Jenny Kendler

Lately I haven't been able to draw anything that isn't basically an object or person or group of objects and people floating in a background. (I mean, okay, so I've drawn some other things -- like, objects and people inside fleshed out interiors or landscapes and other physical spaces, besides the white of the page. But they sucked.) I'm trying to not frame this as a problem, just a fact: right now, the only good drawings I am making are of things that are floating in space. 

One of the explanations/excuses I come up with when I'm thinking of it as a problem is that sometimes I get stuck thinking verbally. Ideally, I'd only be creating images that can only be expressed as images, and not words. The issue comes that when I try to think about them, words get in the way. So even if I have a particular image of a particular bird, as soon as I think "I'm drawing a picture of a bird," it might as well be a white piece of paper with the word "BIRD" floating in the middle. By the time I get to drawing it, I'm just replacing the word "bird" with an image of a bird, instead of creating an entire image on the entire plane. (In fact! The "bird" tag on my art blog reveals many drawings demonstrating this exact scenario.)

But maybe this isn't a bad thing. This is why I'm enjoying Jenny Kendler's work so much right now! Amazing line work and images, and my favorites all involve objects and people and animals that are just floating. And it works and it's fantastic and powerful. 

She actually does a lot of different types of work, and it's all gorgeous. There's more on my tumblr Jenny Kendler tag. This might also explain part of what attracts me so much to the work of Anu Tuominen, Ed Young, and even some of these photographs of book art.