Ghosts

During the Covid Pandemic, I relocated across the country. When I drew I drew in my small sketchbook and focused, appropriately, on images of floods, fires, and loss.

— David Bailin • 2021

Sketchbook IV: Selections

All pages approximately 5½ x 3½ inches.

Statement

During the last couple of years, I have worked primarily in my sketchbook. When drawing thumbnails and sketches, there are no grand gestures, prickly technical issues or self-consciousness, no expectations or visual blowback from an unresponsive image. Sometimes an image is discovered on one of those pages that sparks a new idea or series of drawings. And sometimes the act of sketching is so calming and restful that I find myself falling asleep mid-gesture only to wake up finishing the line. In the interstices between sleep and awakening, an image will occur. Most of the time it is lost but occasionally it appears fully formed. The series, Ghosts, involve images I retained from those moments. There is no thematic or narrative consistency except that in each of the drawings, the selection of materials and technique is self-referential. In a drawing using charcoal that has been wiped and blown off the paper, a women stands in front of a broken tree that has fallen over a fence during a storm; ink drawn over charcoal creates a gritty, muddy surface for a drawing of a boat stuck in a dried up lake bed; dragging the side of a piece of charcoal across a gessoed canvas creates a powder of blurry images that depict people moving to or running away from some kind of disaster.

These drawings are interruptions that insert themselves into my artistic process and require a special consideration. A consideration not only of what is drawn but how it is drawn.

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