A New Hope
The idea for this drawing came about after messing around in a tutorial in 2019 with MA Tutor Paul Johnson. At the time I was working by drawing over films of my own walks and one of us joked that I could draw over a feature film, I forget who. This is the result of that throwaway joke nearly a year later, and produced with some free time over what we might call lockdown 1.
This drawing saw me watching Star Wars- A New Hope, somewhere near thirty times in slow motion over a period of a few months drawing characters from the film in order of their appearance. The initial idea was that I would draw characters in order, and each time I worked this would build up the layers of information.
The first session was drawing the spacecraft scenes in charcoal to provide a base layer and to also provide a dusty base to walk on (as the canvas came down the wall and onto the floor). It was important to me that my movements and interactions with the work were somehow recorded in line with other works of this type I had produced. The oil bar as chosen material would not offer this. Next up was drawing the cast of characters in order of appearance. Colour was assigned in keeping with my links to Cy Twombly's meanings of colour from his Italy paintings and as such the colours chose themselves...
Yellow- C-3P0 Blue-R2-D2 Black- Darth Vader White- Princess Leia
Light Blue- Luke Skywalker Burnt Sienna-Obi-Wan Kenobi Raw Umber- Chewbacca
Red- Han Solo
As I worked I did consider the importance of Peter Cushing's character Wilhuff Tarkin and drawing him in green but I thought I may need to save this colour for drawing two, and for Yoda. I know now that this is unlikely to happen.....
Critically there are issues with the choice of material, the support and the idea of 'walking' during the production of the drawing,, which lead me to consider that this may be the last of a set (or set of sets) that become the true end of the MA work. There will be further drawn works, but I don't see more feature films........................