Master Art

A gifted draughtsman and printmaker, Eric Fischl has noted that, ‘I have over the course of my career used all kinds of different materials such as charcoal, crayons, watercolor, oil, the graphic techniques of etching, lithography and monotypes. Each one has its restrictions and its demands and I like using them for precisely those reasons. I have had better luck with some materials and less with others. For the artist, the properties specific to a material will unlock the creative flow or they will block it. It is essential that an artist finds the materials which will unlock and expand his imagination and express his feelings. I prefer to draw with a brush and my fingers rather than with a pencil or charcoal. I prefer to use color rather than black and white. Using color is like drawing with light. I prefer illumination over rendering…The difference between drawing and painting for me has been that suspension of certain kinds of criteria I have for painting that I don’t have for drawing. In so doing, my drawings tend to explore and express the more fluid erotic sensual aspects of life. I think of them as more gestural, as in body-language, and body-language includes bones and muscles as well.’

Fischl is particularly fond of the medium of watercolour, which he has used primarily as studies for his prints and paintings. The present sheet, dated 2000, displays a coloured background that is found more often in his watercolours of the late 1990s than in more recent works. As the artist has maintained, ‘Certainly with the watercolors where there are only one or two colors, there is a nice play between the material and its demands and the figure and its demands. I like the tension that exists there. I like the tension between the very thin, very liquid, very transparent watercolor and the dense, muscular, physical body. Drawing is an act of reduction and liberation. With watercolor I am reducing the body to the most minimal language one can use to describe it and at the same time capturing something essential so that the spirit transcends the limitations of the body.’