fortress Drawing

graphite and ink on okawara: This work is a sort of journal of the year 2013. In Invisible Cities Italo Calvino describes a chess match between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Khan is overcome with the conviction that all of his conquest amounts to nothing “The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what?...At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains; a black square, or a white one.” Marco Polo then speaks up “Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods; ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought; you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out; a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist…Here a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larva’s nest; not a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree’s being chosen for chopping down…This edge was scored by the wood carver with his gouge so that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding…” In "Six Memos" Calvino points out that these two views articulate two modes of viewing the world, one as a void and nothingness and one as infinitely complex, full of detail. With this drawing being a journal of my days of one year I did plenty of vacillate between these positions from void to infinite detail.