Wyatt Harrah
Stripes, 2021
Ink on paper
24 x 18 inches
I’ve always done very labor-intensive black and white abstract pieces. Usually with a pen I will fill my sketchbook with abstract lines and shapes for hours. The reason I do it could be because I feel my technical art skills aren’t very good, I can’t reliably render ideas I have in my head, especially if there is realism or paint involved. I learned if I wanted to be proud of a piece I could replace the skills I lacked with the time I was willing to devote. If I didn’t spend a lot of time on a piece and it didn’t display alot of technical ability then I would feel guilty if I was proud of it. It isn’t always this way and I certainly don’t think that of other artists, but a lot of the time I can’t help that my art has less value if I spend less time making it. Another reason I do it could be that I simply just really enjoy it, I really enjoy the feeling of working and feeling fatigued and the feeling of relief after finishing a piece after all the work. Whatever the reason, I’ve noticed that the more time I put into the piece the better it looks in my eyes. This is one of the reasons that I wanted this piece to be bigger than most of my art. The bigger a piece is the more time needs to be put into it, and a bigger piece also has the capacity for more detail.I want the scale of this piece to theoretically fit in in a gallery. I think what that means to me is a size that wouldn’t be dwarfed by an empty wall of a gallery, something you could see from across a room. Besides the size the other theme I wanted to work with is tone. I was inspired by the artist Susu Takashima, they describe their art as line drawings in which the width of lines change from the beginning to the end. This results in their work transitioning from dark to light from beginning to start of each line. Another artist I hear people frequently bring up when talking about a lot of my art is Agnes Martin. What I particularly like about Martin’s work is that it is semi dystopian. What I mean by that is her art, especially when in a gallery, seems very antithetical to more classical paintings. I imagine her work is what a classical painter would imagine the worst future for art would be. They’re very geometric, simple, and abstract. I wanted to take the tones of light and dark from Kusama’s pieces and the dystopian geometry of Martin’s work and make something of my own.
Click images to enlarge.
