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Poem, Phrase, Word, in Observation Drawing





Last year, I was obsessed with experimenting with different mediums and materials on drawing, the main theme I was exploring is that whatever object I draw is not important, what is important is what visual language I use and the mark making and materials can evoke the audience's interest and emotion. So I chose one of the most common objects in our life - apple as the content to draw with different visual languages.




Earlier this year, I started to think about the connection between poem and observation drawing, In poem, poet use different Words to construct phrase, use phrases to construct poem, those phrases themselves have imagery already, so sometimes the poem doesn't necessarily need to have sentences, just the combination of beautiful and meaningful phrases.


As a result, when I am doing an observation drawing or painting, I start to see myself as a visual poet, see my work as a poem, see the real world in front of me as just a reference, I pick up the interesting parts I would like to use as phrase to put in my artwork in terms of visual needs, mark making and every stroke I make as words to make the phrases make sense. In that case, to make a beautiful poem (artwork), the quality of words (the mark making) and the choose of phrases (references) is essential.









This is also one of the ways I found to not copy the real object, but to abstract it to become resource that I can use freely. There are also some other ways to pick up the phrases, for example zoom in the object, focus more on details, texture, or zoom out the scene to observe the relationship and space, abandon the perspective, seeing the reality as decorative elements... I am still on my way to experiment with it. Next step I will focus more on evoking emotional resonance with the audience from my work.



 














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