Ball Pen Faces
Saturday, November 24th, 2007On the train between Amsterdam and Berlin a man in his forties was sitting across the table from me. He was drawing faces on a sheet of paper using a ball pen. I couldn’t tell, if he was portraying someone sitting near us or even myself. His drawings were naive, one could say childish. I watched the scene while reading in “Notes From The Furure Of Art” (a highly inspiring collection of texts by Jerzy Ludwinski, a Polish art critic, curator and theorist who I only learned about through the book that the editor, Magdalena Ziolkowska, had given me a couple of days earlier). The book contained drafts, mostly also done with a ball pen of how Ludwinski thought art was expanding. The combination of the two very different kinds of of ball pen drawings gave me a sublime joy.
A long time ago I used to experiment quite a bit with the absentminded drawings of the kind that people do while on the phone or when killing time. Usually this type of drawing is more or less abstract, maybe with figurative elements, but generally avoiding obvious references to the world outside of the drawing. However, I never thought about how strange it is when a grownup man draws figuratively outside of any professional context and without artistic ambition. Abstract drawing is clearly more acceptable in this context.
