— stella untalan : artlog

Show­ing my work.

I’ve been think­ing quite a bit lately about being more focused on show­ing some of my work. That means mak­ing sure I have images to post on my web­site. This isn’t dif­fi­cult for my smaller draw­ings I scan them and that is the best solution.

I was able to do this recently with my win­ter twins draw­ings even though they are on a syn­thetic, translu­cent sub­strate. I cut a sheet of Rives BFK Gray to use as a back­ing to make sure that the opaque white gouache wash could be seen. It worked well. Cer­tainly as close as I am going to get to actual hang­ing conditions.

Now my new indigo-dot draw­ings are yet another adven­ture. The actual draw­ing is cen­tered on a 22 x 30 sheet . There is very lit­tle con­trast between the back­ground color and the hand drawn graphite grid — it’s the point actu­ally. So the graphite is change­able under dif­fer­ent light­ing con­di­tions; it shim­mers, glints, or dis­ap­pears. I’m not sure that scan­ning can depict that. I could see if they could be flatbed scanned I’m look­ing at options and pric­ing. I’ll do at least one test.

The other option is pho­tograph­ing the work. That will give me the most options of light­ing and expo­sure. It will also require some detail shots. I need to do some test­ing and then pric­ing for this option.

There are 18 draw­ings so it will be pricy.

Once doc­u­mented — presentation.

Once the work is doc­u­mented I can start fig­ur­ing out how the work can be framed for pre­sen­ta­tion. So many of the pos­si­bil­i­ties I see require the work to be framed. Enter­ing the work into com­pe­ti­tions requires fram­ing. The indigo-dot draw­ings are on print­mak­ing paper. It needs to pro­tected from mois­ture so it must be framed for pre­sen­ta­tion.  My most recent draw­ings can be framed behind lexan. No pas­tel dust to worry about being elec­tri­cally charged and get­ting pulled to the clear surface.

The edge of the paper and it’s rela­tion­ship to the draw­ing and the framed edge are very impor­tant to me. Each is a bor­der that artic­u­lates a dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship between the draw­ing and it’s place in the phys­i­cal world. The draw­ing needs a bound­ary of quiet between it and the world.