Tara Tucker
Gallery Affiliations: Rena Bransten Gallery, Steven Zevitas Gallery
Region: Pacific Coast
Flora and fauna, both dead and alive, influence the subject matter in my drawings. My work is always about a future without humans, a world where plants and animals have learned to co-exist and meld in order to survive their environments.
I use dark graphite lines on clean white backgrounds so that the texture, gesture and sense of movement of each subject are completely un-obscured. The white backgrounds also have a scientific quality that is reminiscent for me of days spent as a child watching my mother do taxidermy as a volunteer at the local natural history museum. Birds laid-out on a white lab table. I lightly frame out my subjects on the paper, then start drawing immediately, building up layers of graphite lines. I like to work on a series of drawings all at one time. Each one informs the other. Sometimes ideas change in a drawing as a result of how another has developed. This creates complexity in the scenes I depict and keeps the unfolding story fluid.
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