32 Small drawings with characters

July through November of 2018 I made a slew of small drawings in ink on paper using the two AxiDraw machines. From time to time as I work, I’ll edit and modify my program code so that the way I produce images changes. Most coders I’ve talked with are careful to archive each state of their code so it is possible to revive an earlier version and reproduce its function. I don’t do that. When I modify the code, the previous state is overwritten and lost. That’s kind of like cancelling a printing plate.

So I continued to explore mark-making and image communication and the small format of these drawings meant I could produce a piece relatively quickly (In as little as a few hours, but usually overnight). Lots of opportunity to experiment!

I became particularly interested in the interference patterns created by my process – diagonals and rays – yet another “layer of meaning” (the representation, the individual marks, the patterns). In many of these drawings, it becomes clear that the representation (the face, the figure) does not exist anywhere but in the mind of the viewer. That the image representation is communicated so clearly while, at the same time, the details we perceive truly do not exist on paper.

Click on the thumbnails below and again on the enlargement and, in many of these you’ll easily see what I mean.