Improvisational Abstract Drawings: Modular Baroque

Modular Baroque
Drawing, Folding, and Improvisation
August 13, 2014

I make lots of drawings freehand, sometimes under constraints. Maybe I’ll set a number of drawings per day. Maybe I’ll set a time limit. I’ve come up with a new constraint that has to do with folding paper before or after.

This is not a new game.

At the end of the process, three separate sheets emerged, presenting “whole” drawings.





The progression of division and redrawing, from start to finish was a little too complicated to remember, and it happened in just under a hour: 58 minutes. I folded the first blank piece of paper, and then drew across the fold (yielding A1 and A2). Then I unfolded the paper and connected the two separated parts (A3). For the second sheet, I folded a blank sheet and aligned it against one of the existing folds in the first sheet. (At this point I lose track of what I did.)

Of the eight results, a few are annotated below:





Results?
I like the results just fine. The accuracy needs lots of improvement and that can happen with good ol’ hand and eye coordination. Or, perhaps digital drawing techniques one day when I have the technology. Or better still: use these results to create cleaned-up versions through tracing paper. The versions will not match up after that point, but I think the spirit of the project will still be true.

Improvisation
I’ve done over 1000 drawings as single, one shot efforts. But this was something newer because I started to think of how the connections would affect other drawings. Whether a fold exists before the drawing happens or after a drawing happens is probably going to be pretty important.

If a fold exists and I draw over it, I know ahead-of-time. But what if the drawing is in an area that hasn’t got a fold, and then I fold it to get a new modular area to branch from? I think this second situation will divide up the drawing in a way I’d probably avoid otherwise. This leads to a little more challenge for me.

I’ll have to try it soon.

Scans of the drawings involved here are viewable over on flickr.com in my “Drawings 2014” set. (By the time you read this, they might not be the most recent ones there.)
There are eight variations!

Time to get back to work making more drawings. Thanks for reading.