Fish Palimpsest Deconstructed

I drew a weird line drawing of a fish with a pencil on a pad of paper.  On the next page of the pad, I traced the indented lines of the pencil.  Repeated.  After that, hailing The Big Lebowski, I shaded over all of the indents.

I made the original of this a year ago, and although my art has changed since I started working digitally, the idea of layers of lines and varying opacity has continued to shape my artistic aesthetic and perspective.

A palimpsest (in the title of the work) is something that reveals the layers beneath it (like a chalk board).  The deconstruction of the palimpsest (showing all of the layers explicitly, as I’ve done below) tells the story of the drawing process.  I drew this a while ago in the dining room of my parents’ place.  The pad I used was one of those Realtor promotions.  I cropped out the Realtor’s face.

 

7 Comments

  1. i often think of prehistoric fish and how they evolved. Here you have one evolving or devolving (word?) in art. Quite lovely

  2. The image layer of the image in the second box looks like a school bus. I can totally see jaws of a fish in the first box, but it looks more like a Mario Brothers plant of ball-in-chain bad guy too.

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