[ drawings for ] Living Rooms / [ shadow drawings for ] Living Rooms
These gouache on paper drawings, selected from two sets of images completed in 2002, are based on the plan of the second floor living area at 1614 N. Hermitage Avenue, Chicago. Intended as studies for paintings, the drawings attempted to inscribe spatial, inhabited experience: I became attentive to the brush and its fluid mark as it asserted its own scale and breath, acceleration and pause; the brush measured and assisted memory.
Each of the ten [ drawings for ] Living Rooms articulates a specific interior room configuration, as well as the threshold space(s) to any adjoining room or passageway, oriented on the page as either north- or south-facing at a scale of 1:12 inches. The [ shadow drawings ] for Living Rooms came to occupy a contingent relationship to the first set of images and allowed me to visualize a sequence of “trace” or “after-images.”
The green / gray pigments of the [ shadow drawings ] gathered and settled as a distinct range of tints and opacities. This simple shift in coloration presented each image in contradiction to its prior state — as residue or evidence, perhaps, of a space transformed by the conditions of physical compression, decay, or gravity.
December, 2002