Mysterious protectors, overlapping forms
The free line wanders on, slipping through cracks in the fabric of the world
I’ve been writing recently about my travels to India, the long apprenticeship with my memories of the Indian carvings, and the eventual emergence of the dancers and the peacocks. At the beginning of 2016, the merging of creatures and dancers started to reduce down into some simpler combinations. Still unplanned improvisations, the forms took their own direction.
The strange protector figure who had appeared at the end of 2015 came back, sometimes with human features, sometimes as a bird.
An overlapping started to occur.
Someone said to me, ‘this how autistic children draw, they don’t have any sense of boundaries between things’. As if there was a right way to compose. But I was attracted to the overlapping, boundary-breaching way that things were appearing. It seemed to be an accurate portrayal of what Indian philosophy and complexity/dynamic systems theories had taught me, that everything in the world is nested into everything else.
I don’t think I was consciously thinking about the Indian murals, but I started making what I thought of as ‘composite’ images, where lots of things were happening at once.
There was also a ‘humans are one with the land’ theme.
The forms appeared. I followed.
Everything is everything. It is odd that people think there are rules for drawn forms when all things in life intersect and overlap and connect.
Also “funny” that people can make blanket statements like “autistic kids ____” when there is no singular autistic kid behaviour. Honestly lots of kids draw that way because they are just making marks and following what comes out of their minds and bodies.
I think visually and aesthetically, your fluid forms and figures work so well and would almost be odd if they had boundaries between themselves.
I really love your drawings and think too, as Davin above says, that it would almost be strange if there were boundaries or divisions between the figures. They are fluid, they fill the space.
And I have a question 😊in some of them it almost looks like you applied colour first and then drew the black lines, as if the drawings were “dictated” by the colours. Was that the case?