"Descent of Angels"
This was the first of a short series of four drawings that were a strong departure in my usual drawing style. The drawings in this series are all created with no visual source. The elements in the drawings are purely from my mind, and strongly abstracted.They each began with a thought, or a phrase, which usually became the title of the work. The creation of the image was completely intitive, more in the style of a painting.
It is a dialogue between the eye, the mind and the hand that starts with the hand and eye. The hand makes particular marks, values, textures, shapes which the eye and mind find pleasing. And those marks suggest others and so the piece grows gradually with no underlying plan or goal.
Old nineteenth century literature, of which I was fond as a child, sometimes refers to the universe as "the spheres". I presume it is refering to the orbits of the planets or the paths of the stars. But as a child I simply loved the phrase itself.
So here the angels are descending through the spheres. Yet in this drawing the spheres represent the mystery and otherness of the spiritual realm that transcends our own experienced material dimension. The angels are descending from the abstract into the concrete, from the beyond space and time into the here and now, taking on the human face as they enter the world of houses and bricks.