Seed: Psycho-geographies
Drawing on your Map
Get your hands on an actual map of a place you live or have lived or that is somehow meaningful to you. It's important that is it a real map, not just printed from the internet ( the object and paper quality is different).
- Using fine liner pens, paint markers or watercolors draw/paint on top of the map ( tip: print several photocopies of the map to use as testers for your compositional trials)
- Your drawing can be anything that you relate to the map: a memory, a scene, site specific flora, fauna, visual information or response to the topography.
- Let the map structure be an intrinsic part of your composition.
- If the map is in color try limiting drawing to only black and white for greater contrast.
It is important that your drawing has some kind of relationship to the map itself, whether this is personal, historical or purely formal. Materials and meaning are always connected.
Artist links:
Julie Mehretu is an interesting painter for our time: American, born in Ethiopia in 1970, she says her paintings are “psychogeographies,” touching memory across time, space, place". Mehretu produces her works much in the way a city gathers its memories. She starts each painting with a geometric structure that serves as the basic anchor and organization for the image. Her works are " story maps of no location".
"Mehretu’s paintings have been seen as analogues for our globalized domain, its information networks and dispersive political, social, and cultural economies. They may also carry the imprint of her own life history: Her family fled Ethiopia to the United States in 1977, when the military leadership began a campaign of terror. Her experience of migration and diaspora lends perspective to how politics create world currents. ."- Julie Mehretu at MOMA
image: Julie Mehretu, Looking back to a bright new future, 2003 at the Whitney