Research on drawing of natural elements - sea, night sky

Vija Celmins

Celmins’ work appears to be almost photo-realistic, her palette is limited to grey tones and she explains her approach -

I see drawing as thinking, evidence of getting from one place to another. One draws to define one thing from another. I tend to take very small increments and steps in changing. An example was that I had been working with pencil and I began to see that the graphite itself had a certain life to it. So I did a series of images of oceans and deserts using different grades of graphite and pushing each one to its limit. I learned a lot about the possibilities of expressiveness in graphite by doing this. Then I moved into the galaxy drawings. Even though you may think they came from lying under the stars, for me, they came out of loving the blackness of the pencil. It’s almost as if I was exploring the blackness of the pencil along with the image that went with it. (Quoted in Drawing as Thinking, [pp.1-2].)

In the video www.vimeo.com/22299024 Celmins explains that her drawings use as a reference natural objects such as stones she found. It looks to me that she uses the patterns of the natural objects which may for example resemble the pattern of the stars, and she puts this together with things from her imagination to produce very imaginative and engaging pieces of work

Celmins’ approach is very interesting, and also useful, because I find it very difficult to conceive a work without any reference, and often begin with a photo. In doing so however it’s difficult to avoid copying the photo too much, and as a result my work sometimes lacks freshness.

Some of her work are:

Sky- night,1991

Untitle, 1970

References

www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-galaxy-p78335

www. imagejournal.org/article/active-sight/