Fundamentals
The increasingly universal awareness that drawing is no longer considered as a mere supportive framework for preparing a work is quite significant as well as the fact that drawing is more and more accepted in the gallery of finished works. It has its own value due to the closeness of drawing with the initial will, the spontaneous record of the primary emotion, and the impossibility of hiding neither a “mistake” nor the most intimate and hidden fiber of our subconscious. Furthermore, a drawing cannot camouflage the technical flaws or the archetype level one has reached. In short, a drawing is the most sincere expression of our inner world and of our way of perceiving the world we live in.
I am interested in rescuing drawing as a spontaneous register of the most primary closeness to the model and as the image that makes its manufacturing honestly transparent. According to this formal appreciation it is possible to establish an analogy between drawing and childhood, since both represent a direct expression and a spontaneous way of perceiving the world..
The rescue of drawing put forward in my project involved working in the presence of the model. Resorting to a natural drawing and to the most elementary means for drawing, charcoal, I intend to make the image bare in itself the subjective burden of the performer, which is –in theory- denied in the objectiveness of a photograph. Drawing naturally is the addition of millions of seconds one on top of the other, while a photograph is the portrait of a given second. .
I nevertheless encountered a genuine unfeasibility: the children´s scarce availability of posing time. At times I needed to work for more than eight hours in a row. Consequently, in some cases I was forced to use a photograph. This allowed me to appreciate the difference between using photography and not.
In order to make my works as less photographic as possible, I carried out the first drawings naturally and when the posing session was over, I sometimes made several photographic records to enable me to continue my work. This allowed the children, in all cases, to adopt the typical attitude of boredom seen in the greatest portraits in history.
I decided that enlarging the scale would also harm the faithfulness to the model. This was a primary aspect of my project, because making the children figures gigantic enabled me to alter the normal perception of the spectator and bring the images out of the conventional record made of children, by giving them the solemn and mysterious appearance inherent to the adult world. Disguised and enormous, the children look timeless, it is impossible to classify them within a given period of time or place; they also relate iconographically to portraits of historical characters, representations of power, richness or knowledge.
The drawing, that served initially as the framework and complement of oil painting, had to become the protagonist. Instead of oil paintings I was carrying out charcoal drawings and therefore they had to be “charcoaled” as much as possible. This was the project´s most complex challenge. A process which I believe I am still beginning to comprehend, the rescue of what lies beneath the oil painting.
Ximena Cousiño 2012
