I thought about this many times lately. It was like an old friend, knocking on my window to wake me up.
Drawing is my most direct expression. When I started doing abstract drawings many years ago, I was thinking about sculptures that I wanted to make. I did not have the how to, the where to, and I was busy doing other things that I thought were what I wanted to do.
But the ideas were insistent and felt as if they were calling me. So I drew them. Almost all my abstract drawings for years were sketches for sculptures. In my imagination I was making sculptures all the time.
Then the drawings started to have a life of their own. They were independent of everything else, and I did them as final artworks.
A friend from Germany created an opportunity for me, to have an exhibition in Koln. I sent pictures of my works and the deal was made. I leafed through my many drawings and those I chose, I decided to sew onto canvases. I had an old sewing machine but I did not know how to use it. I remembered seeing my grandma sitting at an old Zinger and I imitated all that I remembered her doing, and the machine started to sew.
I started to draw with the sewing and at the same time that it connected the drawings to the canvases, it became part of the drawings. I let the ends of the threads hang from under the canvases. Then some of the instruments I had on my table as I was working found their way onto the canvases too, with some glue, as they seemed to be just what was needed there. Then came words. Some paintings had a word or two. Others had poems.
For a month and a half the works hang in the gallery. I had a good review in the local newspaper. The curator of one of the museums visited my show. I made friends with other artists and I went to visit their shows.
All the works were not just rectangular with straight edges. They had irregular shapes and stuff extended from their edges into the space around them. This is the point here. Irregular shapes, and breaking away from being restricted into rectangles.
Then I participated in a collage class and all the works that I did there refused to be blocked in a straight lined frame. They all had things sticking out of them.
In this drawing I thought about a sculpture again and I let the shapes play in a big shapeless background. I cropped it for the blog, but the frame here does not have as an important part as the cropping has in all the other paintings in this blog.
In this painting there is not even one little part that is not totally alive with the experience of now.
Is it a plate with something on it?
Is it a ship, traveling on a golden sea?
Is it a jungle with a cloud?
Is it about having been in a place where food was ready for me on the plate, and a ship has come to take me out of the jungle onto the open, golden sea?
Now, what will happen next? “What will happen next” is a pregnant question and all is good.
