Ryan Fitzer

Sketch after Stephen’s Iron Crown by Robert Motherwell

The drawing above represents a reworked sketch from the “Drawing From the Collection” class I led at the Ft. Worth Modern last Sunday. I had an excellent time and the students seemed to put up with my assignments.

Once I was back in my own studio I wanted to keep working on a couple of the drawings. The first drawing (above) is from Stephen’s Iron Crown by Robert Motherwell. The second is after For Carl Andre by Lynda Benglis.

After looking at my reworked sketches for a while and not convincing myself of whatever it is I need to in order to feel successful, I began to see a correlation with the process I used when I started working with clay during undergrad.

Whenever I came against my lack of ability to realize a form, I tried a more aggressive approach. The image of the Altered Vase series is an example of this. After making this series of vases and feeling like they were still lacking in whatever way, I started to puncture and crumple each vase. I look back and see this as a function of frustration.

In the process of learning a skill, mistakes become a necessary part of the process. In my case, the altered vases exemplified my lack of clarity of idea, from which, I was able to see what needed to be refined. Having something physical to respond to was essential (if sometimes awkward) to working though my hand/mind’s-eye coordination. This seems not to have changed much.

But having made these vases, I can still see them in most of the work I make today, like the drawing above. This leads me to the question that if I had never made this series, or instead, tried to think my way through it, would the drawing have turned out the same?