Nearly three years ago I started drawing in a tiny sketchbook from photographs. One of the drawings was this orange and pink angular composition. It made me think of those large roads you get in America, the ones that cut through the desert. It’s more than likely that this came to mind as it was around then that I watched Steven Spielbergs ‘Duel’ for the first time.
I tried to push this further, wanting to paint large stretches of American highway in these colours, but I could never really take things out of the sketchbook and into something a lot more tangible.
When out in LA we hired a camper van and drove four hours north up into Mammoth Lakes. The scenery changed from warm desert to cold snow along the straight roads. I spent as much time as I could out there drawing. Nothing seemed to stick though and I struggled to reflect such an overwhelming landscape in my sketchbook.
On the way back I decided to draw whilst in the van, doing quick studies of what was moving past outside the windows. Rather than draw a particular thing, I attempted to capture the movement through the landscape. The terrain changes so quickly in America, one minute you’re amongst the mountains, the next all you can see is flat desert.
I have spoken before about having things out of my control whilst I am trying to draw. Doing this worked really well. I suddenly felt a lot less precious about what I was doing and instead just approached each mark as it came. What was happening outside the windows would fly by so fast, I only had a few seconds to draw down a particular shape or mark a specific colour.
I started each one looking at the road. Wether or not there was a bend coming up, or a crossroad. In a way the road moved slowest so I could look just that slight little longer, using it as an anchor before adding scenery as it went by.
I really enjoyed making these. The way the subject itself wasn’t stationary, I was more attempting to record an overall sensation of a place. In a way they are imagined landscapes.
Since returning I have stretched up around ten canvases and planned out rough compositions onto them from these drawings. It was upon reflection that I started to think about the small drawing from February 2020 again.
Love that idea of trying (and failing?) to pin down moving point of perspective. These are great 🖤