Click on the link “Graphic Art” in the right sidebar to view my art on Etsy.
The opening salvo in my triumphant return to graphic art (after Miss McElree’s class) is Rabbit Dreams. It was drawn by starting to doodle in one corner and, years later, ending in the other. It started out as a meaningless free-form salmagundi. But as I went along, it started to take on meaning. There: Fukushima. There: more nuclear power plants. There: regiments of technocratic onlookers. There: the rabbit, symbol of overpopulation. There: his nightmare, aftermath of rabbits doing what comes naturally. I bought a set of art pencils when I started out. But half-way through, I realized that mechanical pencils worked best for the ornate fiddling I was doing. I did copy some of the images from books and the internet. But all were drawn freehand—no tracing—and each was altered to suit my purposes. When I was finally finished, I took the drawing to a printmaker in Bryn Mawr and had a scan and copies of various sizes made. Then I bought some colored ink pens and started to ink in 8 1/2 x 11 prints like pages in a coloring book. In my first version, Rabbit Dreams I, I used the whole rainbow. In later versions, I found that a limited palette gave each version more of its own character. Nota bene: The digital versions of these small inked prints are all that is left of them. The ink has faded to a pale pastel on the originals. A lesson. Never use colored ink on coldpress water-color paper. It just sinks in and disappears.
Even though I draw it, my art can be considered conceptual, because I start with a concept. Chaos in this case was my concept. A long time ago, I read a chapter in James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science on the subject of “scale,” the idea that objects, if they are of sufficient complexity, look different when seen from different viewpoints. One example stayed in my memory. The Paris Opera House, Gleick argues, is more interesting to look at than a New York skyscraper, because the Paris Opera House employs “scale.” In other words, view it from nearby or view it from afar, the New York skyscraper always looks the same. The Paris Opera House, on the other hand, is complex enough that your perception of it changes as you approach and as you retreat. “Simple shapes are inhuman,” asserts Gleick. “They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.” The initial concept behind Rabbit Dreams was to draw something with enough complexity that it would have scale, that it would look different when viewed from near, far, or yonder.
Ted Silar 