1000 Round Drawings, first edition

date > November 2017
media > archival giclée print on watercolour paper, hand bound and embossed covers. Each is signed and numbered
size > 17.7 x 20.5 x 1.2 cm, edition of 7 plus 2 artists proofs. 61 pages

> I produced this first edition of books from the labels in the work 1000 round drawings (see related works below) as I felt the need to add a table of contents with a description of what each drawing is. This index reads like a weird train of thought.

> This printed version also allowed me to add a foreword about the thinking behind the work and its relationship to neuroscience. The text reads as follows:

1000 round drawings is an experiment in associative thought. I was curious to see how difficult or easy it would be to draw 1000 round drawings and where the process would take me. Some are jsut round doodles, others are detailed drawings of round or spherical objects that came to mind or that I noticed in the week when I did this. Sometimes I would stall, other times I could barely keep up with the ideas that sprung up. Whenever I was out of the studio, I would carry a little notebook where I would jot down ideas as they happened. A pumpkin around halloween, the button on my iphone, icons on computers, a car badge would get me going again. For a few days, I thought in circles.

Why, you may ask? It all started with a numbering stamp that arrived in my studio with Yoon Jung Kim from South Korea who came for a three month residency in Trélex. For months I worked to the sound of her using the stamp and started to yearn for something to count myself. In the studio I found 1000 paper labels left over from a previous project and spent a satisfying few hours stamping them 0001 to 1000. I like numbers - they feel like a comforting and familiar memory from my life as a scientist.

The choice to draw on the labels with a fine nibbed black pen was also driven by a desire to take a break from the more visceral mark making of painting. As a painter, a large part of my practice has been centered on exploring the territory of the painterly mark in all its myriad forms but always involving coloured pigment and binders or varying viscosities.

If I represent anything in my paintings, it is painting itself. If I don’t paint images, it is because I feel that the possibilities are simply endless: even just drawing round things with a black pen, I felt like I could have kept going forever. The numbers of possible images that we can generate are probably as numerous as the possible states of mind a person can be in: astronomical.

Still, curiosity and playfulness started a train of thought: one round drawing inspired the next and while every single one of the drawings is trivial in itself, taken together they become a thing of beauty and wonderment, representing the intricate, sometimes surprising, always different meandering paths of our conscious experience of the world. The human mind is truly extraordinary.

> Detail of some of the pages:

> Detail of the foreword:

> Detail of an index page: