To follow the thread, go back to posts for May 22, 23, and 24. The representational drawing by In Young (May 22) will show you what the still life looked like. Now, here we have Austin’s take. Austin is an architecture student. Her charcoal pencil always produces clearly delineated forms defining intensely dark masses. No exception here. These dark shapes manage to loom on the page like a didactic memorial, perhaps a war memorial. (I was reminded of Henry Moore and others in the class also made that connection.)
She achieves this effect because 1) the forms are barely recognizable as pottery and 2) there is no reference to a familiar object that could serve to establish a sense of scale. In other words, Austin looked at those ordinary pots on the studio table and used them as a point of departure for a drawing of the kind of monumental forms that she produced in all the classes, even when the subject was a vase with flowers.
This is the fourth drawing in a series of seven, titled “Pile of Pots.”
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 