Mike Nudelman
Gallery Affiliations: Thomas Robertello Gallery
Region: West
Website: http://www.mikenudelman.com
City / State: Santa Fe, NM
My drawing process is meticulous and meditative. Using a ballpoint pen, I scan my hand over the paper’s surface to gradually build up thin layers of feathery, slightly iridescent marks. The size of small hairs, these diagonal lines look like Ben-Day dots on a print or pixels on a screen. The textured field of ballpoint strokes is simultaneously the means by which the image is created and a veil that clouds and confounds the expectation that anything concrete lies within the paper’s surface.
Most of my drawings depict seemingly unbelievable, serendipitous phenomena, and often appear closer to movie stills, simulations, or dreamscapes than images of anything that might occur naturally. These supernatural images exist primarily on a virtual plane where time and space are malleable constructs and the sublime is a feat of engineering rather than happenstance. I’ve derived my recent drawings from reproductions of Romantic landscape paintings and cosmological photographs. Found in books and on the Internet, such transcendental images are a ubiquitous source for reconstruction and re-charging.