Medium Specificity

 Artist's Statement 

                I have always been intrigued by drawing's capacity to portray minimalist, yet vibrant, pictures in ways film, or almost any other medium, would have great difficulty acomplishing.  Drawing is exciting in that it is limitless.  There is not end to the ways you can look at something.  When filming, you are bound to a certain level of realism, in that while images can be digitally altered, you still have to shoot something in the real world.  You can't make an actor look like a few lines and a burst of color in a film (excluding animated films).

                The Kalman photographs utilized photography's ability to digitally alter the color of the subjects.  I chose to utilize drawings ability to abandon realism entirely and use colors that are "unnatural."  I wanted to communicate an image through indicative images rather than realistic representations.  That is a strength of illustration.  It is almost instinctive.

                Most people begin drawing indicatively.  Stick figures do not actually look like people. Each line represents an arm, a leg, a torso, or a circle for the head, but legs are not perfectly straight lines, and heads are not spherical.  All you have to do is clue the viewer in on what the image represents.  You have to give just enough for a person to be able to tell what it is you are representing, but you do not have try to make it look like a photograph, and we accept that.

                Like the painting "1225" by the artist who goes by the internet name of grey90, my intention was to use simple lines and splashes of color to create a feeling and an idea.  In both my drawing and "1225" the color is not contained by the lines, but they are still working together.  That is a style I think is fairy unique to illustration. 

                People feared that photography would be the end of drawing and painting, but that has not been the case at all.  It is true that the average modern family is more likely to get a family photo taken than to commission a family portrait, but as an art form, illustration has simply explored deeper into its potential to express things in a surreal way.  Saying that photography is better than illustration because it is more realistic is about as annoying as people saying that books are always better than movies.  They are too different to compare that directly.