DRAW NOTHING

How do you draw nothing?

That question occurred to me while I was reading the excellent article on Michael Heizer, “A Monument to Outlast Humanity” by Dana Goodyear in the 29 August 16 New Yorker.

Going to Arizona to see his “City” will be at the top of our agenda as soon as the piece is finished.

So many of Heizer’s works are about nothing.  There were slots cut into the earth in “Double Negative.”  There were jigs and jags cut into the earth.  There was cutting and mounding.

Heizer on his piece “Compression Line,”

“Funny that when this is all done there’ll be nothing to see.”  “When you’re done, all you see is a lot of air.”

So Heizer is working with negatives.  He coined the term “negative painting.”  And as I had not heard of that, I did an internet search of this term, and then of course there was an array of interesting drawings and photographs of paintings that I had never seen before.

One drawing was particularly compelling to me.  And I did what we transparent drawers do, I drew it transparently.  My drawing at the top of the page is the result.

I’m not going to include the work that inspired me, as I’m not sure if it was Heizer’s.  So many artworks are on Pinterest now, and there is no clue as to who did them or in what context they were created.  It is almost like Pinterest has the goal of cutting all ties to context.  Pull things off the internet.  Amalgamate.  And presto, you’re supposed to have a new meaning.  I don’t like Pinterest for this reason.

Back to the topic at hand, when you are drawing Heizer, there is not much to draw.  So I think that drawing Heizer transparently is a far better approach.  When you are making a drawing of a slit in the earth, you get so much more meaning if you draw transparently.

You draw nothing.