The Control of Forgiveness was created back in 2005 when I was still living in Nebraska. As you may know, I was exploring many different mediums during that period of my life. It sort of saddens me to think about the resources I had as an artist back then. I had multiple places and spaces in which to create. And I had so many items, objects, mediums, and tools with which to construct the things I imagined.
In this image, I used some ink I had bought at an auction in Fremont of an artist who had decided to quit being an artist. The bottles of ink came in a small wooden suitcase along with some other ink and drawing tools. In my large room upstairs in the farm house, I decided to start using these bottles of ink by dripping and splashing on pieces of paper with them. I would then embellish the designs I found notable after the ink dried.
The Control of Forgiveness is one result of that period of creativity. I have many more of these kinds of drawings stored away, so I’ll have to upload more of them in the future. In this particular image, I implemented some type to convey a message for what I had been considering about a paradox of forgiveness.
I had been thinking of forgiveness as a paradox because I often found it odd that, when I let go of an issue or situation I wanted to have more control over, I unwittingly found I had more control over it. But when I found myself struggling in one conflict or another to gain control, it seemed that my expectations would be dashed more often than not.
Forgiveness, as I understand it, is about letting go of feelings that don’t serve one’s good intentions. It can also be about letting go of anger towards another, obviously. I had combined this notion of “letting go” with an act of letting go of the need to control ink with a pen, and just letting it fall like experimental precipitation. As an aside note, the word “aphesis” means letting go in Greek, but I did not know this word at the time of creating this image. Nevertheless, it is an associative reference point.
The control that is expressed in this picture, after letting go of the brown ink as drops on the paper, is the stripes and strokes carefully blacked out with graphite. So you see the polarity between the utter freedom of falling drops of ink, and the minuscular detail filled out in the strokes of graphite. This image also hints at a landscape, as I had put stick twigs and trunks underneath the drops so as to make them look like trees. Then I put ink marks around the splotches to give a simplistic association with foliage.
Art of eVan 