Ideas for panel drawings

SHETLAND WAR RUIN PROJECT

Leading on from recent thought on Chinese landscapes, time, space and ruins. In the first sketch I was thinking about a sense of shifting landscape (in many ways coming from the projection work in the installation room where images faded in and out), but quickly realised the ruins were ‘dropped in’, each drawn in perspective in this way. Isometric space was something I was introduced to in a drawing workshop last year and is closer to the Chinese/Japanese way of drawing structures in the landscape. In the second sketch here, using this through drawing an isometric grid, there is more sense of a landscape which the eye can traverse, seen as though from an eternal, above, oblique viewpoint. I continued to work with this, also trying (above, left page) a grid which became gradually flatter towards the top, giving a sense of space falling away towards the bottom. In Chinese works, the isometric system is by no means fixed through the whole of a single image. As Vladimir Brodsky describes in ‘World Created in the Image of Man: The Conflict Between Pictorial Form and Space in Defiance of the Law of Temporality’ (Peter Lang Publishing, 2009), space could be manipulated, to show emotion in the scene depicted for example. Working on this sketches led me to see how space could possibly be something more adaptable, expressive and also expressive of time and journey.