Eve

The start of this drawing was simple. I wanted someone to pose for me for a demonstration the second week of August at Sunapee, and I wanted to work from life. It was perhaps a leap of faith but Elli volunteered her time and I enthusiastically began to plan.

It was important to me to answer basic questions first,...how would she sit, what pose could she handle for hours with enough comfort, enough of herself maintained? Within that limitation, where would I (and you)be in relationship to her? Was there something in her gesture that meant something? So the two of us played for a bit, she would hop in and out of a green chair I set outside, trying to find something that was comfortable and I would nod 'yes' and 'no', and 'maybe' until we had both discovered something physically doable and visually and emotionally of interest.

More questions then, what materials and surface?
I like to use rag papers with a bit of tooth but not too much. This was BFK which is a beautiful printmaking paper that works well with many dry and mixed materials, allowing some flexibility with the surface, ie. it doesn't complain when you chew at it with your tools.

I knew I had some room, my sheet was 40+ inches (BFK comes in rolls as well as flat) and I could crop it, or keep a wide space available. I knew I wanted simple tools for a hot day...so graphite and erasers were the choices for me. I love both their range and simplicity, the silvery, crisp, soft, (and light or dark as well as anywhere in between,)of graphite. By nature, I am more additive than subtractive and as usual, I used the eraser more to give white line than to take away. Pencils are tremendously giving, they glide smoothly but can be jabbed and scraped along a surface, they are delicate, loud, and expressive all at once, having the advantage of being immediate and constantly, visibly, on the precipace of change. As I developed this drawing not just in the day at Sunapee but over the next week, I looked through layer after layer of marks and they accumulated to my experience of searching and being with someone over time. To me, this conversation between the intellect and the hand, the eyes and the heart, is exciting.



Elli is fifteen. Lovely, funny, and fickle. I wanted her close to you the way she was with me, almost as if we could touch. For by and large that is how I feel about the human figure, get me in there and you here, and let's share this moment and space.

Elli's framed as if she sits with all of us, as if she just squeezed her barely visible chair a bit closer. This is gesturally true to her spirit.

More questions though.
When I was drawing from her, there was grass behind where she sat and I wondered what I would do with it...it was a visual problem that I was willing to put aside while I had her sitting for me at Sunapee, but one I knew would need to be addressed.

Over the following days, I decided I would cut her from her space like a paper doll, something I do frequently, perhaps as a reminder of my own childhood, a connecting of generations as well as a problem solving technique. I remounted her on clean white - something I could look at and play with, but not glue down until I had a feeling for what the negative shapes would be.



Flipping it over allowed me to look at her as an original shape again, and I could place her within other shapes so the field of the paper would exist as one.

I thought in terms of her gesture, scale, and meaningfulness within the boundaries of the rectangle she sat within. Taking away the rectangle at least momentarily, allowed me to revisit the problems individually within the image and the process of building it. I think of 'growing' the drawing and the act of cutting and repositioning as ways of reaffirming the shapes edges.
In this process, I considered what would be behind her and why, tossing out ideas of flowers, grass, a shadow, an animal etc.. as all inconclusive and not helpful to the whole. I tried bright patterns but they drew too much attention, blues were heavier than I wanted, greys not enough of a contrast and in the end I wanted something to do with a garden to exist, as she equaled a garden in my mind, something growing and altering. Back to many greens.



If greens, what materials? I went to fabric stores, and craft stores, and hung out with colored pencils and more cut paper for the next few days, finally deciding paper made sense. It would connect with the image of her that I had already cut away.

Through trial and error, intuition and some singing in the mix (I admit it can get loud as well as very quiet in the studio), I pushed her just slightly off the center. I liked the strong horizontal and vertical patterns playing against the curves of her edge and the organic patterns of the paper's rhythms mimicking hers.



I love the clean edge of a newly cut form, and knew I would pick up on this within the ground by layering pieces of paper to form new edges.

So much of what we do as artists involves working inside the image, inside the pull of its innate gestures carried by the emotion of hand and eye connecting with form, and then stepping back and observing, thinking out loud, slowing down to see again.



Spray paint was too heavy and obliterated more than I wanted, colored pencil felt indelicate, so I returned to the beginning and used pencil again, applying patterns to the surface that may be added to or removed on any day. For me, they are changeable and fleeting much like my time spent with this girl.



Why 'Eve' then?
I think we come and go, and the narratives past down are added to and altered. Elli may be any fifteen year old girl/young woman at the very same moment she is a friend, a sibling, and a daughter, among other titles. She is presented as herself, but we are together in stories.



She might be Elli, or 'Mary', 'Alice', or in this imagining, with the garden behind her, 'Eve'.