Drawings have a featherlike quality.
Sometimes you think of something and it is so light, so slight, that you don’t have time to make a note in your diary. Everything is fleeting, but your drawing will serve as a reminder, otherwise it is forgotten.
In the last few years, I have been experimenting with different ways to generate drawings. My current work is a series of both encaustic drawings and ink drawings that were generated in response to behavioral studies and observations. Creating a body of work in response to another body of work has allowed me to question how much visual information is necessary when attempting to create work about subtle, often overlooked behaviors.
It appears to me that much of this new work relates to degrees of pliability – torques and tensions – small forces applied to an object. What force acted on the object and left it in this way? What forces are acting on us without our noticing? How much is really necessary to keep a structure in place? Ladders, loops, arcs, nets… lines being pulled, stressed, fruitlessly resisting being molded. I find something deceptively simple, optimistic, and sometimes comical, in that resistance.
In
using oil, wax, ink and paper, I am also intrigued with how material and mark can
contribute to the interpretation of these themes in the work, and assist in
making the results of physical subtle forces more visually apparent. Ultimately, I am interested in how the
visual domain and the artistic process can be used to examine assumptions, draw
attention to subtleties (behavioral, textural, and material), and engage
interest in topics sometimes thought to be unconnected to drawing.
Rebecca
Zilinski
In art there is only one thing that counts; the thing you can’t explain.
– Georges Braque, Notebooks 1917-1947
