New drawing through several stages

Just finished working over the drawing begun in the previous post. At this point I'm solving mostly compositional issues -- working steadily and intuitively from my first compositional decisions, and in response to each new mark.

From the first iteration, I began creating an environment for what felt like a discrete object -- as this environment became activated I began to meld it, physically and conceptually, with the more defined areas. Then I addressed those areas, solving composition problems (i.e. fixing things that didn't feel right) and flattening the depth.

Now that I'm fairly satisfied with this piece, I'm going to scrub it away, using erasers and sandpaper to attenuate the existing marks and fields. The history left on the paper will be a bare-bones outline of my decision making, flattened in time. From here I will begin again thinking about content and form, building on the history and re-composing.

I will do this over and over. The drawings on my flickr page are all done in this manner, both the thesis drawings photoset and the 2d work photoset.

here is the same drawing after the first scrubbing

here is the same drawing, 2nd composition

New drawing, stage one...

So I started a new drawing this morning -- these current drawings are 42" wide by 72" tall. Here is a picture:

 Stage one of these drawings is usually pretty intuitive: I look for patterns and shapes to emerge from "gestural" marks (for me, marks that are made which try to describe something non-visual) -- this one is a bit of an exception -- I am beginning with a flattened version of a composition I've already worked out on a painting, and with a little color, and even a working title (cradle).

Of course, once I've resolved this stage of the drawing it will be worked over with erasers and sandpaper, and the resulting history interpreted and worked from. It's content/meaning (for me) could change drastically over the several workings, and it will become much more like the finished (almost finished?) drawings it sits next to in my studio: