Ellsworth Kelly Shadow Sketchbook
I follow the Ellsworth Kelly Studio on Instagram and was pleased to see this post that I think is relevant to our recent briefs:
“The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.”
When riding the bus during Ellsworth’s early days in New York City, he sketched the patterns of shadow cast through the bus windows across the book he was reading.
The drawings in “bus sketchbook” feature a series of sketches that ultimately led to Ellsworth’s painting “Mask”. As Roberta Bernstein notes in reference to the drawing for Mask, “the drawing was not based directly on the shadows but derived from the others in the sketchbook that were.”
The sequence of drawings functions like a flipbook or the storyboard of an animated film, allowing the viewer to imagine the moment that captured Ellsworth’s attention gradually unfolding through abstraction.
© Elllsworth Kelly Foundation