Issue # 6 Steven Baelen

My 8 Years Old Son Said I Should do it

My 8 years old son said I should do it.

In January of 2020, the start of a new year, a year that would be remembered around the world for generations to come, I started integrating color into my drawings.  Previously, I had consistently used an almost monochrome palette, but the new year felt like a time of rebirth and new beginnings, and my eight year old son told me I should do it.

With a practice rooted in a passion to delineate my intimate surroundings with pencil, I have come to understand drawing in all its fragility and ephemerality. I have been using these values in order to enforce the power that a drawing tool can produce. These works offer a close look at domesticity void of humans, while at the same time becoming a playground where the identities of the different colored strokes interplay and exchange their roles, with a deliberate lack of resolution.

If I could, I would draw every detail of the room, scrutinizing every element of its construction as I want to capture all the aspects of that fleeting moment. But that juncture is impermanent. Thus from the first drawn line a fight starts with a fleeting moment. The more marks that appear on my sheet of paper, the more the inner logic of the paper becomes imminent. The greater the time I dedicate within the created reality of my drawing space, the more information I leave out from the observable scene. The paper starts to generate voids. As a result the drawings melt and merge in one’s psyche, not on the page. These drawings combine fundamentally formal acts of drawing with gestures that leave them crawling with emotional expression.

Steven Baelen - Belgium, May 2020