Abstract 17 is a six page experiment. Page one is here. I was interested in exploring several ideas. Breaking up and spreading out the elements of a comic over several pages. Seeing if people would use these elements to create narrative. How viewing these pages on the Internet would effect how people viewed these images.I also like this comic page on its own for its pure miminalism.
Drawingsilence.com
This is really powerful - maybe because I have so much on my mind lately, I can't help but project a lot into those blank spaces - not to mention the artistic urge to imagine something in them. The thick borders are what make it effective though.
ReplyDeleteLooking at it again, every panel also works like a character - waiting for me to do something I'm supposed to do (like get to work!)
btw, I love your pages in the anthology. They could be nothing more than very simple conceptual pieces but your expressive lines make them feel more personal.
Yeah, Dave, that is really really excellent. Which in a way is surprising given the minimal number of elements used. Really powerful (but I'm just repeating what Mike said). How would you print it: first page on a recto or a verso?
ReplyDeleteAndrei:
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments
Tough call, without doing some tests I would have to say recto, but then I would probably want to keep all 6 pages on recto as well with blank pages in between. Or I would see what it would look like printed on tracing paper.
Mike:
Yeah I'm really interested in the idea of projecting and imaging whats going on in those panels. Thanks also for the comments about the book, I'm really looking forward to my copy arriving.
Thanks
Love this work Draw!! I agree with what has been written about it here, but I have one concern. Mike has written that "They could be nothing more than very simple conceptual pieces but your expressive lines make them feel more personal." Although I agree with him that your line work has an intimate charm to it, I am not sure what is meant by "nothing more than simple conceptual pieces" as I do not see anything simple about this kind of conceptual art. The notion of reducing something to nothing (ala John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg et. al.) is not simple to me in any way. It provokes a serious reconsideration of what comics is.
ReplyDeleteYou will remember that I started thinking through how to isolate the comics essence a while back and we had a long talk about the "frame." I believe that the frame (inside the frame of the page/canvas) was necessary for comics to come into being. Not just a frame, but a double articulation of the frame (frames within frames). Film's frame is at the edge of the screen, the painting at the edge of the canvas, the drawing at the edge of the paper. But comics carve a frame into the frame and make framing visible as an activity which I find interesting.
Obviously once the frame was established as the defining feature of comics there appear comics without frames, full page comics without internal frames. But I believe that the comic could never have come into being without the frame-within-a-frame to initially distinguish it from drawing.
Anyway - I feel the conceptual meditation on framing here is very complex and not simple at all. But then again you know how I feel about this kind of work. I feel that "abstract comics" is not an appropriate category for what you are doing here. These are "conceptual comics" and historically conceptualism stood in opposition to abstract expressionism, for instance. Not that I feel they have to be at war, or even in opposition. But the distinction is interesting to me.
Much Love-
D