Large Drawings

LARGE DRAWINGS 

Selected Works

SPACE LIKE BLACK VELVET SERIES

The originality of this idea encapsulates the notion of the flower image that is held in space, emerging from darkness into light. This is not a renaissance concept, rather it has developed directly from observational experience and individual investigation through an early practice as an abstract painter and the training of large brush calligraphy in Japan.

Citations from an essay:
Emerging from Darkness into Light (abridged)
Coral G Guest, South Wales, 20012

When the velvety texture of the darkness that is created from the charcoal surface is preserved, the drawing maintains the sense of space it creates. Consequently, the flower subject, and particularly the petals, have the appearance of emerging from a darkness into light.

Back lighting the flower subject with artificial light is not practiced as this would have a reverse effect and thus creates the impression of an image that is falling backwards into darkness. The phrase emerging from darkness into light has been sgraffito the hall mark of my carbon with watercolour and other mixed media works since I was a student in the 1970s. It is a phrase that has had a global effect on the narrow field of botanical art practices and its recent emergent fashion for works in monochrome post 2000. Few have investigated or developed this process in practice, and fewer comprehend it, preferring to depict only the appearance of things and imitate the techniques used.

These works are the first development of the use of mixed media to create a dark space for a light image of a flower subject in the botanical art genre. As a result of being trained by both the expressionist Ken Kiff and the abstract painter Sean Scully, the use of mixed media drawing to create a dark space for the flower motif is aimed at transcending the ancient art of the flat background. This further relates to an ongoing interest in the singularity. This mixed media work merges the art of flower drawing with a visionary approach to botanical art, by engaging with spacetime as a reality and the interpretation of space as a pictorial message to the viewer.

This work offers a translation of unproven ideas and the visual merging of an interest in a theoretical particle, specifically the graviton. It expresses an ongoing fascination with how gravity is related to weather patterns and defines the general demeanour of plant life in the natural world.

This is a rare subject to think through, and it is based upon an individual and ongoing need to investigate how form relates to space, and appears to be inseparable from space. The process represents and demonstrates an understanding and investigation into how an idea connects to developed techniques. From 1974 and ongoing, it reached maturity in 2006. Thereafter, I began to seek a point of resolution in this series of drawings.

© Coral G Guest |
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