ADVANCED DRAWING: Destruction Project

Ali Sykes

ART 318-Advanced Drawing

Destruction Blog Post

I pondered over what to do for this project for a really long time. It was really strange to me to think about destroying my artwork, and then having that destruction become art itself. After sifting through the pieces I made this semester, trying to decide which one would be best for my project, I kept coming back to my figure drawing pieces. I began thinking a lot about the act of drawing a body, and the act of drawing with a body, and felt there was a really interesting relationship between those two ideas.

As I began researching, I came across a few different artists that use their bodies instead of paintbrushes as a method of creating artwork. The first artist that caught my eye was Alexa Meade, who creates beautiful and detailed pieces by painting her actual subjects, models and backgrounds, and then takes photos of the scene. I thought this was a very interesting and unique concept that definitely embodied my idea of drawing with the body. The second artist I came across was Tony Orrico, who is a performance artist with a dance background. I was specifically inspired by Orrico’s Penwald drawings, in which he performs for hours as the human equivalent of a drawing machine transcribing circular arcs with his outstretched limbs, each mark varying with density depending on his exhaustion. Finally, the artist I found most influential is Heather Hansen, who is also a performance artist with a background in dance. She creates large scale charcoal paintings with movements utilizing her entire body. While her pieces do not visually depict an image of the human body, they are still representative of it because they capture the movement and energy of the body. I liked this idea a lot, and wanted to convey this same idea in my own piece.

So, when it came time for me to create my own piece, or rather, destroy it, I already knew I wanted to use a figure drawing piece and I already knew that I wanted to incorporate documentation of my body movements. I chose my final figure drawing piece because it felt the most complete and finalized out of all of my pieces, due to the fact that it is not gestural and contains value and props. It didn’t feel like just a sketch, but rather a piece of work that was capable of being changed with destruction in order to give it meaning. For the mutation, I chose to cover my body in primary colored acrylic paint. I chose the primary colors because those were the only colors I used in the original piece, so I felt that the piece would have more continuity in theory if the colors carried over (even though you can’t see much of the original piece through the paint). I chose to use acrylic paint because it would be the easiest method for me to cover my body and transfer colored pigment onto the piece; but also because I wanted a level of opacity where the mutation wasn’t just adding something to a piece that was already made, rather, it was transforming it into something else. To create this piece, I essentially just rolled around on it while covered in paint, doing different motions and movements, basically just whatever felt natural. I really like the idea of using movements of the body over top of an image of a body, showing this other way to represent the human body in art.

Process