Catherine Murphy
Note to the Participants,
Drawing can happen on any surface. It can be made with any implement, be any shape, any size, any style. It can be loose; it can be tight; it can depict, or it can be an empty page. It can certainly move. It can be an end in itself or an idea that will be realized later. It’s certainly older than civilization, but its lost none of its power.
After reviewing 1,220 images of your drawings, I have decided that if someone says it’s drawing, I just say yes.
That doesn’t mean it’s a good drawing.
Which raises the question: do I know what good is? By the time I got through the hill of work that would have stopped Sisyphus, I’d entered what felt like an altered state of being. I despaired; I was delighted; I got bored, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. In the end, I had an inkling of what my parameters for “good” might be. But as a natural anarchist, I recalibrate frequently.
In my own work, which is always observational, I find that some ideas want to be drawings, some need to be paintings. The work is predicated on ideas and concepts. It’s not at the service of technique. I don’t value painting over drawing, although, painting seems to define my practice. I draw with pencil on paper. It is so elemental and infinite in possibility, that drawing sometimes feels like liberation. My drawing is nearly always in black and white -- actually, not really black and not really white. I do two kinds of drawing: quick sketches as preparation for paintings and tonal, fully realized drawings as an end in themselves. The discipline of understanding color through tone is, I believe, invaluable.
Does beauty figure in all of this? Yes, of course, but defining beauty is a slippery slope. Even the word beauty is suspect. Maybe it’s enough to say that when surprise and recognition happen simultaneously, it always gets my attention.
What I love most about what we do is that we can run but we can’t hide. It's all there to be looked at for unknown lifetimes. Eventually, the viewer will get to every inch. Even the most modest of efforts has to realize the whole (I will say) page. While looking at these drawings, I understood that I needed, at the very least, for, the artist to attend the whole field -- from the outside edges to the middle, the gestalt. No matter how much love and attention we give to whatever “figure” we are obsessing over, we will fail if we don’t realize that there is consequence for every mark we make. In the end, there is no figure; there is no ground; there just is. And wouldn’t we have been a better species and attendant to the earth if the bodies we have used to make our mark upon the world had attended not just to the marks but to the ground as we have moved through it?
I’ve never done judging quite like this before. I know I might have made different choices if I had judged the actual objects -- but you know that because you make actual objects, as do I. It is always an act of faith and optimism that these objects we make mean anything – and I respect that desire.