AMBIGUITY MODE

Usually, when I put a drawing together with different media, or media in a different order, I have been able to assign a new drawing mode. Some of the modes that have been established in these pages include Woven Drawing, One Line One Wash, Automatic Form, etc. And there are still more drawing modes to come! But I really don’t know what to call this.

The drawing was done by combining the energy of Cy Twombly with the need for a resolved form. How might that be accomplished?

I first drew a flat plane in the manner of Twombly with a water soluble ball point pen. I used the Pentel Liquid Gel Ink pen. I just drew curving lines that move back and forth across the plane. Then I drew, within this plane, a form. For the third and final step, I then used acrylic ink to tone the forms. So it is a simple, three step process.

The synergestic, or unexpected effects of this drawing mode is when the ink wash then picks up the water souble pen lines, and distributes that across the architetural form. This served to darken the ink tone, and also blurred the pen lines.

One might say that the picking up of the pen ink introduces ambiguity. And ambiguity is an anathema to Transparent Drawing. The effect is to flatten the form: are the sides of the form now within the ink plane lines, or is it still behind it? Or do the fine lines really fill a cubic rectangle, and the colored form is within that rectangle?

All most modern art does is play off of ambiguity like this. Questions like how do the shapes overlap? Or is that really a shape with dimensions or is it really a plane? Or where is the plane within the drawing spacetime? WHO CARES? When you start to ask these questions, then the mode is decreasing the knowledge, rather than increasing it. Or, it could be taken quite literally: there is a bird’s nest type of plane standing in front of this form. Or is the plane actually running thru the form? Or is this a cube filled with the lines? Again, WHO CARES? See the problems created when ambiguity is introduced?

Still, this was a fun drawing to do. I did not know what was going to happen when I started. For all I knew, it would turn to mud. You get this sort of automatic tonal happening that you would not get otherwise. And a resolved form is knowledged on the paper. And the ambiguity asks questions that will be interesting to pursue in subsequent drawings. I guess some ambiguity now and then is a good thing.