Charcoal drawings on rag paper

I have a love for paper. While visiting a paper mill I fell for a very special kind of paper, a thin, almost transparent and fibrous rag paper and I bought a stack of sheets. This paper made me reach back to an old, classic technique, the charcoal drawing.

That I started out as a graphic artist is still visible in my work. Once I scratched and dug deeply into zinc and aluminium, and in fact I still dig in my drawings, my pastels and my canvasses. Charcoal is a primal and deep black material, and with that charcoal I was entirely back to my basics for a while.

The rag paper I used seems thin and fragile, but is as strong as iron. That turned out to be necessary, as the creation of a charcoal drawing became a time consuming process.

Untitled
75x56 cm

I wanted to keep the history of creation visible, layering is after all part of my symbolic idiom. Rubbing charcoal away is not possible with this paper, I didn't want to. To me all phases of the creative process have a function. Seeing possibilities, making choices, seeking harmony and dynamics, handling mystery and logic. That is in fact the theme of the series.

An outsider does not realize how exciting the manipulation of one of those sheets can be. That quest to arise, why and where to, totally under the spell of the materials.

I am rather satisfied with this, sometimes mysterious, black series and see it as an essential part of my symbolic repertoire.

A series of charcoal phantasies arose, that gives a laboured (sometimes even a rather dark) impression while keeping a wonderful transparency. These are worth seeing.