Applications (Gladman IV)

 

The last few weeks I've been reflecting on the work of Renee Gladman, with particular attention to the investigations she has been conducting about the relationships between writing and drawing. In her essay "The Sentence as a Space for Living," she has, among many other interesting passages, this one:

In any case, for months, I’ve been struggling with how to articulate a bridge between the writing I’ve been doing and this drawing I’ve started to do. . .  a kind of drawing that feels very much like writing, a way of turning the sounds and symbols for speech and thought inside out. One day in a movie I noticed a character holding a fountain pen over a large pad of paper; as soon as she began to scratch at the surface I felt something turn over in me. I had been drawing for years, aspects of buildings, habitations, but drawing was something I did when I was not writing. And though I had a collection of fountain pens, I’d never used them to draw. A fountain pen has, for me, a love of the line embedded in it. A pen with a good nib wants to just go; drawing put that “turned over thing” in my hand. To move my hand was to look at it, to pass with it. This was a way of being most present in language, because, though I was drawing, I felt immediately that writing had carried over. I knew these were prose architectures I was making, and that into the drawing space: that meant I was no longer in the proverbial “page” into which or out of which comes language. I was now on the visual plane. Yet, it was writing that I was doing. The notion of “drawn writing” struck me as a new kind of conversation with prose. It was the writing of a text with its inner syntax somehow revealed.

I've been conducting similar investigations over the last several years, doing "drawings" that were based on the notion of the line exploring space. (For example, this one.) Most of my drawings arose in the traditional manner of black line on white paper, much like the ones by Gladman which I shared in previous posts. But last year as I was looking over Gladman's web site I saw that she had a number of drawings which flipped the script, deploying white lines (and some color as well) on a black surface. Here's one from her web site:

(Copyright Renee Gladman, used with permission)

There's a good deal that might be said about such a drawing about the sequencing and echoing in the white-line motifs, the swaths of color, the sense of a story of sorts being suggested without the use of words. But what struck me most about this drawing, and the others in the sequence, was how dramatic they were, and the kinds of questions that they raised in my mind as I looked at them. I decided to see what I could do by way of entering into that somewhat mysteriously suggestive realm on my own. I began with this one:

 

This was the first in what became a series of drawings that explored the effects of white line and color on black paper, in a manner which was neither strictly abstract nor strictly representational. Here's one from a little further on in the series:

 

 

There's a kind of intuitive geometry going on here. The major shapes are in conversation with one another: the horizontal and vertical empty shapes framed by the white lines, the grounded reds, the upward striving greens, the floating blue suggestive of something like dance or freedom or escape. These are what I might call, borrowing Gladman's words, prose architectures on a visual plane, which demand to be "read" on their own terms.