GMU:Drawing: the natural-scientific gaze/Maria

From Medien Wiki

Mark Making

During the first class of the module we all had a discussion about what the word 'drawing' meant to us. We decided that drawing was a way of creating a subtle line of any description, with any material. This line can be a performance, a representation of something, or an abstract creation using artistic concepts. It does not simply mean picking up a pencil and creating a lifelike representation of an existing image.

However I found the term 'drawing' to be too reminiscent of strictly traditional non-abstract media and also to be limiting creatively. To change this mindset I prefer to call drawing 'mark making' as I find that referring to it as this to have far greater potential to make a piece of work that I find both interesting and visually stimulating. This also gives me a much wider range of materials to work with, both mixed and traditional media. This helps me greatly as I prefer to create rather abstract and concept based artwork.

Early Works

Early on in the class we started the mark making process by recreating some images of different types of cells from the human body, taken with an electron microscope. I decided that I would try to represent these as accurately as possible, culminating in the below image. We then had to re-arrange the image aesthetically and as my mark making was 'accurate', this did not create a piece of work that I consider to be successful. From this I learned that an abstract approach to the details is best for this module and thus any mark makings will look much more intriguing visually.

Cell.JPG