Drawing Quote Unquote

Image - Erik Schuessler

Drawing Quote Unquote

INSTALLATION photos (click here)

Jan 15 - Feb 12, 2016

Edith O'Donnell Visual Arts Gallery

ATC 1.705, 1.701 and

Grand South Exhibition Hallway (outside of Lecture Hall)

University of Texas at Dallas

Richardson, TX

Curated by

Lorraine Tady

Through the work of local and emerging artists, Drawing Quote Unquote explores various ways to interpret the notion of drawing. Plans or diagrams distill intent much differently than a doodle, but both draw a line. One may draw a line in space with movement, a piece of wire or thread, or pour light through celluloid projecting a line. The exhibition also highlights traditional mark making and drawing processes such as working values on toned paper and staining, stamping, etching, inking and frottage. The contemporary artists in Drawing Quote Unquote continue the dynamic history of “drawing” to humor, communicate, express and politicize.

Participating Artists

Shelby Cunningham
Ben Bascombe

K. Yoland

Rebecca Carter

Ryder Richards

David Willburn

Nicholas C. Mathis

Fred Villanueva

Vincent Falsetta

Erik Schuessler

Vance Wingate

Kristen Cochran

Marcelyn McNeil
Jeff Gibbons
Sandra Lara
Heyd Fontenot
Michael A. Morris
Sara Cardona
John A. Hernandez
Mary Ellen Lacy
Doug Land
Peter Ligon
Bruce Lee Webb
Olive Gee Hellstrom
Joachim West
Shawn Mayer
William Binnie
Zoetina Veal
Teresa Gomez-Martorell
Spencer Brown-Pearn

*

Quotations by the artists on drawing

Michael A. Morris

Sound Performance & Video (details and still)

click here to view Morris' work in the exhibition

Working in moving images in the 21st century can be quite a disembodied set of tasks. In response to the increasingly digital processes involved in both representational and abstract approaches to image making, I've found myself more and more attracted to processes that involve my body interacting directly with the material that forms the image (in most cases, 16mm film) while simultaneously using digital, procedural processes to extend the fixed, tactile film medium into an immediate way of forming an interactive, composite image. While this might seem heavy on the side of process and technique for its own sake, my interest in these different ways of understanding images is in their actual proximity to the body, their way of representing the body or the body's index, the way those indices persist through time and the psychological value of the viewer's relationship to those images. Where I see a relationship to drawing in this way of working is two fold: I understand drawing to be a process close to the body of the artist and sometimes also a way of making an image with a certain immediacy. I want my work to have a similar level of intimacy between me and and the material I'm working with while also having a considered relationship to time. In my mind, augmenting 16mm film projections with custom software to generate real-time images in response to the film image balances between these two ideals. - Michael A. Morris

Joachim West

Drawing is an extremely effective communication tool and not a completely separate discipline from one of humanities most effective communication tools; writing. In the east, the distinction is less pronounced. Writing Kanji or Chinese Hanzi or Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy are well respected art forms and large beautiful words are framed and hung on the wall.

Written communication is a visual language that began as a pictographic system. The person who wished to communicate would draw symbols that mimicked the appearance of the things that they wanted to represent as a way of expressing themselves visually. Over time, the symbols became simplified; they morphed into ideograms and phonetograms, into the characters that we know today in the worlds different systems of writing. For example, the Egyptian Apis, which was drawn with horns, and ears to closely mimic the head of a bull became the Phoenician Aleph, then the Greek letter Alpha and then into the Roman letter A which we use today. Imagine the letter A upside down and you can see a simplified version of the drawing of a bull’s head with horns that it was originally.

Drawing is not only a means of communication but also a tool that assists an artist in creative thinking. For the draftsmen the line becomes an avenue of visual exploration. Each mark is a launching point for another creative decision. Should the artist erase? Should he redraw the line? Should he add another line and where should he add it?

In the same way that what an author has already written guides his creative thinking, so too does the artist’s previous work become the context for their creative thought. - Joachim West

Jeff Gibbons

Click below for video

Video - Jeff Gibbons

- what does "drawin" mean to you in your practice?

Not much really.

- what does it mean for you "to drawer?"

Generally, using a pencil or pen to make marks of some kind on something that's usually flat.

- how do you interpret in your work the act of "drawin" or labeling something a "drawin?"

If I drew it, then most likely it's a drawing.

- why draw or what "drawin" is (for you) that distinguishes it (for you) from other mediums/disciplines?

(For me) drawings are drawings, and sometimes people call things drawings that aren't drawings (for them).

- what can drawin do?

They can be hung on walls, put in folders or drawers. They can be folded up and put in an envelope, or set on fire. They can be leaned against or flown over. Etc.

- to drawer means you get _taffy_ compared to _jelly_beans_

- I never drawer in the traditional way because....

We are all dying and talking about when a drawing is a drawing.

-Jeff Gibbons

Heyd Fontenot

I realized that my father, though he understood so little about art and had no interest in higher culture, gave me an extremely important critique when I was about 11 or 12 years old. I’d had no formal drawing classes but was always inspired by the medium of drawing. My lack of education and any real exposure to the arts left me to choose as my subject photographs of horses from a monthly publication (“Western Horseman”) that we received at our home.

In my enthusiasm for the subject, a sleek and shiny show horse used for a breeding advertisement, I failed to depict the real structure of the animal. Instead, I was so distracted by the highlights on its coat that I randomly and indiscriminately rendered highlights across the horse’s body. Bringing the drawing over to my father for approval, his response was a disappointment but his feedback was absolutely correct. I had not been concentrated. I had not looked at what I was drawing and it didn’t translate well.

I’d love to see that drawing again, though I’d fully expect to cringe at it. I remember getting attention for drawing as early as kindergarten. Teachers would call me “an artist”, because I was making drawings. It was something I loved to do, but admittedly I didn’t do very well.

In my later conversations with my father about my chosen career as an artist and the value of what we then called “modern art”, he and I represented polar viewpoints. I’d champion Abstract Expressionism while he’d cling to his love of hokey scenes of farm life. We never shared an appreciation for the same movies, music or visual art. We never saw eye-to-eye on politics. But it just recently occurred to me that he was able to give me a real and meaningful critique before I’d ever heard that word.

So, as I was working on a drawing last night, this memory struck me. Before John Berger and before Robert Hughes there was Gene Fontenot telling me that I had to look harder. He wasn’t going to praise some half-assed drawing. If I wanted to be taken seriously then I had to work. - Heyd Fotenot

Sara Cardona

Drawing lets my body do the thinking. My brain has too much ego, so drawing takes it off-line. I feel that the hands have their own eyes and can "see"." And when I draw, its a bit like seeing with my skin.

There are different centers of intelligence spread throughout our selves, and drawing accesses those other brain centers.

Drawing is just the reverse of talking. When we talk, we form ideas in our head and use the mechanical aspects of our bodies to communicate those abstract thoughts. With drawing its the other way around, those mechanical aspects of our body communicate back a new idea, or thought.

My "best" drawing practice is when my hands tell my mind what they know, and generate an alternate knowledge.

I hope that all doesn't sound too lofty. Its a great question-- I wish I could come up with a cool and simple answer, but I felt describing it as a process was the most honest way I could approach this.

My favorite quote about drawing from a famous artist is by Paul Klee who says that "drawing is a line going for a walk." I really love that image.- Sara Cardona

Doug Land

At its fundamental core, the notion of drawing is an act that uses a line to traverse a space. A drawing of multiple lines forms an image. However drawings do not always consist of crayons and primary paper. Many objects can make lines, and many objects can be abstracted into lines. Knitted sweater is a drawing of yarn. A cobweb is a drawing of spider thread, and a computer is a drawing of wires. Even the conceptualists have drawings. At times it is the pitter patter of serifs across a page and others the drawing is composed of bloated whispers.

In my own work, the object is the drawing of time. If the artist spends much of their life creating lines of varying mediums, what lies at the end of that line, but the ripple of strokes as they collect on a surface? - Doug Land

Peter Ligon

Drawing can serve as a method for mapping space. The function being to communicate a visual facsimile of a perceived or proposed environment. It can also reveal a personal disposition or motivation of either the person doing the drawing or the subject. It also functions to create a fictive, documentary or lunatic narrative. Or it can be pattern...or what's left over from erasing. - Peter Ligon

Mary Ellen Lacy

Drawing is my practice. I consider all my work drawing. Wet or dry media, my work is all drawing. Drawing as a practice is an expressive action. My marks on a surface depict visual, tactile, and kinesthetic process. The action of drawing for me is a rhythmical endeavor. I interpret the act of drawing as dialogue, a discussion directed toward exploration, response to and resolution of previous actions. Another discipline of active engagement for me has been ballet class. Ballet class is formal, somewhat rigid in structure, a very specific and difficult vocabulary of movement. The culture of a ballet class has a system of rules of conduct that are to be understood and followed precisely. What the discipline of drawing is for me that distinguishes it from the discipline of ballet class is independence. In drawing, I am free to choose - my media, my surface, my marks, and my ideas. In ballet class I conform to structure and formality. In drawing I make my own decisions. Within drawing I am an independent choreographer; in ballet class I am a student. Drawing can be a life long opportunity of creative process. I look forward to my continued practice and participation in drawing. - Mary Ellen Lacy

Sandra Lara

I have the unique experience of working with a population that suffers from a myriad of mental health diseases. Over half of the students battle learning disorders, attention deficit disorders, and major mental disorders. Some are confined to their jail cell 23 hours a day. Drawing serves as a therapeutic method to attempt to re-socialize, focus, and (most importantly) boost their self-esteem and self-worth. The genuine power of drawing is evident in their spirit and their eyes. I feel hopeful and honored to see a sense of life returning to their shattered world.

What does it mean for me to draw? I think that Frida Kahlo said it best! She paints because she needs to and she paints her reality. I listen to my intuitive inner voice so that the energy and emotions in my drawings express my validity of being and share my realism. Drawing for me is a necessity, it’s my existence.

I instinctively become spontaneous when I am drawing. I allow my spiritual being unrestricted authority. Freely drawn lines and open spaces in ink and pencil are prevalent in the final piece.

I distinguish my drawings from my paintings because I use more space and less color (compared to my paintings where I use more color and less space.)

My drawings access the natural flow of my hand and, for me, retain the ability to actually look around and put to use my visual language. My paintings, on the other hand, focus on colors and images to help me express my message. Overall, I rely on a more intuitive inner voice to guide me throughout my work.

Drawing avails artists like me who have introverted personalities to make extroverted statements by using the expression of lines, color, form, or shapes.

Drawing is a way for me to examine the concepts that might be offered as definitions of drawing, e.x. representation, performance, and embodiment. Exploring how thought and discussion can be visualized. Compared to painting, there are endless limits ranging from ironic to sincere, figurative to abstract. Drawing can embrace the creative re-imagining of a painting's possibilities exploring a critical engagement with its limits.

It is my desire not to be “Labeled in a Specific Category.” Traditional is not a reflection of who I am not nor who I am. It is simply not my style. Self-Taught artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (who is best known for his very non-traditional primitive style of work) has had an essential impact on my work. I am drawn to artist such as Thornton Dial, Jean Dubuffet, The Cobra Art Movement Artist, and the art of the mentally ill (specifically Hanz Prinzhorn’s Masterpiece Collection Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis.)

I do not feel an emotional relationship to traditional art work; as an artist I have to “feel” connected to my pieces. - Sandra Lara

Ollie Gee

In my personal art practice, drawing means putting the utensil to the paper and visually representing intangible concepts through figurative and anthropomorphic manifestations. I do my best to express emotion and internal tumult in a way that is universally understandable and humorous. I feel that as humans, none of us are immune to the darker side of perception and it helps to find the light within the dark. We all deal with it in different ways, unique to our personalities. To deal with mine, I draw.

Drawing, for me, has always been figurative. Each piece is a snapshot of an intangible emotion, visually represented. Any time I have deviated from drawing people and representative things, I have spectacularly failed. I am not skilled at creating abstractions through line, shape, and color. I feel the need to visualize stories that are open to interpretation for all viewers, young and old. I do this by illustrating non-sequitur style ideas in charcoal on large pieces of paper. I also do watercolors, pencil drawings, and illustrate comics.

I rely heavily on symbolism and metaphor to tell my stories. I like to leave clues, like breadcrumbs, for the viewer to follow. Depending on the viewer, the clues can lead off into many different directions, as each piece is meant to be read as a personal narration, specific only to the past and present experience of the individual.

Essentially, drawing is the way I describe my experience as part of the human condition.

- Ollie Gee

John A. Hernandez

Imagine........from an envelope

drawing is to imagine

a big red spot a face of a clown a silly hello

something inspired by today a cat floating with

claws of black lines a landscape called Aztec

something inspired by today

something inspired in blank white space called envelope
something inspired for a friend

- John A. Hernandez

Rebecca Carter

Drawing is making thinking/feeling visible and palpable. It is a way to come to knowing. Immediacy, vulnerability, and presence are the hallmarks of my favorite drawings. Through drawing it is possible to discover and uncover because it gives embodied form to immaterial energies.- Rebecca Carter

K. Yoland

Cover Image, Performance and above Images

I work mainly in other mediums but drawing is always present in the process. Most ideas or thoughts start with a drawing - in a note book or more commonly on a receipt, napkin or envelope.

I might sketch the same idea ten times or only once, it really depends on how long I have to wait before I can move the drawing into another medium. Often I find it easier to describe a performance or installation by drawing while I talk. Perhaps the visual accompaniment is more for me than the person i'm talking to. I know that sketching while I talk actually allows the idea to develop, evolve or at least hint at something lacking in spoken language. As long as I keep drawing the performance keeps playing in my head. Drawing is very liberating, an experimentation without ties to the laws of physics or budget, the ideas then develop with greater fluidity. - K. Yoland

Ben Bascombe

Drawing is often exploratory. It's akin to writing an essay to settle one's thoughts on a subject.

People often say that drawing is a very direct creative medium, and it's true. One can often see the process unfold in a finished drawing. Although calling a drawing "finished" can miss the mark at times. It might be more accurate to say a drawing is like an essay with traces of the edits and omissions.

Until recently, my artworks were drawn in graphite with a good amount of detail. An artist friend of mine challenged me to experiment with ink, and it's pushed me to release some control over the marks I make. The biggest impact of this change is that each step of the process is executed more decisively. - Ben Bascombe

David Willburn

Craft media--embroidery, specifically--serves as my primary material for drawing, which is at the core of my practice. Like stitching, drawing allows me to think and work in fragments as I put lines together to connect with something larger: space, subject matter, composition, whatever. I'm attracted to the history of drawing, combined with handicrafts, as a method that is among the most ancient and domestic forms of communication. Of course, the politics of drawing with thread is of interest to me, but it's not always at the forefront of the work. I want viewers to experience other things first: the lines, colors, and various formal elements working together.

I make drawings--often of items and spaces in my own home and imbued with sentimentality--where abstraction is used to strip objects of their subjective influence. For me, the process of drawing is about building with fragements; individual marks connect and unify the whole. I'm interested in the line, how it can activate things, and how it inhabits and changes a space--fabric, paper, wall, or room. I combine this interest with the use of painting, sculpture, and craft media as a way of employing domestic ritual, and as a way of rethinking social, gender, and cultural convention. The subjects are not political; the process might be. - David Willburn

Fred Villanueva

Drawing means the immediate representation of objects and concepts in space, with serial variations to be produced over a finite period of time. The objective is to derive meaning or process in a limited form. Above all it is a drawing's immediacy and spare quality that makes it universally accessible to our mind's eye.

Drawing is the adventure and exploration of art-making activity with the hope of deriving meaning from the marks and images.

A drawing is a proposition of what can be conceptualized, and isolated to communicate meaning.

Drawings lead to inventions and re-inventions. - Fred Villanueva

Vincent Falsetta

My drawings relate to the process of living my life as an artist. These drawings expose my thinking process in both a visual and written manner. My Index Card Drawings, List Drawings, Chart Drawings and Journals are examples of this endeavor. I am interested in redefining for myself what a drawing can be or should be.

For me drawing means recording my thinking in whatever manner is necessary. My drawings serve several functions. They can take the form of a list, a chart or a journal. They can include sketches, schematics, formulas for paint colors use in my paintings, miniature duplications of finished paintings, and archiving of information. In addition to the information presented in these drawings I am interested in the visual and formal qualities of how these works look, both individually and as a group and as multiple groups.

The “Index Cards” are a behind-the-scene activity that I have done since the 1980s. Each painting I make generates from two to ten cards. These drawings reveal predominantly studio lab notes for my paintings as well as journal entries that include questions on what I am investigating and other mental notes. The cards themselves are custom-made and archival. The lines are printed on Strathmore drawing paper, the holes are cut out and the paper is cut to size. The text is written with a crow quill pen and the actual oil paint used in the paintings is used to record colors and compositions. - Vincent Falsetta

Shelby Cunningham

Drawing means I can show you what I see in my mind and in my memories, as close to that mental reality as possible. Distortion and differences from reality come through in my drawings that cannot be seen in an un-manipulated photograph. I want to share what I remember from my childhood or what I see through sleepy or hallucinating eyes, and there's no easy to way do this. I've always dreamed of having a camera in my mind that shows others my memories and hallucinations, but for now drawing is the closest I can come to doing this. My drawings also let me highlight the things I want to highlight, and they let me keep things simple. Drawing is something that I can do blindly when I wake up in the middle of the night in the dark, just to get an image down quickly. I can't set up a camera and manipulate an image that fast, so I keep drawing instead. - Shelby Cunningham

Kristen Cochran

In the development of a child, drawing typically precedes writing.

Essentially, drawings are graphic accounts of verbal processes.

The pleasure, is in the action.

- Kristen Cochran

Vance Wingate

I always remember being fascinated by the way marks on paper or other materials could be made to look like something real or imagined. My Dad would draw images of cowboys and rodeos and would do wood burnings or leather works with them, I always was happy to see him do that work. I also remember my grandmother having a drawer in her desk at her home that was filled with the free pencils, crayons, ink pens and markers that my grandfather would get in his days doing business at banks and insurance companies. She would let my cousins and I dig through them and use anything we wanted to draw with. I found this to be as good as finding buried treasure. The marks and types of lines fascinated me then, and still fascinate me.

Drawing, to me, is distinguished from other 2D processes by the immediacy and fact of seeing the ‘bones’ of the artists’ work, or hand, in the drawings. The traditional materials of graphite, charcoal, ink, watercolor or crayon, have unique material/tactile qualities unlike any paint or collage element. I very much enjoy experimenting with ways of getting marks onto a surface, and trying all kinds of materials to do so. Drawing is a process where adding and subtracting material on a surface makes a ‘palimpsest’ effect, adding to the depth and intensity of the work being done.

To draw means I get spontaneity and opportunity from mistakes or ‘accidents’ compared to being more controlled in other mediums. - Vance Wingate

Nicholas C. Mathis

My ideas on drawing are situational. For me, it is an attempt to reconnect with an exact memory or convey a motion on a page. It can be a practice or meditation in pattern and repetition.

I am always intrigued by drawing/mark-making's deliberateness and immediacy, compared to the typical restraints of newer media. - Nicholas C. Mathis

Zoetina Veal

All visual art is drawing to me. Drawing is making a mark, flat or raised as in sculpture. Sculpture is drawing in 3D with objects and things and light even. A painting is drawing with pigment on a 2D plane. In my practice, the distinction between drawing and painting and sculpture has become increasingly irrelevant. I don't feel a need to label a work a drawing as opposed to a painting - Zoetina Veal

Ryder Richards

Drawing is thinking. Yet, at some point, “drawing” becomes “a drawing,” from whence it shifts to an exercise in completion rather than intuitional thought, per se. As completion draws neigh satisfaction and communication become important guides, shifting the process into a dueling contrast of internal pleasures and the perceived external reaction of others. This contingent, altering, stuttering process of drawing is a specific way of relating to the world, requiring a certain awareness, which is how I determine some of my work as drawing, despite the myriad forms they may manifest.

I have made paintings: real paintings that painters would like. And the mindset required to make a “painting” is completely different. I often execute an idea with paint or make a drawing with paint, however they are not “paintings.” I find many sculptural processes more closely related to drawing: there is something similar in the mentality required to navigate exactly how an object can exist in the world. - Ryder Richards

William Binnie

Drawing is a way for me to document the exhausting decline of civilization. Our peril is so tedious it is boring, our looming extinction so meticulous it abuts the banal. At times, I simply feel like a transcriber, distilling in shorthand. Drawing has an immediacy, an urgency that painting does not. The formula is simple enough and the ritual is without the pathetic romance of the brush. Painting is decadent and autoerotic. It is for self-pleasure in self-pity- the narcissistic musings of a nostalgia misplaced. I paint. I love to paint. Drawing is bound less by the confluence of self-doubt and egocentrism. It is accelerated, direct, and largely free of the consecrated canon of painting or sculpture; it is the lesser, the unhallowed, and therefore, like photography, more useful. – William Binnie

Marcelyn McNeil

Detail of top middle image

I don't really think about drawing in a traditional sense. Years ago I became increasingly dissatisfied with my own gestural mark making and made a conscious decision to remove or diminish "my hand" in the work. "Drawing" has become more a process of cutting and pasting where pen and pencil are replaced by the scissor and utility knife.

My works on paper are somewhat akin to collage. Two or three independent layers hang loosely atop one another. These layers are cut shapes that curl and fold into one another creating shadows. The shadows are interesting as they change with the time of day both in size and color and could be perceived as yet another interpretation of drawing. Definitions between drawing, painting and dimensional form aren't things I really think about much, as for me they feel easily exchangeable. - Marcelyn McNeil

Bruce Lee Webb

Drawing is the primordial nature of humanity. The line defines us. The line is our power. Drawing is writing on its essence. To convey thought; from the walls of prehistoric caves to drawing in the digital age. For me, the act of issuing a line is divine. There is a magi when I draw the profile of a head; it's almost like automatic writing. - Bruce Lee Webb

Teresa Gomez-Martorell

Drawing - One of the most fascinating stories I heard was about the invention of drawing. Pliny the Elder tells the story of someone who traced the outline of someone's shadow. Many years ago I made an image of that sequence on a copper plate: a woman laying face down is outlining her own projected shadow, as a drawn statement. I created that woman trying to explain herself, the world where she belongs. This outline represents her. And she wants to tell something about her. Those marks preceded the written world. She creates a symbol, a mark of herself. Marks can create women, men, living beings. Those marks are talking about a presence. After marks, letters and words were made to refer those perceptions we lived. Words represent what we are living. I will explain a story about those presences. - Teresa Gomez-Martorell

Shawn Mayer

“I like to draw.” That’s what I would say. When you’re a kid you’re asked what you like and I always said “I like to draw”. I also sputtered off “playing outside” and “reading books”. In truth I never cared much for nature or literature, but I did like to draw. I don’t anymore.

Drawing used to be a release. No expectations or critique. It was a steady stream of pure uncensored and unconscious expression. Looking back I am jealous of myself. Today I can’t put pen to paper without over analyzing every mark I make as I make it. I don’t draw anymore. I can’t. I instead sketch. Nothing final. Nothing finished enough for people to pass judgment on. But I do draw.

Apologies if that sounds a bit contradictory. One form of drawing makes a mark on the world. The other allows the world to make a mark on yourself. I don’t draw on, but I do draw from. Like a well I draw from the world and I feed myself. I see influences from everywhere and how they influence others. It’s a hurricane of wondrous expression. I draw them in like a sponge. I even pull from my own life experiences. It’s there that I find the same freedom to express myself and perhaps reconnect with the joy I once had when I was younger. The carefree joy of doodling cops and robbers, aliens and cowboys fighting ghosts in the deserts and unearthing buried treasures of old. - Shawn Mayer

Spencer Brown-Pearn

Historically, many forms of mark making including, or perhaps specifically, drawing have had an intimate relationship with the hand. While a myriad of parts and processes have a role in perceiving, translating, generating and producing an image, the hand, if only through proximity, is credited with the minutia which make a particular drawing unique. Each mark on a surface is a record of a hand’s gestural action across it, carrying with it a direct connection to the individual who made it. However, in my experience, as technology develops, the proximity between the hand and the image diminishes - where we previously made marks on a surface, we now work through keyboards and other peripherals to communicate and produce images which may never take physical form.

With this in mind I’ve become primarily interested in the production of systems of image making which remove the hand even further, but still consider the vestigial gestural action of drawing - recording motions and sounds and producing marks accordingly.

- Spencer Brown-Pearn

Erik Schuessler

Doodling. It is the start point of recording thoughts from my mind into something real. It is one of my favorite parts of the creative process. I always appreciated it through my time making art. It is the ideas you jot down sometimes these vaporous concepts that swim through my random thoughts. They are the start points to abstract ideas that either stop on that particular random scrap of paper or flow outwards into a larger piece. Some are not even reproducable in a form that you originaly had in your head but the output can sometimes be even better than I came up with in the first place. Sometimes it can be just words. Sometimes a mixture of the two. Sometimes doodles can just be a reference. A plan or keyword to create an image in your mind to build on later. Symbols or iconic elements seem to return as I doodle. - Erik Schuessler

Participating Artists