Out of my 100 drawings, I began to see themes such as feelings and emotion, memory, and public/private spaces surface. During the process of completing this assignment, I often found myself trying to illustrate how I was feeling because I had immediate access to these ideas unlike having to draw from reference photos. I heavily relied on memory for these drawings as I felt like they were the easiest to draw out and a lot of the times, I resorted to memories of public/private spaces. All of the themes found in my drawings blend in with another seamlessly because a lot of memories I have are heavily based on my emotions and are often attached to physical places that I have visited in the past. Just from looking at the collection of drawings I’ve made, these themes may not seem too apparent but to me, I can link many of the drawings together and even place them on a timeline. I started off this assignment by trying to capture my emotions but towards the end of the assignment, I began drawing out interior spaces of places I resonate with deeply (my old house in Beijing, hotel rooms that I’ve been to on holiday, etc.). The common ground between these themes is their personal connections to me and how they all tie together in my mind but not so much for an observer looking at them all together at once. I did not consciously plan on drawing each picture so that these themes would surface but it did not surprise me to find that these themes would emerge and work well together.
These were the first 9 drawings I created in class. (process photo)
This is a photograph of all the 100 drawings that I drew.
I split my drawings into 20’s and did 20 drawings every day (process photo)
The leftmost group of ten drawings is centered around physical places that I drew from memory. The middle group of drawings all depicts people in some way. The rightmost group of ten drawings is all centered around emotions and how I tried to capture and express what I was feeling through drawings. The drawings I did that depicted people were primarily blind contour drawings, thus leaving the sharpie marks more uncontrolled and shaky. The composition of the collection of drawings based on feelings are more jam-packed as more doodles are needed to convey those feelings, leaving very little empty space on the page. The physical places drawings were all based on places I have actually visited and were drawn purely from my memory. My style of line in the peoples’ collection is the most “messy” out of the other collection, however, I balance that clutter by leaving a lot of empty space around the actual drawing so the focal point is purely on the faces. I personally like the emotions collection the most because together, they work well to convey one big emotion that is entirely up to the audience’s interpretation. The places collection is also a very interesting collection where each image feels like it is a snapshot of a moment in my mind once you view them together all at once.
My partner Grace picked out these ten images from my one hundred drawings and here is how she described her curatorial choices:
They all felt like scenes out of a film or cartoon to me, all moments captured in still form. Things are in the of happening – the fish are dancing, hands are reaching, people watching etc. the line varies between the pieces but they all seem to hold a story or background to the image themselves.
