– Chris Lombard –
Drawing in charcoal is not exactly the most forgiving experience. The immediacy and harshness of the medium (it is after all burnt wood on processed wood) cultivates a sense of deliberation and commitment in the act of making a mark: you find yourself at times being almost gentle with it. I love that tension, I love how when certain options or devices are denied me I have to become a bit clever and really consider how I am going to be able to communicate. I love how that commitment takes the act of drawing and turns each stroke into either an act of brave optimism or an act of salvage. Drawing with charcoal forces me to relinquish my crutches and tackle bare handed a now much more formidable subject.
With painting you can create completely naturalistic colour and atmosphere. You can’t do that with a drawing. Sculpture offers us the opportunity to replicate form and texture as realistically as we went; not so with drawing. Drawing is the assembly of scratches, dots, speckles, smudges, smears and lines into a version of reality that is only ever fully conceived when the viewer is coaxed into interpreting these marks into their own version of that reality.
Basically the only thing that I’m ever really saying is: “this is how I see it, how do you see it?”
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