Last month I spent a week in an artists’ residency in the bothy at MERZ Gallery in Sanquhar. My right hand is in recovery from nerve damage so I wanted to spend some time seeing what I could draw. I managed a few sketches of the surrounding area but what I was mostly focussed on creating several grid drawings, done using a dip pen with various ink colours. There was a definite Agnes Martin influence coming through.
I plotted out the grids in a sketchbook and drew them as carefully and meticulously as my right hand would allow. I realised that holding the pen was quite awkward but could be maintained on and off for an hour or two at a time. I also quickly realised that I was going to occasionally overload the pen and smudge the ink. I decided that this would then become an integral (although not deliberate) part of the drawing. Above are the four grids I created at 150mm square with each line 10mm apart. I then wanted to combine the grids to test and compare the measuring and drawing so once I was home I scanned the grids and layered them in Photoshop. My initial idea was to combine the primary colours (red, yellow, blue) but I was also inspired by the television work of Dave Rushton, who set up MERZ Gallery in a former lemonade factory in Sanquhar, so I created another version in light based primary colours (red, green, blue). I positioned each grid colour so that the centres matched but the edges highlighted the inconsistencies in my measuring and drawing.
