Line

I’m starting to think like a pop-up book. Line defining space rather than mass. Here’s a preliminary practice work for an illustration of the first paragraph of “Alice in Wonderland.” This is Alice. I want to create a world that is 2D and 3D at the same time. Flat figures and objects arranged in 3 planes: simply foreground, middle ground, and backdrop. Maybe that’s my theatre history emerging in my work. Downstage, Upstage, Centerstage, fly systems. I suppose we all have to draw from what we know and how we are used to seeing the world.

This is only Alice. The vision can’t be realized until she is put in context with the environment, but I need to start practicing a new treatment of figures and objects, so I’m working on creating a dominant line defining the space around the object/figure, lines within always serving this ruling line, and washing out some saturation of my usual treatment of color. We’ll see where it leads me.

To be continued…