Drawing Pöx: Your drawings read as sculptures that are free from engineering, gravity, budgets, and civic permission. As you think through a structure, when does it become convincing and plausible enough that you know it needs to exist?

Toni van Tiel: I use time as a driver for conviction. I sketch a lot in the morning, then refine certain drawings much later, with long gaps in between. What works best for me is to forget a drawing and return to it, flipping through an old sketchbook as if seeing it for the first time.

When I rediscover a sketch and feel a renewed spark of enthusiasm, that’s usually the point where I begin to refine it, and it moves closer to coming into existence. This process often repeats until the final realization. This is probably the closest I can get to objectivity in my own work.

Drawing Pöx: Distance and forgetting as a test. What is it that you are looking for when you return to a sketch?

Toni van Tiel: A surprise. It feels slightly independent from me.

It might be a small chuckle, a rough kind of beauty, or a detail that suddenly clicks into place. That’s usually when I know it’s worth developing.

Sometimes it’s more practical; I can immediately see what was missing, a small addition or a shift that opens up a new direction.

Drawing Pöx: A drawing can almost seem to develop its own character, sometimes with humor. Your drawings take familiar structures and displace their function, creating material and spatial incongruities. How do you think about the role of humor in your work?

Toni van Tiel: Humor is structurally embedded in how I look at and think about the world; it’s almost a default mode. It feels inescapable. I tend to use it to make work more accessible, which is probably why I often use common structures and objects. It greases the wheels for weirdness.

Sometimes it takes the form of satire or pastiche. I like “lullig,” a Dutch word for clumsy, goofy, or inept humor, which comes from lul, meaning “dick.” But I like it when something is both sincere and absurd.

Even though I aim to design art for public space, I don’t necessarily agree with it. Most of it needs to stay within the realm of the drawing. A real sculpture would demand a more serious approach, both in how it’s made and what it symbolizes. I care deeply about the state of our planet and animal rights, but for some reason I cannot, for the life of me, turn my creativity directly into work that serves those causes.

Drawing Pöx: Your drawings propose public spaces without showing the public. Can you take us into that world? If we walked the streets and peeked through the windows, what kind of society, culture and behavioral norms would we see?

Toni van Tiel: Everyone is asleep.

It’s essentially our world, same structures, same problems, but with an almost irrational amount of enthusiasm and resources directed toward art.

Last year I broke that absent-human rule. I made a large drawing, about 1.40 by 1 meter, four times bigger than anything I had done in years, coming off a decade of A4 sized work. Almost architectural in scale, a monumental memorial to my cat, Gaasje.

There’s a small Fluxus-like gesture in it by setting the scene during maintenance hours. You’ll notice a pair of feet dangling over a giant H-beam high above, wearing almost ‘Where’s Waldo’ type socks. Someone seems to be resting after seemingly installing and lighting an impossibly oversized piece of incense.

Drawing Pöx: Same problems but more art. What is all that art doing?

Toni van Tiel: To connect and to rearrange meaning.

For me, the act of sticking things together brings great joy, because it can suddenly produce new meaning.

Near where I live there’s a large sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, a gigantic, dynamic stack of bowling pins, and also John Körmeling’s slightly rotating life-sized house on a roundabout. Those works feel like small disruptions of daily life and logic, and they’ve influenced how I think and draw. I’d like to contribute to that.

During my studies, Johan Huizinga’s idea of Homo Ludens stayed with me. The idea that play is fundamental. If everything becomes more automated, then what remains is play. I think a lot of that art exists to invite that state.

It can connect. It can offer comfort. But some of it is meant to irritate or provoke. Someone once told me they’d love to see one of my works realized, only for the joy of destroying it. I took that as a compliment.

So, that’s what all that art is doing. It gives something to engage with, to play with, or to push against.

Drawing Pöx: Your work feels more unified now, more contained. And there is more blue. Can you take us into what your work looks like a few years from now?

Toni van Tiel: I think the work is becoming more about building worlds.

Right now I’m working on a large drawing, about 2.10 by 1.40 meters. It takes inspiration from a small, A5-sized, drawing of an Art Deco bus stop made entirely from car tires. In this larger work, that idea has evolved into something more like a portal.

After years of working on small drawings of sculpture, this feels like a monument in itself. This drawing will become part of a group of works of various sizes that share the same horizon and setting. Together, they could form a continuous landscape, like a sculpture garden.

At the same time, I’m making these small blue works. They are quicker, more direct. I revisit older sketches and push them through quickly. When I place many of them together, they start to resemble a kind of city plan, almost like a map.

There’s also a desire to push things into reality. I recently worked out a plan for an actual sculpture, based on an old drawing: a kind of double loop structure for tumbleweeds, set in the Gobi Desert. The idea that, within our chaotic universe, somewhere far away, a round, drifting bush might perform not one, but a double loop, feels like a kind of modest optimism.

The plan, which I wrote and submitted to an open call, has since been rejected, but I really enjoyed the process of planning and working it out. The chances of this plan being realized are very small, but I like putting the idea out there. If it were ever built, it would immediately inject a sense of reality into all the drawings.

Drawing Pöx: You are building worlds and even testing how they might exist in reality. And yet it all returns to drawing. Why drawing?

Toni van Tiel: It feels primary for me. I start the day with it, just drawing to clear my head, making a few pages where anything can happen. It’s immediate and always within reach.

From those sketches I often move into software, like GIMP or Blender, which I also consider drawing. I use it in a very rough way, almost like a set of wooden building blocks, to quickly test colors and construct things.

In the finished work, I often use gouache. There’s a directness there as well. The surface has a kind of matte skin, and you can see small imperfections. I value that. Even when the ideas become more speculative, it keeps the work grounded.

Toni van Tiel (The Netherlands, b. 1979) often describes himself as a sculptor on paper. His work imagines public spaces, structures, and objects that feel both plausible and slightly off. Drawing gives him a place to build those worlds at a distance from reality, while keeping its possibility near.

www.tonivantiel.nl

@tototonititi

Drawing Pöx: You use a saw, and at its core, your process feels like drawing. What attracts you to it?

Ireland 3000: My process was developed over the course of two years, through many experiments and failures. The desire was to create large-scale figures, moving beyond the scale limitations of a printing press or bed. This is why I hand-print all my works using a modified ball-bearing baren.

The use of the jigsaw power tool to cut out the figures and shapes is key to the work. The limitations and qualities of drawing with an electric saw give the work a unique energy.

The manipulation of the saw, the confidence required in your line, and the lack of a second chance all add to the qualities of the work and the fun I have making it.

Drawing Pöx: You took the structure and visual drama of Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ and reworked it through your own method. What was your intuition?

This body of work began with Caravaggio’s painting “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas”. I loved this image and the weird bizarreness of Christian imagery. When I re-created this painting as a woodblock, I realised the potential to explore Christian imagery within my process.

Re-creating these works allowed me to reflect on our inherited Christian morality, the role of the artist, and the importance of originality in art-making. It also gave me space to focus on drawing the bodies and robes, and to bring in more low-brow influences through cartoonish colours and exaggerated elements.

This piece, “The Entombment of Christ”, contains all of these ideas but it could also just be some people who’ve fallen out of a pub drunk at closing time, carrying their friend.

Drawing Pöx: There is a particular, and very similar, energy when you talk about wood and when you talk about the human body. What is it that draws you to them, and what connects the two for you?

I’ve always worked with the body as the vehicle to express myself since I began making art. Drawing and the body are constants within my practice, but the medium has changed over the years. It started with printmaking, then wooden sculptures, moved into performance art, and now has returned to printmaking. Making these woodcuts feels like a nice combination of all my previous work, but funnily what seems so obvious now took me some years to find.

The mediums have changed over time, but I’m always drawn to physicality, action, and the realness of a material. I use the cheapest large wooden sheets I can get from the building supply store. They have the roughest grain with the most imperfections, and I really like the surprises that appear when you print the wood. I often find when I’m drawing and cutting the wood, if I can make myself laugh, it’s been quite successful.

An art practice is a strange thing to carry with you through life, and there are always mysteries within it. I’m just happy if my practice continues to challenge me.

Right now, I’m planning a series of landscape prints, which I’m really excited about.

Drawing Pöx: Mysteries within your practice - can you describe one you are currently sitting with?

I’m really lucky at the moment; I have a lot of clarity in my practice, what I want to do, and what the work is doing. Sometime around 2013, I saw Bill Drummond (KLF) give an artist talk in Glasgow. He talked about not making art bigger than himself and how he was just making paintings that were around 6ft and could fit on top of his Land Rover. This is the artist who in the 90s burned a million pounds on the Scottish island of Jura.

The contradiction in ideas resonated with me and how to think about being an artist. I think it’s important to demystify the creative process, how to be an artist, and how to make work, but also accept the mysteries within the work and not try to pin them down.

Drawing Pöx: In demystifying the creative process, you challenge the assumption of the tormented, conflicted artist by emphasizing that a healthy mind is an artist’s most important tool.

That’s a tricky one. What you say, I believe, is correct regarding a healthy, responsive mind for a prolonged creative practice.

For me, it’s about getting to the studio and making some work. Everything is clearer in the doing.

Once the work is made, it’s editing time: being honest, making good decisions, and keeping pushing.

Drawing Pöx: What is a risk you haven’t taken yet but might be getting closer to?

Around 2012 in Scotland I spent some years doing performance art. I was tired of white cube spaces and wanted to challenge myself and my work. I created a fictional society of nude historical re-enactors - The Edinburgh Nude Historical Society. They would re-enact historical and political events in public spaces. The practice was very challenging and really brought me to my limits but also gave me an understanding of my artistic self and where I could push myself to in service of an idea.

So to think about risks in a more traditional studio practice feels strange, I have places I want to go with the work but I don’t see it as risks - just need the time to get there.

I do a little street art, specifically wheat-pasting, that gives me a more traditional adrenaline rush and risk I need.

Drawing Pöx: You mentioned a new series of landscape prints. What makes you excited about them? What are you after there?

I don’t know what makes me excited yet. I just have an urge to make landscape works. I can’t really say why, but I think with art-making, it’s probably clever to follow that unknown and see what can be unearthed in the process. I potentially foresee them as another way for me to play with what it means to be an artist. When I was younger, I would never have dreamed of making landscape works; they wouldn’t have interested me as a subject matter. So, personally, I’m intrigued to explore this change in motivation.

The idea began a few years back when I did a cycling trip along the Baltic coastline in Germany, and one night, while walking along a cliff coastal path, I was struck by the view. The Baltic coastline is starkly different from what I’m used to on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. The ocean and surrounding land are flatter and more pictorial, ready to be directly transposed to my woodblock format. I could see it very clearly in terms of a flat image with a foreground, middle ground, and background.

Hopefully, this exploration will also tell me something different about the places I depict. I feel I’ve always gone inward when thinking about making art, and this could be more outward.

Drawing Pöx: With everything we’ve talked about: risk, mystery, learning from difficulties, and the unknown, what is it about drawing that makes you come back to it? Why drawing?

That’s a difficult one to pin down. A lot of reasons and thoughts run through my head as to why. I kind of see everything as drawing. In the simplest sense, it gives me a lot of joy, both doing and seeing other people’s drawings. I see it as a language that everyone speaks to various levels, and I love to see when people have a mature, complex visual language developed.

Now that I think of it, some of my oldest memories are of drawing: my father showing me how to draw perspective or, as a child, drawing with my older brother and putting people standing in long grass, as I couldn’t draw feet.

When I draw, I’m not in complete control of the outcome. I can’t capture likeness in people, and I’ve never drawn a pleasant landscape. With a lot of effort, I can draw objects adequately, but it doesn’t interest me. When I draw, I try to capture an energy or transmit an aggression within the line while pushing the reality of the form. Often, when I finish or look back at a work, the overall scene won’t be that interesting to me, as long as it works visually, but I will find most enjoyment in a line I have captured, the curve of a finger or the bend of a knee.

Also, the drawing tool is always key. At the moment, I’m using quiet, blunt carpenters’ pencils for a heavy line that matches the cuts of the jigsaw power tool, and I like the energy it gives my lines.

I have to mention the experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment. They did a complete version of the works of Shakespeare, which I watched during COVID, using everyday objects from home to play the characters - bottles of tomato ketchup and salt and pepper shakers for a king and queen. This simplification and abstraction of complex characters had a profound influence on how I view making art.

It reinforced something I already feel when I draw: that energy, doubt, and humour are all part of making something real.

Brian O’Shea (b. 1987, Co. Limerick) works under the artist name Ireland 3000. His practice spans drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and performance, often using humour and satire to explore Irish identity and post-colonial history. After several years working as an artist in Berlin, he has recently returned to Ireland to continue his practice.

He studied Fine Art Printmaking at Limerick School of Art and Design (2010) and completed an MFA in Contemporary Art at Edinburgh College of Art (2014). His work has been shown internationally, with recent highlights including the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, and the Deutsche Internationale Grafik-Triennale.

ireland3000.com

@ireland_3000

Drawing Pöx: A wave keeps coming back in your work. What attracts you to it?

Jérémy Boulard Le Fur: As both a surfer and a drawer, I have always been fascinated by oddities, distorted shapes, and unpredictable movements. Certain waves, with their strangeness, move me at first sight, much like a dog with divergent strabismus: awkward yet profoundly touching. This deformation speaks to me, much like the movement of fur, hair, or coats: living forms, in constant motion, that naturally resonate with the rhythm of the waves.

In my other drawing series, I explore relationships between the human and animal worlds, often tinged with grotesque elements. With the waves, my gaze shifts toward nature itself: deformed masses, frozen in a state between liquid and solid. These vast expanses evoke the abyssal depths described by Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe in A Descent into the Maelström.

When working on my large-scale pieces, the repetition of the stroke, always in the direction of the current, becomes a physical act that draws me into a meditative trance-like state, similar to the experience of surfing.

The polychromy in my recent works also echoes the psychedelic imagery tied to surfing: multicolored reflections on the sea, water as a distorting mirror of the world, and the ever-changing skies of dawn or dusk. These elements contribute to an immersive, almost hallucinatory visual experience.

Beyond the cliché of the « pretty Hawaiian wave, » I aim to offer the viewer a hypnotic experience, a visual transport that transcends simple representation to touch on the intensity of the moment.

@jeremyboulardlefur

jeremyboulardlefur.fr

For Tim, drawing is a slow way of thinking with the body. For Anna, it is structure and invention born of nature. Sarah sees decision and doubt inside a line. For Philip, it’s aspirin for heartbreak: barely effective, but elegant.

Across their three exhibitions so far, they have shown drawing take many forms: on paper and in space, in graphite and in steel. No clear pattern emerged. Instead, they found intimacy, risk, and a viewer wanting to stay with drawing.

Drawing Pöx: Take us back to the very beginning. What was the first conversation that started Drawing Wow? And how did the group come to be?

Philip: As with so many things, it all started with a simple question. Wolfgang Flad, an artist and a friend, asked whether I could imagine putting on a drawing exhibition in a small project space in Berlin with two or three other artists. A small, tidy little show. And at first, I thought: why not? But quite quickly, I realised it wasn’t enough. It felt too narrow, too contained. Drawing has so many different faces. I wanted to show more. So I spoke to Tim first. Tim Plamper, artist, long-time companion, partner in crime. For over ten years, we’d put on many exhibitions. I knew: if anyone was right for this, it was him.

Tim: I said yes without hesitation. On a warm summer evening in Berlin, we met at Wolfgang’s along with Ricardo de Larrea Remiro, who was then director of BCMA, the space that was set to host us, to figure out how we might go about it. We sat in the studio, drinking beer, saying: this is exciting – let’s do it. We started scribbling down names of possible artists. I came up with fifty, sixty names fairly quickly; absolutely buzzing, full of ideas.

It was a sticky Berlin night, and I remember it vividly: we kept nipping out into the courtyard for a smoke, bouncing ideas around, talking into the summer air. What on earth were we going to call this thing? At some point I said: really, the title should be something like Drawing Now – short, punchy, to the point. But also… irgendwie geil.

Philip: I immediately said: “Wow! Not Now! Drawing Wow.” And just like that, the name landed, and it fit like a glove. Of course, it echoed things like Drawing Now, the big fair in Paris, or that catalogue from the seventies. We were fully aware of those references and liked the resonance. But Wow was more than a twist. It captured exactly what we were after: the impact, the range, the independence of drawing today. Drawing that surprises, moves, excites. By the end of the night, we had it: the name, the concept, the list, the energy. Drawing Wow was born.

Back then, we still thought it would be a one-off show. Now we know: it was the beginning of Drawing Wow. 

Anna: I wasn’t there for the first conversation, but I remember when Tim called me up. His voice was full of energy. When he told me what they were planning, I just thought: yes. The idea of shaping something from scratch – not only showing drawings, but thinking drawing – felt incredibly alive. From the start, we had a shared respect for the line, for the craft, and the same trust in drawing as a language. I loved how open the idea was: a space for drawing in all its range and contradiction. 

Sarah: I joined a couple of years later after the first shows, but the spirit was the same. What struck me most was how seriously they took drawing, without ever making it precious. I may not have been there at the very start, but I felt part of this bigger cause right away. I felt very connected to that early impulse: to take drawing seriously, but also to enjoy it. To give it space, weight, visibility without locking it down.

Anna: It’s funny: thinking about the name, it always felt like a shared joke we’d always known. A little absurd, but weirdly accurate.

Sarah: Exactly. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. But it does take drawing seriously. That’s the whole point.

DP: From that sticky Berlin night to now: three shows and so many remarkable drawings. What is one quality a drawing must have to feel it belongs to Drawing Wow?

Tim: For me, the most important is to feel that a drawing is alive. That it’s not just fabricated, but full of blood. That it’s born from real experience. And in the best moments, I catch myself thinking: wow – I’ve never seen the world quite like that before. 

Philip: For me, a drawing doesn’t have to be born from real experience at all. It can be entirely necessary on its own terms. What matters is that this drawing exists in the world, because otherwise, something essential would be missing. It doesn’t really matter who made it. If no one else does it, I’ll have to make it myself. But I’m always relieved to find that someone else has already done it. 

Anna: For me, the most important quality of a drawing is that in its final form it is committed only to itself, that it radiates something self-evident. It makes an assertion that can be very succinct, but which is inviolable because it follows only its own movement, its own laws. Something that raises questions rather than trying to answer them, unambiguous and enigmatic at the same time. 

Sarah: What makes a drawing special for me is its own presence. A uniqueness that can’t be evaluated by form or technique, but by just evoking a sensation that feels unusual and guides you into being present within a thought, a story, an imagination or whatever led an artist to express their inner self in this work of art.

DP: As you worked with drawing artists and witnessed how viewers respond, what has this shown you about the place drawing holds in contemporary art right now?

Tim: Curating Drawing Wow over the past years has only deepened my sense that drawing is more than a medium. It’s a way of making sense of the world through the body, a form of physical thinking, and at the same time, its ‘Abbild’. 

Its relevance lies in the immediacy of mark-making, the tension between intention and accident, between what’s thought and what’s felt. 

In Drawing Wow, we’ve seen how wide that range can be: from fragile, intuitive sketches to highly crafted, time-intensive works. But what remains constant is this: drawing carries traces of time, of presence, of pressure. You stay close to its making, and that closeness holds something deeply human. 

In a digitised world of frictionless images and relentless visual acceleration, drawing offers a kind of stubborn tactility. 

That, to me, is its place in contemporary art today: not as a relic but rather a quietly radical practice. One that slows us down, and draws us in. 

Drawing resists speed.

DP: What patterns or trends did you notice in the works you’ve seen, selected, or turned away?

Sarah: Since I joined Drawing Wow in 2021, I have only co-curated the most recent show in Vienna in 2022. In our process of selecting the artworks, each of us proposed artists, and we collectively decided which ones and which works to exhibit. 

Curating a drawing exhibition, we aimed to highlight the diversity of the medium and while reviewing the proposed works, we saw exactly that: the wide range of what drawing can be. What stood out was that there wasn’t a pattern. 

Of course there’s a rising in digital art but so is there a tendency towards going back to classical drawings. Our perception of what a drawing is and what can be expressed through a line in a broad sense isn’t limited by a fixed definition. The possibilities of the medium continue to expand over time and as curators we strive to make full use of the endless potential drawing holds.

DP: What has surprised or stayed with you in how people look at and spend time with drawing?

Anna: Personally, I am always surprised and delighted when even a seemingly fleeting sketch, a minimal trace or what at first glance appears to be a succinct gesture is perceived and recognised as an autonomous pictorial work in its own right. 

I have also observed that viewers sometimes find it easier to find a personal approach to drawings, perhaps this is also because almost everyone has left traces of drawing on paper at least once as a child. 

Another thing that has stayed with me is how willing viewers are to perceive the medium of drawing in its broader sense, i.e. to engage with the question of where drawing begins and where it ends.

DP: What kinds of risks do you see artists taking in drawing today?

Philip: I think one of the interesting risks artists take with drawing today is that they don’t really define it so clearly anymore as drawing. It’s not always treated as a medium in the classical sense. It’s more like a tool, or even a way of thinking. Drawing can suddenly appear in the form of an installation or even a performance. 

It used to be more about representing something: an object, a scene, a feeling. But now it’s much more open. And that’s risky in a good way: it’s harder to read, it doesn’t always fit neatly into categories. 

But perhaps that’s also its greatest strength that drawing today doesn’t necessarily show something, but rather shows how something is thought or done. It becomes less definite, but more engaging. 

A good example of how classical drawing can combine with contemporary thinking was Dry Joker by Birte Bosse in one of our exhibitions. It’s a steel sculpture shaped like a drying rack, basically a drawing in space. It brings a sense of classical line, but in a very contemporary, sculptural way. That’s exactly the kind of range we like to explore in our exhibitions.

DP: Beyond Drawing Wow, each of you brings a personal relationship to drawing. What role does it play in how you think, notice, or make sense of things in your life?

Anna: For me, drawing means something very elementary: leaving black traces on white paper or cotton with the simplest means: charred twigs. 

Nature not only provides me with the material, but also with graphic inventions and ideas, structures, contrasts, light and shadow, constellations and compositions that I would never come up with in such abundance. 

Drawing means seeing the world that surrounds me as material and using its structural properties to create something new and, in the best case, something surprising and ambiguous.

Sarah: As an art historian, I see drawing as both a subject of study and a method of understanding. I remember while writing my bachelor’s thesis on a painting by Anthony Van Dyck I became even more fascinated by his drawings and sketches than by the work itself. 

Drawings possess a unique immediacy and intimacy, offering insight into the creative process in a way no other artistic medium can. Engaging with drawings sharpens my perception and interpretation. They invite a more attentive gaze, one that reveals not only form but process, hesitation and decision.

Tim: Drawing is how I think. Not a technique or expression, but a state. A multilinear form of knowing.

The line becomes a passage: through perception, memory, and gesture. A choreography of meaning. Sometimes precise, sometimes faltering, but always a trace of presence.

It’s how I stay with complexity without forcing resolution. I draw to stay close to what escapes explanation: to what flickers, trembles, resists naming.

I trust drawing not because it offers clarity, but because it allows me to remain with the questions, long enough for them to resonate.

Philip: Oh, and I would say: drawing helps me deal with complexity the same way aspirin helps with heartbreak: barely. I use it to tidy things up, not sit reverently in their mystery. Flickering, trembling, unnamable stuff? Sounds like a malfunction, not a muse.

I don’t trust drawing to keep questions alive. I trust it to kill them gently, with aesthetics. It’s not about resonance. Sometimes, maybe, it’s just about getting away with something that looks like thought.

You know, close enough to fool even myself.

DP: Earlier in our conversation, you’ve taken us into the past. Take us into the future now. If Drawing Wow were to surprise even you, what might it grow into?

Philip: It began as a running joke. Whenever things got too serious, one of us would say: “What if Drawing Wow became the McDonald’s of drawing shows?” Same name, same structure, popping up all over the world. Standardised brilliance. Clean lines. Global reach. Fewer fries, more pencils.

Sarah: But somehow, the joke stuck. It kept resurfacing as a kind of quietly persistent idea. What if there was a way to share the core of Drawing Wow not only as a format, but also as a language? Something others could pick up, reshape, and make their own?

Anna: Over time, the vision took form: an open-source exhibition kit. A structure that could travel. Be translated. Recur. Still local, still personal but connected through a shared grammar of gestures, values, and curatorial care.

Tim: So maybe, one day in a future where people still pause long enough to look at drawings, Drawing Wow does become a kind of franchise. A way for others to carry the torch. To draw in their own cities, with their own hands, but under the same name, glowing softly in the distance like golden arches at dusk. Only better. And upside down.

Eben: WOW.

DP: You each spoke to this in fragments earlier in our conversation but I always end with this: why drawing?

Philip: Painting is hard.

Sarah: Live, laugh, suffer.

Tim: Drawing knows me.

Anna: I’m lovin’ it.

drawingwow.de

instagram.com/d.r.a.w.i.n.g.w.o.w

linktr.ee/drawingwow

Peter Peri’s Reclining Nudes join the effort to reframe the tradition. Rather than rejecting the form, Peri engages it knowingly. He retains the structure of the reclining pose but takes away its availability. He replaces body with arcs, angles, and mathematical precision.

The nudes rest on their own terms, where reclining belongs to them, and is not offered to the viewer.

Peri disarms the tradition’s voyeuristic history and opens space for relation rather than objectification.

@www.instagram.com/peter___peri

Drawing Pöx: Your work examines body transformation and protection through ornamentation. What are you protecting against?

Velvet Other World: We use costume and pageantry to not only amplify the presence and impact of our figures, but also to create deliberate barriers that distance them from accessibility—similar to the way oversized garments like hoop skirts function.

At times, our figures appear protected from the perceived dangers of the outside world; in other moments, they are presented as coveted objects—fetishized, handled, and revered like sacred totems.

Drawing Pöx: It seems that in both instances - either by increasing physical distance or by transforming the self into the totemized and untouchable - there is a vulnerability to guard. What dangers do you feel your figures are responding to?

Josh: To a degree our heroes and heroines do not fear anything, they are impenetrable and immortal like diamonds or mountains. But they are imbued with a longing for peace, romance, and passion while making up a world that only exists in a dream, kind of like a heaven. I feel like our drawings resemble prayers for something better, more beautiful, and full of life.

Kat: I agree that I don’t feel like I have specific concepts of them fearing or hiding from anything. We are more interested in the idea of our figures exploring their power through their impenetrability. I think their vulnerability lies in the emotion in their eyes which is at times the only truly human part about them. They transcend the biological body and become godlike in their freedom to embody anything they desire with the “outfits” they wear but they still retain a humanity that we hope viewers feel they can connect with and maybe even see themselves in.

Drawing Pöx: Their presence is commanding but their eyes stop me - exposed, sometimes daring, sometimes disappointed. What of yourselves do they carry?

Velvet Other World: Both identity-expanding tech and post-human possibility point toward a radical shift from accepting the body as fate to treating it as fluid, evolving, and potentially unlimited.

The eyes represent the core behind the form - if you can change your body to any degree at what point are you no longer “you” or human? We use eyes as an anchor point for the humanity behind our figures. We could create a blob and as long as there are eyes somewhere that blob instantly becomes figurative.

Although we imbue our drawings with what moves us, our work isn’t really about us as individuals. We often gravitate towards dramas around longing, courtship, and exhibitionism through the lens of body modding and limitless expansion.

Drawing Pöx: What was it that made you want to work together? What did you see in the other that made you think - this speaks to something I’ve been drawn to; I want to see what it becomes between us.

Kat: We were always making work together without realizing it. In art school, we were constantly bouncing ideas off of each other and having never ending conversations about meaning. Our ideas began to echo each other—sometimes so closely, that others around us could see the thread between our work even back then.

We’re drawn to the same flickers in the dark—fashion, shape, shadow, light. Our individual work has always felt like two people describing the same dream from different corners of the room. We were already making the same kind of work without trying to.

When I came back to Rhode Island from Texas, we were together again, dreaming out loud every day. It started as play, a what-if, a hum in the background. But it grew into something inevitable. Like the work had been waiting for us to say yes.

Josh: We had this shared history of thinking and creating alongside each other during undergrad but never explored a collaboration. When we finally decided to make drawings together, something clicked and it felt so natural.

For me, I had always deeply respected Kat and her work. She’s a genius, and wanting to incorporate both of our minds felt like the right thing to do. We both had hit a bit of a wall with our individual practices and there was an aspect of each other’s art that felt like the missing link. Kat was making work about protection and eroticism through objects and the figure while I was making work about glamour and transformation through clothing and the body.

Drawing Pöx: When you look at your early drawings together and compare them to now, what quality has emerged over time that wasn’t there at the start?

Velvet Other World: Our early work is very much centered around a lot of glamour, portraits of royalty, and poetic, long titles. We were thinking a lot about the idea of romance and conveying emotion through the eyes alone. We also played with a lot more geometric, flat shapes as opposed to newer work that is more nuanced.

Our more recent drawings are more focused on texture rather than depicting obsessively ornate material. The characters have stretched beyond portraits and into full environments.

We are becoming more interested in blurring the lines between body and clothing. There is a lot more fusion of the body with object as the “outfit,” and their fur suits are more form-fitting now. The pieces are more sensual as well, and less about looking back in time but more about imagining what could come next.

In some ways, they are more active now, like flying, wrestling, and transforming into vehicles. Before, we kept ourselves more rigidly aligned with a specific method and aesthetic, but now that we have been making work for a while together, we feel more free to explore new ideas and see what else we can tap into within the VOW world.

Drawing Pöx: From untouchable, totemic presences to letting your figures grow restless inside their forms - more independent, more assertive. If you follow this thread forward, what do we see in the future world of VOW?

Velvet Other World: Romance and devotion will always be at the core of our work but we want our figures to have limitless expansion. There are endless possibilities for them to change shape, occupation, and exist in new environments. We have been playing with the idea of cut paper collage and utilizing craft materials like sequins as a way to introduce color, flatness, and a raking light. We are just getting started.

Drawing Pöx: As you expand, giving your figures and your hands new possibilities, drawing seems to remain at the core. Why drawing?

Velvet Other World: Drawing is the foundation of everything. It is the purest form of expressing ideas and what directly exists inside the mind and body.

Only using charcoal, erasers and paper is essential to our practice as it is simple, straightforward and allows for us to transform something simple into something magical.

Josh Allen (b. 1995, Andover, MA) and Katrina Pisetti (b. 1996, Salinas, CA) live and work in Providence, Rhode Island. Allen and Pisetti began their collaboration under the moniker Velvet Other World (VOW) in 2021. VOW’s charcoal drawings explore the transformation of the body through a focus on costume and form. In their collaborative practice, they explore ideas of plastic surgery, body maxxing, and body modification through the lens of costume. They also look to the history of theater, pageantry, and ceremony to dissect the constructive and protective nature of dress. VOW’s indulgent, pneumatic drawings are loaded with pattern, texture, and ornament that serve as an armor that shields the body. While playful, these grand depictions of their figures endow them with a near-devotional stature. Their dense, assertive imagery reveals forms that are simultaneously hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine, forgoing identity, and reconsidering the human relationship with the body. Each charcoal on paper piece is made through a buildup and breakdown of surface. VOW works with heavyweight paper that they are able to repetitively sand down and re-coat with layers of charcoal, reflecting their visual concepts of encasing and transfiguring the body.

www.velvetotherworld.com

@velvetotherworld

“What makes you want your drawings move?” I asked.

Rozemarijn: “My stop-motion films come directly from the drawings I create. Drawing is for me the most honest form of making art. It’s as intimate as it is raw. Observations, memories and dreams I transform into pen drawings, sometimes so intense that the white paper almost disappears.

I only draw with pen and ink; Indian ink is a material which is irreversible and has only one color: black. I very much like the restrictions this material brings with it; they make the rules I created for myself: I don’t have to think about which colors to use, I don’t have to rethink my material. Within these rules I can do whatever I want.

In 2006 I started making animation films. I always dreamt of it earlier, but it really took off out of practical reasons. I went to Japan for a residency and couldn’t bring many materials with me. I decided to put my drawings together into moving image and my first stop-motion films were born and shown in Tokyo.

After this I won the Buning Brongers Prize for drawing and painting, which was surprisingly nice because I had submitted moving image, a video work.

Since 2015 I decided to restrict myself regarding the subject of my work as well; in my drawings I now focus on drawing the landscape – particularly the garden – and, more recent, the female body. Through this, I explore how a personal experience or the sensation of a specific moment can become universal and recognizable to the viewer.

To take this a step further, I would like the viewer to really step into my world by creating film. How does it feel to be captured by a hand-drawn image in motion, while hearing sound at the same time? Can I come closer to the viewer this way? Can we interact by sharing a same association provoked by a drawing? Film also gives us the possibility to experience the perception of time, this is an interesting aspect for me to play with as well.

I create my films using stop-motion, capturing each frame individually. For example, over 10.000 photographs construct Rêves en Ligne, a film I made for the Zadkine Museum in Paris, with a duration of 10:30 minutes. By employing this technique, I choose a slow and simple way to produce moving images, staying as close as possible to the act of drawing. I build my film settings layer by layer, much like I create a drawing, erasing nothing. This approach allows viewers to follow the drawing process closely.

The films’ soundtracks I create by using primarily analogue equipment, like a 4-track recorder. As it stays as close to the drawing and filming process as possible, bringing the drawn worlds to life.

From these films I develop a more spatial form of drawing, in which I like to incorporate elements from my animations into new works. Therefore, I preserve the drawn paper figures that are featured in my films, in cast resin or ceramics. As these works capture a moment frozen in time, allowing the viewer to observe them from different angles.”

The man’s terror is raw and sharp, but the insects are not. They seem fragile, gentle and almost playful.

Very many know Mepaintsme for his eye as a curator, but not that many know him as an artist. I asked him about this drawing. Here is what he said:

: For a period of time I was experimenting with varnish and allowing the back drawing to be seen through the front drawing, perhaps creating a new dialogue. A lot of my work explores subconscious fears and this transparent effect seemed to work well communicating this.

Dan Beudean does it too. His drawings revive historical myths and forms in ways that feel familiar and present. Or perhaps it’s the reverse? You look at a drawing of Aunt Cristina watching TV and you sense echoes of the past: something once monumental, now slipping from memory.

In his self-portrait as Belphegor, Dan hides a devil’s tail, gripping it firm, aware of dangers it carries, knowing the power he is holding back.

Dan’s work offers questions. When you look, you are certain that you found the answer yourself.

Dan Beudean
Pencil on paper mounted on wood
34 x 28 cm, 2025

I asked Elene: why Lake George?

Elene Usdin: On a long journey from New York City to Detroit, I made a stop to see friends at Sacandaga Lake in New York State, and it so happened that I passed through Lake George. On the outskirts of the town, I encountered an unmistakably outdated feel —a blend of stillness, timelessness, and a palpable sadness that lingered in the air.

As I continued my journey towards Vermont and then Michigan, I captured many photographs. This was back in 2018. Being French, the vast American landscapes have always held a particular fascination for me, as well as the nostalgic and occasionally somber atmosphere of small towns enveloped in this grand nature.

DP: What did you discover in transforming those photos into drawings?

EU: The photographs were in black and white, which led me to reimagine and invent the colors as I translated them into drawings. It is profoundly satisfying to breathe new life into my photographs.

I have the opportunity to craft a narrative, creating stories around these places in hindsight. In the Lake George series, for instance, I envisioned submerged cars, symbols of a bygone era and lost memories.

DP: Now that some time has passed, how do they make you feel?

EU: Now that I look at them, I find them quite dark, evoking an ambiance reminiscent of Twin Peaks. They are compelling, perfectly suited for a horror or fantasy film backdrop.

They also echo the themes of my forthcoming graphic novel, which delves into the decline of America following the 2008 economic downturn in Detroit. This novel, Detroit Roma, imagined and written together with Joseph Boni Siran, is slated for release in October 2025 by Sarbacane, a French publisher.

DP: On America's decline, it would be remiss of me not to ask: if you were to illustrate the current political climate in the U.S., what drawing would that be?

EU: Perhaps this page from my graphic novel - Detroit, apocalyptic.

Elene Usdin: Lors d’un long voyage de New York City à Detroit, j’ai visité des amies installées à Sacandanga Lake, dans l’état de New York, et je suis passée par hasard à Lake George.

J’ai trouvé un aspect très désuet aux abords de la ville de Lake George. Quelque chose entre l’immobilité, l’intemporalité et une certaine tristesse des lieux.

J’ai fait pas mal de photographies, sur ma route vers le Vermont, puis le Michigan.

C’était en 2018. En tant que française, j’ai toujours été fascinée par les grands espaces américains, mais aussi par la nostalgie et l’aspect parfois lugubre des petites villes, implantées dans cette nature grandiose.

Les photographies sont en noir et blanc, je dois donc inventer les couleurs quand je passe au dessin. C’est très jouissif de donner une seconde vie à mes photographies.

Je peux ainsi y ajouter une narration, j’invente une histoire autour d’un lieu, a posteriori. Dans ces dessins de la série Lake George, j’ai imaginé des voitures englouties, symbolisant un temps révolu, une mémoire oubliée.

Je trouve ces dessins assez sombres, une ambiance à la Twin Picks. Ils sont intrigants et pourrait être un décor d’un film d’horreur, ou d’un film fantastique.

Il me rappelle aussi les thèmes sur lesquels je travaille actuellement sur mon prochain roman graphique, une Amérique déclinante, après la crise de l’industrie économique à Détroit de 2008.

Ce roman graphique, Detroit Roma, conçu et écrit en collaboration avec Joseph Boni Siran, sortira en octobre 2025 chez Sarbacane, un éditeur français.

I asked Tuğba about her work.

Tuğba Demirbaş: I exaggerate my own neurotic states and transform them into stories. I distort the forms of people in my life and recreate them, which I truly enjoy. In fact, I constantly explore themes connected to what unsettles or fascinates me in my own life.

DP: What are those themes?

TD: Hysteria, passion, and freedom.

DP: What is it about these that holds you?

TD: I believe that the excessive and uncontrollable nature of hysteria reflects the pure and uncensored state of human nature.

Since I experience all my emotions at their most intense levels, I sometimes put too much strain on my body; as a result, my feelings return as physical reactions. But this is a natural process born out of my passion. I don’t try too hard to control it because it makes me feel free.

DP: Why drawing to tell these stories?

TD: I guess it’s completely instinctive. Drawing gives me the freedom to tell the stories I want without adhering to any rules or realities, entirely in my own visual language.

No matter which technique or method I use, I see art as a means of communication, and for me, that’s what matters most.

I asked Guy about Time to be.

Guy Vording: Since 2014, I have been working on my ongoing series Black Pages. While going through old, antique books and magazines, I look for the stories that lie behind the ones presented in their articles. By covering everything I don’t need with watercolor pencil, I create a scene—often intimate or tied to a dark memory—making it visible.

Most Black Pages are the size of an actual page because I use the entire page. But Time To Be is smaller. I wanted to capture a moment where loneliness is the main focus, though not in a negative way. At the same time, I wanted to show an emotion that remains uncertain. She could be exhausted, or she could be at ease. The words in this piece also play with that moment of loneliness.

The words in my pieces are already on the page, exactly where they appear. I don’t cut or paste anything—this is one of the important rules I’ve set for myself.

Lawrence James Bailey collects first. Then he sews. Found fabric - old textiles, forgotten and worn - becomes objects. Objects become images. Images become stories.

“I use a sewing machine in a loose, painterly manner to produce two dimensional imagery, yet the properties of textiles also allow me to cut, join, and form the work in a sculptural way. The materials I use add a further dimension to the images I create. Textiles can possess a varying degree of softness or roughness, fragility and vulnerability. I can use these qualities to tell stories or create feelings in ways which I never could using paint on a canvas.”

Lawrence weaves together many things. Revolution and ruin. Romanticism and Pop. Fantasy, sci-fi, cults, and survival. Mountains and wastelands. Reformation and pandemic. He stitches it all together: beauty, dirt, and uncertainty.

“I initially try to do as much shading as possible with coloured fabric, like how a painter blocks in colour. I then use the threads to soften the edges, to blend or to add detail.”

He planned Dance Before The Storm in the long days of summer. It was meant for an exhibition in Den Helder. Then the sewing machine broke. The deadline slipped away and he took other work instead. This one sat, waiting. Months passed. At the start of the year, he picked it up again. The stitching took a week, paced in bursts - too many hours at the machine wears on the hands, the eyes. Step back, return, keep the thread moving. In January, the last stitch was set.

“The raw textures and frayed edges in my textiles echo a world unraveling — social order slipping, leaving us exposed. But they also hint at renewal. Imperfection isn’t just decay; it’s the untamed beauty of being human.”

Lawrence James Bailey
Dance Before The Storm, 2025
Textile appliqué and embroidery on wooden stretcher, 56 x 39cm

Few artists have mastered this. Konrad Witz in La Synagogue (1435). Van Gogh in La Maison Jaune (1888). Gauguin in The Yellow Christ (1889). František Kupka in The Yellow Scale (c. 1907).

To me, Magali Cazo stands in this company. I asked her about this drawing. Here’s what she said – scroll down for the French original:

“I paint my landscapes from memories and sensations. I like my images to be both realistic and slightly detached from reality. They pass through my imagination and memory, which will never be able to perfectly translate what it has seen.

The first images in this series came directly from childhood, then they transformed over the years and through my travels. Symmetry emerged naturally, like a search for balance or a desire to speak about the body by depicting nature.

My damp paper creates blurred atmospheres, and the water brings its share of surprises, which I embrace and compose with. It is a living ink that expresses itself, requiring an acceptance of the unexpected.

Color plays an important role—I strive to capture those moments when the light fades, setting off bursts of vivid tones that stand out against the encroaching shadow. The daily splendor of the setting sun.”

“Je peins mes paysages à partir de souvenirs et de sensations. J’aime que mes images soient à la fois réalistes et décalées par rapport au réel. Elles passent par mon imaginaire et ma mémoire qui ne saura jamais traduire parfaitement ce qu’elle a vu.

Les premières images de cette série me venaient directement de l’enfance, puis elles se sont métamorphosées au fil des années et de mes déplacements. La symétrie s’est imposée, comme une recherche d’équilibre ou le désir de parler du corps en représentant la nature.

Mon papier humide crée des ambiances floues et l’eau amène son lot de surprises avec lesquelles je compose. C’est une encre vivante qui s’exprime et qui implique d’accepter l’inattendu.

La couleur joue un rôle important, je cherche à traduire ces instants où la lumière baisse et laisse éclater des teintes vives qui contrastent avec l’ombre qui s’installe. La splendeur quotidienne du soleil couchant.”

Drawing Pöx: Many describe your work as surreal or dream-like, evoking blurred memories. To me, however, your drawings feel lucid and clear, capturing complexity with precision. Where do you see your work on the spectrum between these opposing qualities, unless of course you view this as a false dichotomy?

Anya Belyat-Giunta: I agree - although my drawings adopt a dreamlike logic, this is not their final purpose. What I aim to unveil is a réalité autre, a fusion of the collective unconscious. It is a space where the viewer can project themselves into the world thus created, reaching towards spirituality - a space of contemplation and refuge. As if what is presented were familiar, and amidst its ambiguous qualities and appearances, it could be read and, most importantly, experienced with its soul - yet according to a different set of rules, a different logic. I draw as I dream.

In many cultures, dreams are believed to be parallel worlds. I love the idea of living my dreams as a parallel life. The separation between the two, to me, is permeable; there is a constant fluidity. There is this liminal moment of transition just before we fall asleep, called hypnagogia, which is essential: this ability to position myself on the borderline of both worlds. In-betweenness as an altered state of consciousness, and the drawn line captures what cannot be seen with the naked eye: the ultimate invisible.

Drawing Pöx: “I draw as I dream." Each of your drawings lets us into this world. We see unborn children playing in delightful euphoria. We watch strange figures move through secret gardens. A disappearing monkey sitting on the shoulder of a hypothetical liar. Angels fall. And if you’re quiet, you may see something that didn’t happen yet, watching you from the other side.

Who are these characters? And if you spoke with them, what would they say they want?

Anya Belyat-Giunta: This vivid description makes me realize that over the years, I have created quite a population of strange figures inhabiting my Terra Incognita. The Waves by Virginia Woolf comes to mind, a succession of monologues propelling through the space of the reading experience. In my case, the monologues are silent murmurs in the abyss. Each drawing in a way opens a portal. The personification of a series invades me, like a wave sliding onto the shore, then retreating, leaving space for the next one.

It is not within my capacity to explain how and why a particular series takes the form it does. To me, the drawing process in its essence is a living organism. Each time my pencil touches the paper, silent sounds come to life. Each line has the ability to explore the invisible, personify faces, and shape body-landscapes. I think it also defeats their purpose to articulate their proposals. I experience each encounter as a precious discovery. They surprise me with their peculiar appearances, attributes belonging to both the animal and vegetal kingdoms. The strangeness of being is what unites them.

Drawing Pöx: The waves you describe feel deeply physical. How does your body respond to these tides? How do you feel it in your posture, breath, and hands as you draw?

Anya Belyat-Giunta: I’m not always fully aware of my body’s functions while working. I believe it’s Fred Deux who speaks of the paradox: the simultaneous absence and presence of the body during the drawing process.

My body definitely enters a trance-like state, and perhaps what emerges is a transcendent body? My bodily functions become somewhat confused, as I’m still able to experience profound emotional reactions.

On several occasions, this emotional impact has made me cry. I might laugh, yawn, or smile. In a way, it’s also a pleasant feeling - this reaching toward something elusive, which keeps me going, as this something remains out of reach.

Sometimes, I experience vertigo and shivering vibrations, which I have come to recognize as signals. Intuition is key, and these signs act as indicators, guiding me through the meanders of the subconscious.

Drawing Pöx: Beyond the physical, you speak of silent murmurs, silent sounds coming to life. To me, each of your works has a distinct soundscape - there is tinkle and chime, there is thrum and quiver, there is echo and whisper. But with some of your portraits, seeing them feels like stepping into a deep fog where noises are muted and sounds dissolve into silence. I sense this in your Manteau de Fourrure series and Unknown Figures. It's also explicit in Entre Deux Mondes, your collaboration with Erich Gruber.

How intentional is the sense of silence in your work, and how do you approach sound as a dimension of your drawing?

Anya Belyat-Giunta: I haven't extensively considered the sound-related dimension of specific works, so this introspection is not that easy. But in fact, silence has always been deeply embedded in my experience and at my fingertips - it’s the very genesis of my story. As a child, I closed myself off in the silence of communication with my surroundings, partly due to my upbringing in a communist regime. Yet it is also this silence that granted me the permission and the will to find my voice through drawing. Looking back, my earliest drawings felt more like screams.

Quite a few years ago, French art historian, critic, and curator Amélie Adamo used the term silences habitées (living silences) to describe my work. She speaks of invisible presences that saturate the silence - this indescribable sensation of a delicate breeze brushing the skin, a fleur de peau (skin-deep) feeling. You aptly observe that in some of my series, the drawing creates a diaphanous pictorial space. This is where the living silence also resides.

In Manteau de Fourrure, I was particularly interested in pushing the drawing medium to explore its dimensionality and the possibility of thickness - not in a physical sense, but in terms of energy. These are probably the drawings I worked on the most, layering and layering to achieve an almost engulfing visual experience. Now that I think about it, this evokes in me a sense of inertia, a kind of numbness, something we experience in dreams, where we try to make sounds, but nothing comes out. I appreciate your description of it as being in a foggy space, almost like a weightless vacuum.

In my collaboration with Erich Gruber, we engaged in a drawing dialogue intuitively following our parallel visions. For Erich, his work generates a contemplative space, born from the extremely lengthy process of drawing. For me, on the other hand, I strive to capture the vibrations and flow of visions as accurately as possible.

Drawing Pöx: In one of our earlier conversations, speaking about your drawing Hilma vêtue de son manteau de fourrure, you said:

"As I stand at the feet of each work making it come to life, the connection is special but different with each drawing as it would be with a living being. I think of this relationship as a love story. It evolves with the moment of time, setting, maybe the state of mind I am in. I can tell you for sure that the following drawing hangs over my head when I am working. I can't imagine being separated from it! It represents an absolute moment of grace, when the drawing somehow unveiled its divine aura in my eyes."

Standing ‘at the feet’ of your work evokes humility and reverence and blurs the lines between creator and creation. The love you speak of implies vulnerability and an intimate surrender. And your entire process interlaces the physical, spiritual, and emotional.

What makes drawing the medium for such a relationship? Why drawing?

Anya Belyat-Giunta: This particular drawing, Hilma Dressed in a Fur Coat, is actually a portrait of Hilma af Klint, a visionary mystic artist. This work represents a special connection for me, one in which I understood that there was something I needed to transmit through my work, and that was enough for the work to exist. I worked on it for months, and in the end, it became a revelation—a light aura, a moment of grace. It also highlighted the importance of a certain purpose behind the work.

I don't mean to compare myself to her legendary story or the work she produced. It's simply that working on this piece was a grounding experience for my understanding. It felt as if I had been walking around blindfolded for many years, and suddenly, everything made sense. I felt centered and aligned.

Drawing chose me, not the other way around, and not without reason. It stimulates my deep perception of the world, opening my senses and striking me with its omens. The process itself becomes a gateway to a spiritual and mystical experience. The reverence you mention - the reception of what is given - feels like a gift, an offering. But most of all, it is a revelation for me, and, of course, for anyone willing to engage with my work. It is an invitation to a spiritual journey.

To fulfill this purpose, drawing is the only medium that can truly express the relationship I undertake with the unknown. Its accuracy, fragility, and immediacy are crucial to this connection. From a formal standpoint, it also aligns with a linear interconnectedness, which differs from the structure I experience in other mediums, like sculpture. In a way, it relates to automatic writing: one form - line, shape- leads to another, evolving from each other and creating a chain. The process is economical in means - efficient and direct. It offers a vast spectrum of possibilities, seemingly inexhaustible. Even after years of working with the same materials and paper, the revelation continues to emerge with each line.

I can’t speak of the drawing process without addressing the lovely partner of drawing: paper. It’s its own love story, and I believe many artists working with paper would agree. The sensuality of the surface, with its defined limits, is something special. Beyond those limits, the paper simply gives up. I appreciate working within a defined temporality, a limited open window, so to speak. It demands urgency and clarity of vision. On the other hand, the found papers I use carry traces of past memories, which add richness to the work.

In conclusion, drawing is both a precise and open-ended language, imbued with grace, healing, and respect. My work often takes the form of series, where I capture suspended moments - an ongoing tension between appearance and reality. It is within this blur, between the invisible and the visible, that I position myself. Drawing becomes a way of transforming fleeting visions into pictorial representations, inviting viewers to reflect on how they perceive the world.

There is something profound about how art transcends personal experience, creating a space where others can reflect on their own inner landscapes.

Anya Belyat-Giunta (b. 1975) is an American artist based in Lyon, France. Moving with her family, she left the Soviet Union for Austria and Italy before spending her teenage years in the United States. Through every transition, drawing remained her constant—a companion shaping her vision. She earned her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and has exhibited internationally. Her work has been recognized with the Charles Oulmont Prize Foundation of France (2001) and a shortlist for the Partners Drawing Prize at Saint Etienne Modern Art Museum (2015). Significant international exhibitions include Loup y es-tu? Bestiaire et Métamorphoses at Château Maison Laffitte (2018) and major shows curated by Lorand Hegyi at the Parkview Museum Singapore—Intriguing Uncertainties (2018) and Disturbing Narratives (2019). Her work is held in the Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium), the Thomas Koerfer Collection (Switzerland), the Gilles Fuchs Art Collection (France), and Museum ARS AEVI (Bosnia and Herzegovina)

www.anyabelyatgiunta.com

@anyabelyatgiunta

Drawing Pöx: In our earlier exchange about your drawing Wildman’s Bouquet, you spoke about reimagining Wildman and Wildwoman - mystical figures from medieval European storytelling - as outsiders who embody land and queerness. What draws you to them? And how does exploring these archetypes through self-portraiture help you visualize the concept of queer rewilding?

Zachari Logan: I often respond to, reference, and re-evaluate art historical sources as a catalyst for ideas about contemporary representations of the body and self-portraiture. My first encounter with the Wild Man, Wildermann or Woodwose was in Vienna, during a residency back in 2012. The Albertina collection, home to the largest collection of works on paper in the world, allows many pieces to be researched firsthand. I was fortunate enough to spend considerable time looking at Martin Schongauer’s fabulous etchings of Wildmen, Wildwomen, and several family crests that incorporate the Wildman’s image.

Schongauer’s treatment of their bodies is playfully gestural. The furriness is luxuriant and sensual. What struck me visually - and still interests me in regard to the Wildman - is texture.

The Wildermann’s bodies, visually othered by their nudity and their place in the forest, are simultaneously made fabulous (queer) by the intense furriness of their bodies. This visual inversion was relevant to my own desire to rewild or transform my own image.

The first works in this series were not primarily based on Schongauer’s depictions but on those of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. While in Vienna, I was concurrently researching the Italian painter’s work in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. Arcimboldo's fantastical portraits of Hapsburg royalty as conglomerations of flora, fauna, and inanimate objects felt very contemporary and relevant to my desire to reshape or rewild my own body – formally and texturally. These initial drawings were silhouetted portraits mixing both flora and fauna. The furriness in my renderings became textured landscape; landscape in turn became body.

Several years later, I focused on works that directly referenced Schongauer’s, in a series titled Tales From the Bone Garden, of which Wildman’s Bouquet is a part.

Drawing Pöx: In your drawing, land and body intertwine, weaving each other in a ceaseless cycle. Fur becomes foliage, flesh becomes earth, and the body returns - to morph again into a landscape.

To describe this metamorphosis, you’ve cultivated a rich and intricate visual vocabulary of flora and fauna. In a world with 390,000 plant species, how do you curate which ones will tell your story on paper?

Zachari Logan: Initially, this curation - or cultivation, if you will - has been linked to my physical experience of flora. Simply through the act of observation: by both photographing and drawing flowers wherever I am in the world - at home in Saskatchewan or abroad. Sources mined empirically by my presence: seeing and then describing them through the flash of the camera, sketching, and, in some cases, collecting.

Within my ongoing series of monumental pastel drawings, the Eunuch Tapestries (which refer to the famed Unicorn Tapestries in the Met Cloisters), I began to visualize my catalogue of plant observations within single compositions. Literally hundreds of collected flora and fauna (mostly photographic) were composed within nocturnal scenes that span anywhere between 5 and 25 feet. I mix these plants freely, creating a landscape that could not possibly exist, but as a mindscape.

These works are composed similarly to that of a Dutch still-life painter who would entwine flowers that would have never bloomed at the same time - so in other words, naturalistically, but entirely fictive. Within these compositions, I also utilize my memory of collected forms - so drawing from recollection to create hybrids that represent, similarly to one's mind, the way memories shift and are reformed by time and experience.

The pictorial space in these works is a fusion of two styles - somewhat like that of a medieval mille-fleur tapestry, where space is slightly abstracted or flattened by patterning of foliage, alongside the black vacuum of Baroque painting. The space becomes in-between or liminal space - not entirely flat or deep.

Primarily, the space I create in these compositions feature a reimagining of roadside ditches and rural areas - very common in my Canadian province of Saskatchewan - which are filled with what are referred to as weeds. In other words, undesirable plant life - eradicated by farming, at best pushed to the margins.

These particular types of botanicals have become incredibly important to my construction of narrative and my conceptual interests, focusing on the way we as a society refer to sexual minorities and essentially to anyone othered by a majority. It is very similar to the language used to talk about weeds. Why is a weed a weed? It is deemed so because it has no purpose for human consumption, but it still has a desire to thrive and a purpose outside the monocultured crop.

Drawing Pöx: You make a critical point. Today, we are seeing a political and public backlash against diversity. Otherization is growing. Identity is weaponized. Marginalized groups are scapegoated. How do you counter this? What do you hope a viewer does - having seen your work - to become an ally?

Zachari Logan: Ultimately, I hope to plant a seed for the viewer, so to speak. I'd like to create a sense of awareness in the viewer of how entwined our continued existence is to how we treat one another - and by that, I mean all people, but also all beings, the earth. So, there are ecological concerns adjacent to ideas about being othered - or marginalized, that I'm engaging within this series, and within all of my work.

What we do to the world and one another, we do to ourselves. Ultimately, land is body. I'm interested in slowing down the viewer and proposing that they contemplate an enchantment with the world. I feel a huge issue with our society is a disenchantment often fostered by political and religious ideologies, which are quickly disseminated by our technologies - be that our phones, streaming services or other conveniences.

We participate in a collective dread over the state of our planet (or continue to turn a blind eye), which in turn alienates us further from the notion that we are nature - not outside of it looking in. I think this fundamental detachment is our predicament - and I wish to dispel it.

Drawing Pöx: Reconnecting us to land, to others, to ourselves - is no small task. Why drawing as a tool of choice?

Zachari Logan: Every person has had some experience with the act of drawing, whether it be a map, stick man, or a 'connect the dots' exercise. Drawing is closely linked to bodies - the bodies of viewers and of the creator. This universal is important. It helps connect the viewer to the materials, to the act of creation.

It is true we cannot all draw the same way; but what a boring world that would be? It's not about level of skill. It's about that fundamental connection through doing.

Secondly for me, it’s the immediacy of process. There is an intimate physicality which is intellectually important. The way in which I draw, particularly when using pastel, involves no separation between my hands, my mind, and my materials. I'll often get to a point when working on a drawing, that my fingertips begin to bleed and need to callus over, becoming an even better applicator. This closeness between creation/ body/mind is paramount.

I also link my installation of monumental works on paper to the vulnerability of the materials used. The ways in which I display my larger drawings are always exposed with pins, referring to mortality, temporality - back to myself and the viewer.

Zachari Logan works mainly with drawing, ceramics and installation practices, exploring intersections between identity, memory and place. Employing a strategy of visual quotation, mined from place and experience, Logan re-wilds his body as a queer embodiment of land. He engages ideas of beauty, mortality, empirical explorations of landscape, and overlapping art-historic motifs that underline a fundamental interconnection of human as nature. Logan has exhibited throughout North America, Europe and Asia and is found in collections worldwide, including National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Remai Modern, McMichael Collection, Peabody Essex Museum, Leslie-Lohman, Nerman MOCA, 21cMuseum Collection and Thetis Foundation, among others.

zachariloganart.com

@zachari_logan

@elizabethshullart
www.eashull.com

Espen Strandhagen has been a friend of Drawing Pöx since its launch last year. We chat, exchange notes and thoughts, and I loved his Urban Romance show in Amsterdam in November. Last week, going through his work, I came across his reflection on the genesis of Blanket:

“When I begin a new drawing, I have a fairly clear idea of where I want to take it. It mostly begins in the evening with an image in my mind, which I’ll then try to describe in words in my notebook. Sometimes accompanied by a little penned sketch. Despite having the whole finished image quite clearly in my mind, it often happens that what I see behind closed eyes and what works on paper doesn’t match up, and so the drawing changes direction.”

One point caught my attention: his step of writing before sketching. I asked Espen, “What function does linguistic narrative serve in your process? Why this step between vision and sketch?”

Espen: I’ve always loved the nuances of language and the imagery that words evoke. Since I was young, I’ve kept a journal. Describing a new image in words helps capture the bare bones of the idea. Then I won’t forget it. It’s less complicated than drawing and often comes first.

Words sometimes creep into my drawings. Earlier in my artistic practice, words as visual elements were at the center of my work, but it remains a base and a starting point, while other imagery has become more important.

Espen spoke about how, in his mind’s eye, images feel complete and multidimensional, yet this sense doesn’t always translate to paper. “What stands in between, and how do you overcome it?”

Espen: There are several reasons why this translation can be difficult. First, there is uncertainty if I can technically manage what I envision. For example, with the Blanket drawing that began this conversation, even though I saw it clearly in my mind, I still built a little model to draw from.

Then there is the question of whether the image is relevant or true emotionally. How does it relate to my other work? Is it only personal, or does it connect to something universal?

There is also the matter of urgency: does the image really need to be made?

All of these questions resolve themselves when the discomfort of not making a drawing becomes too strong, pushing me to draw it.

Once I begin, I find joy in the rhythm of the process - a quietness of mind, the sound of pencil on paper, the discoveries along the way. To shift my focus, music, yoga stretches, and breathing exercises help transition from the everyday to the drawing table.

Time is another essential component. My process is slow. Starting a drawing that I know will take weeks - while ideas for ten others compete for my attention - can feel paralyzing.

Some works take years from inspiration to completion. For example, with A Darkness of its Own, I first saw the door that inspired it in November 2020. What held me back each time I thought about it was the uncanny feeling the place itself evoked.

Two years later, I stumbled upon Marcus Aurelius’s quote: “What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” That helped me move forward—I made a midnight sketch. But the urgency wasn’t strong.

I didn’t return to it until April 2024, when I began scratching the plate, imagining light streaming from the door. It didn’t work, and I set it aside for another six months.

When I returned, I realized: if there isn’t light, there must be darkness.

With that, the image came alive.

To come back to Espen’s Blanket drawing - what began as an idea, then a verbal description, followed by a model, and finally a soft and tender drawing, eventually developed into To Lay a Ghost, a piece rich in complexity yet grounded in quiet presence.

Guus Møystad is remythologizing the world and queering mythology. He draws from history, fantasy and folklore. He works in the liminal, mapping the edges of self and community, inclusion and exclusion, and holding the body’s fragile vulnerabilities.

I asked him about his drawing Vogue! Here is what he said:

This drawing was born out of a love for the overstated poses of the guards in artistic depictions of Jesus’ resurrection as they are totally blown away by his appearance. It brought to mind the highly stylized and dramatic stances of Ballroom vogue dancers.

The combination of old and new in this and other drawings offers a reflection on shifting notions of gender and queerness through history, as many of the mannerisms, aesthetics and cultural markers of the pre-modern era read to contemporary audiences as camp.

I just love that, especially as it concerns a time that is usually depicted as brutally uncivilized and violent. I look for the ‘queerness’ already there, and exaggerate it, for example, in details like Jesus’ gentle touch of his vaginal wound.

@goose.moystad
gusmoystad.org

Dimanche is an archetypal family scene, though distorted, erased and overexposed. It looks like a drawing. But it acts like something else. It hits with a visceral force and pulls you into a place where the sensory experiences of the past - the smell, the sounds, the warmth of the sun on your skin - feel strangely real.

It’s disorienting, because the past has reached and touched you briefly.

I asked Magalie about this drawing. Here is what she shared:

I develop a body of work around intimate and collective memories by exploring images from the past, transforming photographs of everyday life scenes and archival material into graphite drawings that question shared memory, transience, and erasure.

For this drawing, Dimanche, I was inspired by a family photograph - a Polaroid from the 1980s. The image seemed enigmatic to me, with its carefully composed framing (revealing the hand of an unknown person on the left) and its distinctive light, evoking a sense of suspended time.

I sought to prolong this sensation, to stretch this frozen moment. Certain parts of the scene repeat, expand, and elongate, exploring different rhythms and scales. These variations exist in a kind of in-between space, between reality and imagination, where time seems to repeat itself, revealing another dimension of memory.

@magalie.darsouze

magaliedarsouze.com