by Andrew Marcus
^{The School of Disappearance}

These drawings reflect my increasing interest in the conveyance of physicality, i.e., direct phenomenal experience, as it is lived, and, specifically, how such experiences can be recorded in pictorial space.

A gesture moves the material of marking (in this case black ink) through space and time, until it meets an unmoving planar limit (paper) of varying rectangular proportions. The convergence of ink and paper leaves a record of a multidimensional reality, in which lines of motion, the speed of these lines (force of gesture) in time and the distance traveled, are definitively and dispassionately recorded as a pictorial event.

The event, however, is not defined solely by the ink hitting paper, lest it be understood that the whole sequence of actions is arbitrary or accidental. Factors such as the intended guidance of the gesture toward a specific area of the page and at what angle (whether or not the intention is fulfilled), the opacity and quantity of the ink, and the force of the gesture, all account for differences in marks made and the impact they have on the page as a pictorial field. 

The dimensional limits of the plane in which the marks embed provide more than just an arbitrary context. It is precisely the limits of the plane which give the marks upon it a specific value; and each mark is in relationship to every other mark precisely through its, and their, relationship to the limit (boundary) of the plane, as well as the cohesion of the gesture which gives them flight. So, location of the marks within the dimensionally specific planar context, as well as the precise manner in which these marks meet the page and find their home upon it through my intended gesture, are primary elements which comprise this method of drawing.

What determines, for me, whether a drawing is a success or not? There is what I would call an emotional clarity, or tone, when a drawing is “right.” The mark lives within the space of the page in such a way that a unique world emerges, a world of things and a world of space in which they are contained, peculiarly -- that is to say with specificity, and with a clear sense of movement, and of time; a kind of aliveness that is human and also not human, perhaps more neutral, with intimations of infinite expanse.