Branch 1994

Alfred Freddy Krupa made this drawing of a branch in 1994. It's mostly charcoal by the looks of it. The lines are really searching, aren't they? You can almost see the artist's hand moving across the page, trying to capture the way the branch twists and turns. Charcoal is great for that. It's so smudgy and forgiving. You can build up layers of dark and light, erase, and redraw until you get it just right. I wonder what Krupa was thinking about when he made this? Maybe he was just trying to capture the beauty of nature, or maybe he was exploring something deeper, like the passage of time, or the fragility of life. I really love the textures in here: that build up of darks in the top left; that really anchors the whole picture. Drawings like this make me want to grab a piece of charcoal and start making marks myself. It’s all one big conversation, really. That’s what painting is: you see something that someone else made, and it inspires you to do something new.