I’m still working on the ink wash sketches today. Initially I had though the black acrylic was going to be more conducive as a medium, but I’m finding that there’s a clarity and looseness to the India ink that I’m becoming more attracted to.
I also went back today and printed out a few more image resources, this time from images of flood victims. I had told myself at the beginning of this project that one of my primary goals of the work would be to produce pieces that walk the line between being peaceful and terrifying at the same time. Water very much has the potential to be both, depending on the situation. For most of this week, the images I’ve been drawing from have been images I shot at the beach at Walden Pond and also at a beach in Ogunquit, Maine last summer. The gestures from the beaches are much more subtle in terms of the positioning of the figures. When I contrast them against the images of the flood victims the two patterns that have emerged are that the flood victims 1) are generally found in large packs of figures, 2) many of them hold hands and 3) there’s a sensibility in the gestures that the figures are moving somewhere. In many of the beach scenes, the figures are simply standing there with their arms folded. A few are moving, but the most common reason for that is when the figures leave the ocean and come back to the beach.
In looking at the patterns and differences between these two very different resources, I have to find a way to choose gestures that could very well be both; the gestures that are more subtle and open to interpretation. I don’t want the gestures to be so transparent that they have no ability to go beyond what they literally are.
Clara Lieu 