Hello, my name is Michael Campbell.
My drawing “Wild Earth” is from a series of small, rather random graphite drawings I have been creating during the last 18 months, no doubt a response to the disturbing and melancholy times we’ve all been living through.
For the last 15 years I have been trained as a botanical artist— a very exacting, precise and time consuming way of making art. And while it has made me a much better technical artist it has also at times resulted in work that can be overdone, stiff, and sometimes boring.
To create some balance in my creative process I began doing these smaller, quicker pieces which always begin by simply dropping graphite dust on a piece of paper. Then I smear a bit with a cotton glove or brush, before going at it with various tools, pushing and pulling, adding and subtracting. A very wise teacher told me that at its core drawing is just putting material on a surface and moving it around.
All of these types of drawings are based loosely on the earth—either remembered landscapes or closeup views of some mundane object. Always a kind of ordinary depiction of ordinary things with varying degrees of abstraction. I'm intrigued by arrangements of texture and form that show up without much conscious effort—the “happy accident.”
Some are interesting, many are discarded. I try not to spend a whole lot of time on any one drawing and I also do not spend time considering their value. Looking at them now they do seem freer and more experimental than the “finished” plates I obsessively labor over for months.
The drawings from that time have a focus and subtlety that I will continue to re-visit. Perhaps it is the unhappy times in which we find ourselves. It is a kind of play. It is certainly a form of therapy.