Finished Drawing:
The Infernal Performance
Blue ballpoint pens on 18 x 24” Mayfair paper
Pens used: 4.5
When I first started planning this drawing I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with it other than that I wanted to do a circus theme. I worked through some preliminary sketches and then was struck by an idea of a floating circus, which led me to thoughts of expressing Dante’s Inferno with relation to the layers of hell as a ‘circus island’ of sorts. There is a ringleader performing to a crowd of same-faced children. In front of him is a portal gate into the circus in the form of a clown’s mouth. All of this is occurring on a piece of land that has been torn from the ground and underneath it resides an array of various performers and circus animals.
Essentially, the idea behind this piece (aside from it being a nod to a layer of hell according to Inferno) is that it is a criticism of the act of trampling others to achieve perceived greatness, as the ringleader has done in this drawing. I say that his greatness is perceived and not actual in that with his acts he has created this personal hell of his in which the audience could merely be a figment of his imagination with their same-faces and eerie smiles. It is an indulgence of sorts. To compare it to one layer of hell in Dante’s Inferno I would say that it relates most to pride, but I think that more than pride this drawing has to do with delusion. He performs to a crowd that sees him as the ultimately achiever of such a nightmare scape, yet the actual backbone of the circus and the workforce behind the performance is buried underneath the ground, forgotten from the world above.
Another smaller idea behind this piece deals with the act of performance itself as an artificial role that many of us play in our everyday lives. The perceived greatness of the ringleader mimics a strive in life for fame, fortune, and more and with ignorance to what might actually be important. In the grand scheme of things, we mean very little, and the universe is very big. This performance will ultimately go unnoticed. The piece is a nod to an idea that life itself is a circus, and, just like the performers, many of us will end up buried during the act.
Close-ups:
Process:
Preliminary Sketches:
Last planning sketch before starting the final piece
Scribble Line Sketches:
Black ball point pen, continuous and quick scribble line
Blue ball point pen. Practicing the style of Il Lee’s scribble line drawings.
Red gel pen, working in a type of scribble line that resembles text but isn’t actually words.
HB pencil, working with a rapid scribble line without a contour guideline
Sharpie, circular scribbles
Pencil crayon, experimenting with mixing different colours of scribbles to create shading
Highlighter and black sharpie, loose scribbles
Charcoal. I wanted to practice rendering a face with scribbles since I was going to draw a lot of them in my final piece. The circus theme also transfers heavily to the larger drawing.
White gel pen on black paper. I wanted to test what the drawing would look like if the highlights were scribbled in instead of the shadows.
Fine liners with a defined border and multiple colours.
Artist Research:
Russel Crotty
Seb Patane
Sol Lewitt
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