A Plan to Escape From the World's Reversals

A Plan to Escape From the World's Reversals

Kerstin Kartscher (German, born 1966)

        This week we reviewed the essence of drawing. What always starts with a simple line on a canvas gradually concludes in an image of many wonders. The MoMa displayed numerous of fascinating drawings. The artwork that I've chosen to discuss is Kerstin Kartscher's "A Plan to Escape From the World's Reversals". This piece is a 2D, liquid media drawing illustrated with a felt tip and gel-ink pen on paper. The drawing indicates a landscape consisting of a body of water, a mountain, plants, a wild cow/ox and an abstract conceptual of the sun. I would say that 90% of the drawing is completed with lines in the form of hatching. At first, the title caught my attention. As for my subjective thought, I speculate that Kartscher is aiming to convey the desire of an escape from everyday life. A withdrawal from the uneasiness of getting through a normal day of labor into a stress relieving environment like the one shown in Kartscher's drawing.

The drawing is presented in several values from light to dark and an interesting pinch of a reddish hue and a highlighter yellow. The light area is visualized in the sea, darker values are shown in the mountain, mostly the sun. Angry and vertical lines are incorporated in the mountain, whereas

mellow and horizontal lines are represented in what appears to be the waves in the sea. I take the indications of lines and value in each individual element as an expression of dominance in the aspects of nature.