This is an ongoing drawing project.The images in this blog are of the first 100 small ink drawings from appropriated social media posts, from friends, acquaintances, influencers or just random publications thrown at me by the algorithm.
The screen shots of social media or impromptu archive started at the beginning of the pandemic back in 2020.
Like many I found myself living mostly through the screen of my electronic devices, mostly my phone. As people shared and overshared their trapped lives using their phones, I found myself fascinated by the variety of content available, beyond landscapes and plants that I already collected or stolen before. So humans made it back to my work through their self publishing and I became enthralled by my fellow humans. I also became a lot more aware of the lives of others different to me: the disabled as they share their day to day, theirs joys and difficulties; the parents of the disabled as they share their knowledge of almost unique children, as they wished to made the rest of us more aware - and kinder- of our human diversity. The brown and black folk, the native original people of many nations, the remote ethnic groups and many others made me realised the importance of self publishing in aiding to address the historical lack of visual representation of their people. Suddenly I knew more somehow about many things.
And I found so much humour!
The screen shots in my archive are of human diversity in all forms, as I mentioned before, but also include memes, TikTokers, adds for shoes, paddle boards and trolleys; photos of plants on window seals, garden corners, dead pets, dead relatives -as they passed either for covid or any other ailments; old photos from the family photos as people celebrated their wedding anniversaries or honoured family members; news items such as missing people and the war in Ukraine. many, many cityscapes from Caracas and its colonial and modernist architecture, as well as landscape from other places. Many works of art from the many artists I follow, mostly photography and even dance photography. Even kinky shoes have a special place in this ongoing drawing project.
Small ink drawings were made in remnants of paper that were stored in my studio. Unable to carry on working on my oils and on any painting that required any concentration, the small drawings were intended as warm up exercises.
But as they accumulated and I didn't curtail the subject matter of these drawings -anything went, was ok to be depicted- I've realised that i was embarking on a rather ambitious drawing project.
I thought that these drawings were capturing our shared digital vision of the world as it unravel. Yet the algorithm is very personal. So this project it's really a self portrait of sorts, one of my scrolling mind.
The first 100 hang almost chronologically, I added them up as I finished them in batches of 10-20, were exhibited at Spilt Milk Gallery in Edinburgh, September 2022.
The project is ongoing as I continue to go through my vast digital archive of appropriated social media posts.
I hope I can exhibit next 200 of these drawings.
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