Drawing Diptych

This past week has been absolutely crazy for me. I've been trying to wrap up a few projects before embarking on a trip to New York with Todd Anderson, head of SIUE's printmaking department and 3 other printmaking students. We've been invited to work in the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Hopefully I'll have some fun pictures to post upon my return. For now, I'd like to share with you a drawing that I recently completed for my drawing class.

This piece is a diptych, two drawings displayed together that function as one complete piece of art. This semester in my drawing class I've been working with ideas concerning natural and man-made structures: how they interact with each other, how they help or hurt one another, and the connections and differences between them.

In these two panels I sat a bonsai tree inside of a structure I built from a shoe box, string, and wooden coffee stir sticks. The stir sticks (pictured on the right side of the right panel) were assembled to loosely represent the foundation of a building. They extend over the tree and intrude upon its space, providing a narrative about how societal growth can infringe upon pre-existing natural habitat. The right panel depicts the bonsai tree being viewed from a hole that I cut out of the back of the shoebox in the shape of a building.