I paused before I wrote anything about Sol Lewitt recently because to me he was truly an influential artist in helping develop my approach to image-making, in particular image-thinking.
My first intentional encounter with his work came when I was working for Nancy Drysdale in the early eighties. She was selling some of his wall drawings and asked Chris Bailey and myself (we both worked for Nancy at the time) to produce the work in accordance to the directions of the drawing. At first I thought it was quite a cop out – how could an artist not do his own drawings (I was young and more than a bit naive). The one thing it made me do, was to start thinking and looking at how these works could vary just by the installer. Later as the wall drawings became more colorful, I thought they were becoming more about the implementation of the work than the concept of the work.
What I came to realize was that the implementation is/was the concept. I still think that is pretty interesting.
His approach became infinitely scalable. Here is an example of the directions of a drawing. This one is from the NGA’s Vogel collection:
Wall Drawing #65 / Lines not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random using four colors, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall.
The interpretation is wide open, yet at the same time it is defined within structural limits. It is open and closed at the same time.
Every once in a while I’ll talk to someone about my work and I will talk about how I’m interested in a “non-specific exactness”, this approach comes directly from thinking about these early wall drawings.
I don’t think you were naive in your resistance to making the drawing from a recipe — I think that was an insight. Might be an interesting exercise to try recapturing your youthful instinct and see where it leads.
I also think you would benefit greatly by an exploration of drawing in its “traditional” sense, of drawing things in the most fundamental way, aim and shoot. The line seems to go “here” putting it “here.”
Note, this isn’t really “traditional” in one aspect since most drawing instruction really implies reliance on some conventional system of thinking about rendering objects. Nonetheless, don’t want to get bogged down in philosophy in a blogger comment.
Look at Bonnard, the bathroom tiles in the Pittsburgh painting of Marthe in her bath. It might be fruitful for your work.
Best, Aletha Kuschan