pencil on paper
all images are details
the feldman drawings began with a listening exercise, thinking about how listening to a certain piece of music every night for a month while falling asleep. after a few weeks, i realized that the listening activity was not so fruitful, so i decided to not only listen to feldman while falling asleep, but while lying in bed in the dark, i decided to make drawings based on what i was listening to.
over the month of december 2004 i listened to morton feldman’s composition: piano and string quartet, every night, with the lights off, drawing until i fell asleep. sometimes i would listen and draw for the whole hour of the composition and sometimes i would fall asleep after only a few minutes. the drawings were made without being able to see, and using the sounds of feldman’s composition to determine the movements of my hand holding a pencil against a piece of paper. in every case, i drew and listened until i fell asleep, generally being woken up by the discovery of a pencil lodged in my back!
the resulting drawings attempted to consider the process of drawing as a process of recording (music, drawing, moments, falling to sleep, etc.), and the drawings follow years of drawings made with my eyes closed in response to sounds in specific spaces. the earlier “eyes closed listening” drawings grew out of a conversation between drawing and making “field recordings” (where one traditionally captures the sounds of a particular place on tape as an audio document).
the act of drawing is very much related to early audio recording technologies, such as making a drawing or engraving a plate for a print, and the “cutting” of the surface of a gramophone record.
these drawings offer a process of re-recording and transformation through context and repetition. as i listen to feldman’s piece i am also “recording” what i hear in the form of lines on a piece of paper. the drawing is not music, nor is it notation. it is a drawing, confined by my limitation to articulate sound visually… offering idiosyncratic graphic images that could only have come about through the music and the process of making… i.e. groping in the dark.