The past year here in Whanganui so far has been a cyclic year. By that I mean my work has picked up on older aspects of my practice, including specific compositions used in the past and a rejigging and re-interpretation of symbolism. When this happens, the progression in my work feels like it's slowing down, but the intricacy of the reassessing of symbolism is very rewarding at the time of drawing and painting.
The cycles seem to be in three-year spells, the weird thing is that I find myself rummaging through all my sketchbooks, dating back to 1995 and redrawing images into my most recent sketchbook without realising it, so I guess that's the main reason for the re-infection of older ideas. I guess you never totally empty out a vein that you're mining at the time, so you go back to it, reinvestigate, mine a bit more.
Serendipity also seems to play a big part too, as in the image below for instance. I've drawn over the etching below to give it new life and to try out some new compositional ideas that I've been using in recent retablos. The original etching, titled Faith Waste was copied from a drawing of the same titled from 2004, now in a private collection in Wellington (scroll down about 3/4's of the page to view). Recently, when sending some works to a gallery, I found some of the test prints of the etching in a folder, so I decided to draw on them. One of the results is shown below.
The cycles seem to be in three-year spells, the weird thing is that I find myself rummaging through all my sketchbooks, dating back to 1995 and redrawing images into my most recent sketchbook without realising it, so I guess that's the main reason for the re-infection of older ideas. I guess you never totally empty out a vein that you're mining at the time, so you go back to it, reinvestigate, mine a bit more.
Serendipity also seems to play a big part too, as in the image below for instance. I've drawn over the etching below to give it new life and to try out some new compositional ideas that I've been using in recent retablos. The original etching, titled Faith Waste was copied from a drawing of the same titled from 2004, now in a private collection in Wellington (scroll down about 3/4's of the page to view). Recently, when sending some works to a gallery, I found some of the test prints of the etching in a folder, so I decided to draw on them. One of the results is shown below.
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