Crowd (Shibuya) - ink drawings

Crowd (Shibuya), ink brush on paper, 50 x 70 cm, 2018

Last year I saw a music video with clips from the famous cross walk at Shibuya in Tokyo. I had done drawings and paintings before using little figures based on photos of Czech Christmas markets and village squares but last year after I saw that clip I decided as a challenge to do a few drawings based on the imagery. I've never been to Japan but I have a lifelong interest in the country and its people. A lot of my work just now is using line drawing to define the form in a simple way akin to comics, the color fields are separated from the subject. But in these ink drawings, somewhat based on sumi-e style, it's all about values, light and shade, and studying the photographs in detail. I just had an A4 printed photo and I would stare at it and slowly draw the image across the paper with a brush. With so much detail, little mistakes tend to vanish into the crowd, as it were.

Crowd (Shibuya), ink brush on paper, 50 x 70 cm, 2018

These drawings take 3 or 4 afternoons to finish. I should perhaps do more like this, or even large-scale paintings of a similar theme but they are quite different than my other work, so I'm not sure if I want to go in that direction. Another thing I do with my work sometimes is to convert the image into PETSCII characters from the Commodore 64 using a super cool program called Playscii written by J P LeBreton. It's a great tool for making retro images and computer games and I've only scratched the surface with what it can do. One of my hopes eventually would be to have these images woven on a loom to make tapestries, but I havent figured out how to set up a digital loom. It's definitely tricky. I applied for a residency in the Netherlands at a textile museum where they have fantastic equipment and they actually called to invite me, but the fee was pretty steep and although I wish I could have gone, I didn't really have a good business plan at the time (or even now :)) to make it worth it. Its kind of a bummer because that opportunity won't come again. Here are the petscii conversions of the crowd drawings.

Pretty cool, hunh?
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