Joan Linder
Gallery Affiliations: Mixed Greens
Region: Northeast
In a culture hyper-saturated with electronic imagery, I use traditional materials—quill pens and bottles of ink—to create large-scale images, exploring the sub-technological processes of observation and mark making. My drawings show life-size figures and objects, drawn with a deliberately free hand and energized, rigorous cross-hatching. I generate awkward intimacy in my drawings through a process of “slow looking.” With continual acts of observation, translated through the hand, I describe an intense response to my subject matter, which is as contemporary as my means are old-fashioned. In my drawings, I have considered the banal and mass-produced; the politics of war; sexual identity and power; the psychology of family relationships; and the beauty of natural and manmade structures. A personal scrutiny, through drawing, of my immediate surroundings becomes an examination of a larger, contemporary, American experience: I transform the personal into the political. The labor-intensive style of drawing I have developed is an intentional act of embodiment, in tension with the electronic landscape surrounding us all.
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