Felt tip
“It’s the Lazy Bastard’s watercolor!” That’s what John Wayne called the art of felt tip pen drawing in the middle of a dream I had during my art school days. We had these saloon-style doors at the entrance to the painting department and Wayne came bursting in, smashing canvasses over the heads of bemused student painters and putting his cowboy boot through “yer goddam prissy crap abstracts!”
On this subject, as I suspect on some others, I would have to dispute The Duke’s views. Felt tip has a vibrancy and directness that makes for magnificent manly mark making.
The felt tip is a hybrid tool of pencil and paintbrush which combines a nib point and brush bristle capable of rendering a distinct line and swift blocks of dense plane. These drawings show a range of marks which reference watercolor washes, cross-hatching, expressionist brush strokes, pointillism and woodcut. The self portrait, bottom row, left, uses the ink bleed from the reverse side of the paper to affect a more nuanced result.
