By now I defined main elements of my drawing but still, I needed to define a size of the work, I need to study how light falls across my subject, I need to define a material(s) I want to use for the final piece and a tonal gradation.
So the task is big and I want to go on an easier way… isn’t it what we are trying to do out of our human nature? – Trying to simplify our life?!
But before starting a description of my work I want to introduce a TaoBao.
Basically, I believe that after the creation of iPhone this is the second biggest creation of our civilization in our lifetime. Jack Ma created the “Taobao (Chinese: 淘宝网) is a Chinese online shopping website, headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and is a subsidiary of Alibaba Group. It is the world's biggest e-commerce website… As of 31 March 2018, Taobao has over 617 million monthly active users.” [Wikipedia [Online] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taobao [Accessed 23/08/18] and I'm one of them. Life became so fast and simple that you cannot fully understand it. Before it could take several weeks to find the right epoxy resin for my experiments but now I need just to upload a right photo and in 2/3 days it is delivered to my door. On the streets there are thousands of delivery boys with all kind of cardboard boxes. They are lying everywhere in a pavement, in front of the each door, inside of our houses. All our life through this boxes – this a new way of the consumption.
In order to build the volume of the bookshelf which I took as the main subject of my composition, will be supported by the shape of the boxes so would not need much to “imitate” the reality. But as professors of my University will be judging this as a part of a drawing exercise I would need to implement the marks.
Considering the definition of the drawing from the “Vitamin D” book – “…drawing is no longer limited to the notebook or the preparatory sketch, nor to pencil on paper. Drawing is…defined as a mark-making process used to produce a line-based composition; and…drawing range from monumental to micro, from conceptual to three-dimensional, from black-and-white to full colour.” (E. Dexter, Vitamin D, 2013, p.5) I valuing this as a support of my experiment.
In the preparatory stage, I created several photos of the books and arranged them in a kind of composition and rhythm. Size of the object on the working side is 64 x 40 centimetres (around A2). As the volume still was not so obvious I used simple lines to make foreground stands out more and at the same time this type of line would allow me to create a feeling of a “flat space”. So to say from far it looks like an empty space and from closer look it is what it is – a flat surface with lines.
And the last conclusion about this work. When I positioned this piece next to the real shelf it was a mixed feeling. On one hand, I thought now I have the same books doubled (I really thought about this), on the other, I created a fake which looks like expensive proper books but it is an empty cardboard boxes – it is not what I imitated.
After recent research about “domestic interiors” I almost ready to say that in this work I rather raise questions than depict the narrative story.
Bibliography and references
Emma Dexter (2013) Vitamin D: New perspectives in Drawing. Printed 2016 London: Phaidon Press Limited
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