Artist
Today’s Friday Find.
Joe Fenton is a London-based artist who works in graphite, ink and acrylics. His drawings are amazing. The content is a little macabre for my taste—Hieronymus Bosch is mentioned in his bio as an influence, and you can see why—but I am blown away by the clean lines and elaborate layouts of the drawings.
I don’t know what the proper art vocabulary would be to describe these works but “clarity” and “specificity” and “highly detailed” are the words that come to mind.
Since I’ve been giving myself drawing lessons—with mixed success—I am even more impressed by this particular style. A more freewheeling realism, such as that for which I have been striving, strikes me as being more forgiving than this. If your hand slips a bit when contouring a face, you can always fudge the shading. It doesn’t look like that’s really possible in Mr. Fenton’s work.
The symmetry blows me away, too, in many of them. I mean, it’s hard enough, I would think, to create one side of these ornamental drawings so cleanly. To balance it out on the other side seems like daring the art gods to make your hand shake.
So, I don’t know how he does it—but wow!
Color me—monochromatically—impressed.
