One of the first assignments Klaas Hoek gave us is  to make a drawing depicting the essence of our work, visualising what our work is really about. Not an easy question at the best of times, this assignment  presented me with serious problems, and I tore up draft after draft. How to depict ‘sense of touch’ or ‘play’?

I got to the point where I really hated the paper and the crayons in front of me. Then a small brainwave hit: what I really like about paper is its feel, and what I like about crayons is their colour. So I made a  drawing that is just colour on paper – you see it at the top of this post.

Problems:

• The picture above doesn’t represent the drawing really well
• The colour I had to diddle in Photoshop to make it resemble the really vibrant and alive colour I gave it
• This colour doesn’t change with the light, the real thing does – it comes alive in twilight 
• On the photo you can see the paper’s texture a bit but this is a far way from feeling it going over it with your fingers
• The paperyness is totally lost anyway, the thinnes and strongness of paper.
• I photographed in such a way that the dimensions of the paper are lost, too (it is A4)
• You don’t get your hands dirty looking at it

This sums up nicely the problems I have representing work that deals with touching things. Why not go back to making nice artwork that can sit on the wall behind the couch and have done with this thing …………………………………

Next brainwave:  I don’t want people to play with my work, if that were the case I could have made a drawing of a board game. What I want them to do is play around with  it as in having it in their hands or  explore it with their hands.  

So I have a new word:  ”explore’ will take the place of  play’.

Exitement!  I have this word document where I save all the random ideas for projects or for research  or just anything that come up as a result of all the reading we do (so it don’t keep me awake at night). I immediately did a search-and-replace on this file to change ‘play’ to ‘explore’, and it gives a whole new perspective on things.  ‘Explore’  is  so much more precise ….  !