Today I decided to start playing with grids in my ongoing drawing.
I remember hearing about the grid in my art history lessons years ago and it’s not surprising that it has been used in art for long time: traditionally to divide up a picture ready to transfer to a larger plane, but more recently as the primary subject like in, for instance, the famous paintings by Mondrian (see below).
Is the grid just a convenient construct that allows artists to divide up space with minimal fuss? Or can it play a more fundamental role?
So far my drawing is comprised of organically spreading building blocks that exist on the reverse side of the paper (see my previous blog post about it here). I think the formality of the grid is a nice contrast not only to this, but also to the randomly dripped white paint that forms a barrier to the underneath. I’m not sure how this piece will finally end up – it is turning out to be more abstract than my other drawings in the global mega-cities series – but i’m hoping that the grid will allude to the idea of a cage, or barrier – a prison pinning the rest of the drawing in place. The grid empowers the surface of the drawing, while covering its hidden observables or even its subconscious.
More soon x
