Today after work, Nico looked over my shoulder as I was pulling the tape off of one of tonight’s drawings and mentioned that the work was starting to look less like someone trying to draw something and more like someone drawing something, (the difference being the “trying”). When asked “what do you mean?” she answered while her finger, traced out the clean boarder around the drawing. “With all that white around it, it looks like a picture on a gallery wall. It looks like art is supposed to look.”
earlier in the week, I had started working the practice of masking the edges of the drawings with tape. “You draw all messy, but it looks like it’s supposed to be that way. Good job dad…”
In the past, the assumption was that work needed a plinth or a frame to be considered finished for presentation. With the drawings, I didn’t see them as worthy candidates for presentation. Even though the pastels had been set down, when I looked at them, they didn’t feel finished. Strangely, when I looked as what I posted on Instagram, they had a different feeling. The hunch was that the frame that Instagram provided
Now what I’m suspecting is that the work simply needs to be able to claim the space around it to be considered a presentable candidate. The juxtaposition of a simple drawing on a piece of paper with a clean boarder can make for a compelling object in itself.
In the past, a notorious test of an object’s baseline value has been that if taken out of context of an implied value, and is left to be found inexplicably on the ground by a stranger, would the person that found it choose to put it in the garbage or keep it…
Trash or treasure
Zygote Blum 