SARAN WRAP – DRAWING MATERIALITY

I promised that I would use saran wrap.  And now I make “good” on that promise.

Cellophane kitchen wrap, or to use the generic term, saran wrap, is transparent.  I realized that I was able to use this as a Drawing Materiality.  How good the result is, you will have to be the judge.  

With Drawing Materiality, the key is to ask yourself, how will this material help me to get outside of my boundaries?  Or you might ask, can this material be integrated into the drawing, so as to help shape, in unexpected ways, my generation of form?

82-14 To establish a base geometry, I knowledge a Form Combine from two Source Images, using a blue and a sepia Gellyroll pen.  I drew black lines over the Combine as a movement toward synthesis of form.  After the application of the pink tone, I distributed leaves of grass, as well as some dirt.  Then, I took a piece of saran wrap and sprayed a layer of adhesive onto the wrap, which I then attached to the paper.  This “froze” the leaves and dust.  I finished by drawing, over the cellophane with wet chalk stick, a set of lines seeking greater holistic form.  

The result is completely unexpected.  It is a good example of Drawing at the Boundary of Form.  Movement toward complete holistic resolution would be easy.  

And it is a good example of Drawing Materiality: the materials that I used directly influenced what I was able to do.  When you stick saran wrap to a drawing, it won’t go down smooth.  There will be ridges and creases.  Some of these are due to the vegetative material and dirt.  Other ridges are the natural result of adhering a very thin film to the paper.  When you then draw over the cellophane, your lines are somewhat directed by the texture of what has gone before.  The stick does not go exactly where you think it will.

I was surprised that saran wrap would even take wet charcoal.  You would not think that you could draw anything over the wrap, given how it repulses anything you use it for.  

This is great fun.  I’m drawing in ways that I never would have thought possible.  And this is still in the service of holistic form.  A building, if that is your bent, could be formed out of this really without even trying.  

I think that Itten would be proud.