This is always going to be one of my favorite images – in fact, it still hangs in my home. I drew this image over a month and a half while I was nearing the end of my time in art school.
This image is important to me for two main reasons:
The first reason is that I realized that I had finally made a huge jump in my understanding of what I could really do with ink. As the felt tip on my pens started to wear out, I realized that they made a different quality of mark, and I started putting tape around the end so I knew that I could use those pens for something different – in this case the very subdued ruins in the background are drawn entirely by “worn out” pens.
The second reason this is important is because my fascination with white space emerged even more strongly. The high contrast lines that frame (almost pinching) the dark stonework in the base of the mill cause the white space to take on a physicality that forces them to the foreground of the image as something tangible that clearly sits in front of the mill. It’s almost like atmospheric perspective in reverse.