Drawing Collective at Osnabruck

About drawing within the framework of concrete art-making.

Playing with two, three, sometimes more elements, working with the way in which these elements interact. For me the keyword is 'exploration'. A drawing is a piece of work that may perhaps lead on to something else, and I think it is for this reason that drawings I do are rarely 'one-offs'. One thing leads to another, and another and each stage may open up possibilities which also need to be explored, but in the end the drawing exists as a thing in itself.

The starting point: the first mark - the "what if" factor: in the case of these drawings, the first mark was an angled line across or down the page. I have been  interested in the idea of slippage - a form broken by a break which allows one part to move in relation to the other, thereby breaking the balance, the monumentality, of the whole form, hopefully creating a tension within the work.

Within these parameters there are still variations possible: should the form float in space, or be anchored by the edge of the paper; how do the forms in the drawing relate to each other; should the form be symmetrical, or a-symmetrical? The question of proportion, the visual "rightness" of the overall image - what works and what doesn't - a totally subjective judgement perhaps.

These mixed media drawings (from a set of six related works) are to do with the notion of "slippage" - an exploration of what happens visually if a shape is broken into parts by a line cutting across it.

 Barbara Halnan March 2019