INFO - LineWorks

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LINEWORKS
Ongoing Drawing Series

I’ve been doing these sketches for roughly fifteen years that began as what might best be described as doodles. And while they’re not particularly consistent in terms of a kind of form making – they’re often very different shapes being made – there is a consistency about the issue of density, and about the idea of line. When we say ‘line,’ we’re not talking about line as in the line of a drawing, we’re talking quite literally about the idea of line in space - a physical line that has dimension. The type of line work that we’re interested in is not graphic. It’s not two dimensional. And we’ve constantly pushed to make it a more perceptually three-dimensional issue.

I’m often asked what it is I’ve learned from these drawings? I should first say that I don’t go into each one of them specifically trying to learn something. But looking back on those that have been completed, it’s apparent that while often the same thing is drawn over and over again, there is clearly an increased level of three-dimensional complexity- and it is not just simply in terms of the number of lines being drawn. And I think when one asks 'what have you learned?' the implied question being asked is 'how do you get better at it?' Or, 'what’s gotten better about them?' Well, what’s I have become better at is anticipating what’s to come in the drawing. If you look at them closely, it's clear that most of them can’t be drawn by starting in front and simply moving back. They’re not, as Wes once noted, "sedimentary." Lines start in the front, they move to the very back, they cross multiple lines, and then they come back to the front. And what I’ve learned to do much better than in the early drawings is anticipate the lines that are going to come five minutes down the road. And so lines are drawn with breaks in them to allow for lines that are ultimately going to come later. And I credit that to a little bit better ability to envision a spatial outcome, at least within a given zone of the problem. It simply something that's slowly and incrementally learned from having done it over and over again.

Project Credits:

Dwayne Oyler

We think that "Linework" brings with it an inherent set of properties that don’t exist in other types of work. One of those has to do with the idea of foreground and background. Line, unlike most other shapes, forms, and/or materials, has the ability to create a sense of enclosure – it behaves like a screen directly in front of you – but it allows you to instantly refocus and see something further into the distance. So there’s a back and forth between detail and overall figure. We're interested in that ability of line to compel an instantaneous fluctuation between foreground and background. It keeps the eye moving, and it creates a specific form of engagement that you don't find in other many other forms.

A couple of additional points. All of the work that we’ve done typically involves the use of single lines in many places, but also involves multiple lines that get bundled into larger figures. We often compare that to the issue of lineweight, which has the ability to speak of depth in the sense that it tells you if something is close or far away. But when you start to build up lines into different densities – sometimes using single lines, sometimes using multiple lines, sometimes using thicker lines and sometimes using thinner – everything becomes a little incongruent. You might say there’s an ambiguity or confusion caused as a result of these things all communicating different things at once. So, it keeps you searching for what is foreground and background, and, in our minds, that enriches the experience of the drawing, or, ultimately, the work.

I find with these kinds of drawings, one of the essential ingredients is the smallest of details. They don’t have to be everywhere, but they do need to be strategically placed. So, when you start to look at the tiny little knots that occur – in my mind, as small as those are, they are the difference between a more graphic two-dimensional reading and a truly three-dimensional reading. These are the elements that are essential to prolonging the search for the continuity of a line. Without those, there’s no desire to try to follow the lines around the drawings to see where they go next.