I happily bend the rules of fine draftsmanship with my pen and ink drawings. This series is based on twelve famous artworks in The Detroit Institute of Arts.

VISION
My renderings are scientific investigations. They are not so much about what we see, but how we see. When looking at things, our eyeballs shift from one point of interest to the next as it sends data to the brain. Fortunately, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Ambiguous details can still convey the big picture. Despite the underlying narratives, my art is as much about the medium as it is the message.

METHOD
When sketching, I look only at the object - not the drawing itself until after the basic forms are outlined. Not watching what I’m doing, my hand-eye coordination drifts (in the basal ganglia of my brain). I call it the moment of abstraction. Points of visual interest - faces, figures, borders and angles – are exaggerated and the resulting drawings are sometimes laughable but coherent enough to fill in the details (e.g. highlight, shadow, reflection). At this point, the drawing process becomes gestural, emblematic, and just plain decorative.

WARNING
Yes, these drawings are odd. For instance, in my interpretation of Degas’ Violinist with Young Woman one might ask, “Why is this man’s scalp floating away?” And what’s up with Van Gogh’s wandering eye or the harpoon in Copley’s shark scenario seen here? Now you know. The human brain is forgiving and always fills in the gaps as it sees fit.

ANALOGIES
My style seems akin to Cubism, but it’s more a function of time than of space: a continuous event versus multiple viewpoints. I deconstruct a picture to find an alternate route to the same end. A musical analogy would be to build harmonies on a familiar, but fractured, melody. Of course, pen and ink drawings are more like piano sonatas than orchestral works: They say it all in black and white. There's a vital resonance in these feverish depictions.

MAZE
One byproduct of my method is that the line drawing becomes a visual maze. Therefore, I include a built-in “roadmap” in each drawing noted by two small arrows, in and out, where the eye can enter the labyrinth and flow to the exit along the single continuous white pathway without crossing any black lines. So, each work is also a puzzle that you can solve if you like. You're welcome. - Gary Peterson