Lines and drawings

I came across more images of drawings by Sol le Witt the other day, including this one, Wall Drawing 86....

Wall Drawing 86

Ten thousand lines about 10 inches (25 cm) long, covering the wall evenly.
June 1971
Black pencil
Private collection

FIRST INSTALLATION

The Bykert Gallery, New York

FIRST DRAWN BY

R. Holcomb, Kazuko Miyamoto

MASS MoCA BUILDING 7
GROUND FLOOR

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (whose web site link is here) describes it thus: 

In 1970, Sol LeWitt further distilled the formal vocabulary he used in his wall drawings. Whereas bands of parallel lines characterized his earlier graphite wall drawings, he later began to isolate the single line as a basic conveyance for his ideas. Additionally, LeWitt relaxed the requirement of applying lines in only the four absolute directions, fostering new relationships between his verbal instructions, the performance of those instructions, and the surface on which those instructions are performed. 
Noteworthy in Wall Drawing 86 is the disparity between the simplicity of the instructions and the seeming chaos they produce on the wall. The number of lines drawn here is derived from a traditional Eastern concept that ten thousand is a unit emblematic of all inconceivably large numbers. Lines are applied at the singular discretion of the draftsman, who is instructed only to maintain the length of the lines and appearance of evenness across the surface of the wall. The even distribution is conditioned by the dimensions of the wall, giving each iteration of the drawing a different level of density. Other aspects of the lines (their orientation, how often they intersect each other, etc.) are decided by the draftsman as the drawing progresses. The operation of restriction and flexibility results in a visual marriage between pattern and intuition. 

My drawings of shredded paper as it fell onto black paper were made using a kind of system (i.e. trying to match as exactly as possible the places where the paper shreds happened to fall) with in-built randomness (i.e. the random falling of the strips) and there is a certain similarity in the way the marks appear on the drawing.  

I also came across another of his drawings, Lines from the Midpoints of Lines, 1975, an etching in the National Gallery of Australia (the image was copied from the NGA website here)

Sol le Witt, Lines from the Midpoints of Lines, 1975, etching.

The NGA website catalogue describes the work thus....

In a work such as Lines from the midpoints of lines, one of a series of etchings entitled The location of lines 1975, LeWitt's humorous side emerges. Each of these lines occupies a place on the sheet that is designated by a set of complicated instructions. For example, in the upper left corner a line is accom-panied by the following description of its location: ‘A line from the midpoint of the left side to a point halfway between a point halfway between the mid point of the top side and the upper left corner and a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and a point halfway between the centre of the page and a point halfway between the midpoint of the left side and the upper left corner.’ In this absurdly long-winded sentence it becomes clear that the instructions supposedly governing the work are poorly suited to account for the simple fact of lines on a page. Here the artist gently pokes fun at his own practice while making an important point about the relationship between art and text: Pictures and words are totally distinct realms and even the simplest image is ultimately beyond the reach of verbal description.

This is very interesting - as on first sight I thought the sections of 'text' sitting on each drawn line were not real writing, but some kind of non-text, rather than the detailed instructions for the location of each line.  

I find Le Witt's drawings intriguing.  They are so siple in concept and execution, but the effect is often quite impressive.  I like the bigger, more random ones better than the strictly geometric earlier ones (all those different ways to fill a square with drawn parallel lines in various directions seem to me to be rather tedious).  Moreover, although it looks impel, drawing like this is difficult to do - either to maintain a systematic copying or shadowing of a drawn line, or to maintain constant density of line over a large (sometimes enormous) canvas.  But the end products are, to my mind, compelling and convey a sense of balance.