The bodies of the artists hanging out in a painting studio in Jordan (2014) are rendered in thin washes of oil and scraped down with the palette knife, with just enough particularity to convey their individuality despite the sketchiness of Packer’s mark-making. In Jess (2018 above left), her friend’s crossed legs scarcely register as such, and her clasped hands are a miasma of interlaced fingers. The figures often merge into or barely coalesce from their backgrounds, and the sketchy, even agitated lines Packer employs in their depictions obscure as much as they reveal. Packer’s portraits are as startlingly intimate as they are hard to grasp.
#Jennifer packer drawings full#
In this drawing and her oil-on-canvas portraits, exhibited in her first major European show at the Serpentine Gallery, Packer depicts people she loves and honours – friends, family, fellow artists, writers and curators, all of whom are Black – in a manner that insists upon their full humanity, that refuses the propensity of traditional portraiture to serve up those depicted to the viewer’s gaze, no matter how impressive or powerful they are. The pleasure of jumping into a cool pond on a hot day and floating weightlessly on the water exists alongside the relentlessness of the dark field that defines the swimmer’s body, and the dangling rope, which, thank goodness, ends in a knot and not a noose.
Packer barely deploys line – usually the defining aspect of drawing – instead using the side or flat top of the crayon to carve out of negative space an image that is both joyful and ominous. Five white spots of bare paper, interrupted by a few quick dots and lines, indicate the head, hands and feet of a swimmer who likely has just swung from the rope and landed with a splash in the water. Aruna D’Souza is a writer on modern and contemporary art.Īgainst a sea of irregular black marks that dominates Jennifer Packer’s charcoal drawing Swim (2011 below, far right), a finely drawn rope, knotted at one end, dangles from the top edge of the composition.
0 kommentar(er)
