do drawings, together with jargon.  On the tougher items, like a roof, explaining very quickly with an isometric sketch the how to do it debugs it and gets an image of the task into mind.  I've taken it several steps further in my own work, where I use drawings to study different  combinations of jointing the materials.  How to let one material into the other while enhancing the form or graphic.  I get a glimpse of how the shape will real in steel or stone and make changes as needed.  In flat work I often draw the shape dozens of times prior to working on cloth, getting to know the shape and what I like about it, then how it will work with the sky shape or tree, etc.

The how to do it sketches help me sort out the best way to connect metal to stone.  To study the steps needed to fabricate a sculpture prior to beginning.  To visualize the sequence of constructing things.

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