Collections & Obsessions - 'Drawing'

Here's a few of the recent artists whose drawings I have come across lately on the web and been collecting on Pinterest, and some long-time favourites;

Uploaded from marienouvellestudio.blogspot.co.uk

Really loving the beautiful work of Izziyana Suhaimi - a delicate mixture of drawing, watercolour and embroidery. 

Uploaded from www.frameweb.com 

Margherita Manzelli is an intriguing figurative painter whose work I have followed since I came across it unexpectedly at an exhibition in Florence. I really love the delicate line in her drawings (and the slight freakishness!).

Uploaded from artist's website www.shanemcadams

The artist describes this as a painting but I love the delicate mark-making/line drawing in these works; created with ball-point pen on resin.

Uploaded from www.booooooom.com

Check out more of this Illustrator/Painter Joao Ruas on www.feral-kid.com. I love the overlapping and layers within this drawing.

Bree Dentice - uploaded from www.booooooom.com

This drawing is called 'Bunny Up-chuck' and not only does the artist have a great name but thinks up great titles - I especially like it for the physical discomfort it brings to mind juxtaposed with the delicate detail of the drawing.

Uploaded from artist's website www.mercedeshelnwein.com

One my favourite drawings from Mercedes Helnwein's exhibition 'whistling-past-the-graveyard'(2008)- a collection which comprises of detailed drawings mainly of stylishly dressed women in strange ambiguous scenes. 

uploaded from artist's website - www.henriksimonsen.com

This is a painting by artist Henrik Simonsen but I love the lines within it so I had to include it here - created with oil and charcoal on canvas. 

uploaded from rikrawling.wordpress.com/

George Shaw is one of my favourite painters so I thought I would include one of his drawings. Slightly more fluid than his paintings they capture the moodiness and unexpected beauty in the surroundings.


You can follow my collections on Pinterest; http://pinterest.com/atheballerina/drawing/
   

A little road trip

"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door" Emily Dickinson.

Often it feels like sources of inspiration come from anywhere and everywhere but whilst on one hand they feel random, the images that move me most often link in to each other forming little road-trips into a larger journey of investigation. 

A still from Tideland  -  image uploaded from Allmoviephoto.com

'Tideland'(Terry Gilliam, 2005)- The opening scenes depict the main character, an enchanting child Jeliza Rose, cooking up heroin for her addict parents - rarely can I watch this film as a whole and often fast forward through various sections but'Tideland' is a visual feast and one in which I found references and connections to some of my favourite artists.

Image uploaded from Moma.org

The painting 'Christina's World' (1948) by Andrew Wyeth is for me one of the most arresting images from the last century. It's filled with emotional intensity created by the vast sense of open space and the ambiguity of the figure 'Christina'. This painting inspired Mitch Cullin who wrote the novel'Tideland'.

 'House from the Railroad' (1925) uploaded from Wikipaintings.org

Echoes of the house from Hitchcock's 'Psycho'(1960) appear in 'Tideland' but Hitchcock was directly inspired by the painting above - 'House from the Railroad' by Edward Hopper. 

Still from 'Psycho' uploaded from Planetvideo.com.au

Hopper's paintings of figures are rarely of close-ups causing the viewer to be psychologically distanced. His paintings are like film sets with a sense of space and emptiness. Director Todd Haynes translates these characteristics into his film 'Safe' (1995) below.

Todd Haynes 'Safe' image uploaded from www.jonathanrosenbaum.com

Gregory Crewdson photographs are of a cinematic scale and depict American small town scenes with slightly sinsister and ambiguous narratives. He is influenced by film-makers Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Todd Haynes.

Gregory Crewdson from 'Twilight' series - uploaded from artsytime.com

  

Sunday afternoon sketchbook photos

A visit to the park - flashes of red running through the trees.

Grace just wouldn't remove her bunny head - she even went to sleep in it

Messing around with instagram

A Sunday afternoon at my mum's house and then the park with my niece Grace. She turned up in a cute little red-cord pinafore with kitty detail on the pockets and this pink bunny hat/head which she refused to remove even for bed - we removed it when she was asleep!  

'Kindred Spirits' and inspiration

I’ve been working on something on and off for the last year and I'm not sure where it's going. At the moment there's a plan for a series of work called ‘Kindred Spirits’. The ideas are loosely connected to the concept of kindred spirits and also the idea of daemons such as in the Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’. The trilogy had a huge effect on me because reading them reminded me what it felt like to read as a child. The books asked the kind of questions that both children and philosophers ask - how and why we exist and where we go afterwards. Pullman's daemon is the soul's physical manifestation in the form of a creature which represents consciousness, acting as an inner dialogue and therefore a conscience. 

Work-in-progress for Kindred Spirit (drawing 1)

My first image is of a girl with the head of a rather vicious looking wolf on her head. Parallels with Red Riding Hood may come to mind, although there are many readings of that tale that don't really interest me here. Instead I prefer the view of the Native Americans, who consider the wolf to be the highest spiritual teacher of all animals. The wolf is a symbol of strength, loyalty and protectiveness. In "His Dark Materials" the daemon (until adolescence) can shape-shift into an animal which most reflects the emotions,situation or wims of its human.   

            Kindred Spirit (Drawing 1)

These are just some of the concepts and ideas which are running around inside my head for this particular work but how they are interpreted is entirely up to the viewer - please feel free to post comments, Angela x