Art & Story Blog

This was drawn about a month ago on the inside cover of a new Moleskine sketchbook (small). Drawn with a water-brush pen filled with ink.

This is somewhat of a return to the sort of content I used to draw a lot more of. That is, somewhat abstract surrealistic landscapes. Play with line and form and composition and a sort of "growing" of what could be organic forms rising up from the ground and taking on shapes that are suggestive of things perhaps we’ve seen before. Take a look around. What do you see? Maybe a cactus, an onion or radish, a duck or a snail, a trumpet, a plume of smoke, a chimney, a balloon, a musical note. A unique scene can kind of evolve out of this stuff. I don’t really know what it is when I start out, but I try to follow my feeling and intuition and use the opportunities presented along the way. It’s nice when something more cohesive comes out of it. There can be a message, or a theme at times. Maybe just an aesthetic idea or something more literal or suggestive.

I’m not exactly sure what’s happening here, except that it is maybe some sort of microscopic city. These forms are a combination of the natural, organic, and the constructed. If you can see the tiny vertical lines in various places atop the forms, it was my thought while drawing that these are perhaps people of some sort. Possibly you and me, or possibly some microscopic life form. Like the Whos in Whoville. Anyway, that can give you a sense of scale and maybe what it might be like to live in this world.