Drawing has been a passion of mine from my earliest years. As an inspired form of communication and as a way to develop ideas, my drawings have evolved into something akin to an elaborate score of music. The composition has rhythms that branch seemingly spontaneously toward focal points and symbolic references that can be melodic and lyrical or convoluted and discordant with seemingly no beginning and no end. Interior space blinks into exterior form and curiously back again.

Of all the media I have explored, steel has offered an exciting range of shapes and surfaces to draw on. The chalkiness of the welders soapstone pencil I use lends itself to a fluid freeform abstraction of drawings that are superimposed, added, subtracted, broken, and blended on the rough and rusty steel forms. The logic of aggregation and spontaneous gradual accumulations of gestures bound and blow apart challenge presence and play to create a tension between what there is and what one sees. In this the viewer is invited to make and imaginary journey into the work, to inhabit the creative landscape. In that moment there is a sensuous and exciting freedom to choose, create and project and elusive content.

In and effort to capture the organic free associative tapestry of drawings I began cutting them into or out of the rugged yet yielding steel. The process of rendering the steel drawings became a natural springboard into sculpture, with all its powerful sensibilities of dimensional touch, scale, light and shadow. The drawings become sculpture and the sculptural forms inspire drawings. It is this balance between the boundless complexities of the dynamic abstracted line and the exploration of form and its substantial presence that is driving my work today.

Pax Vobiscum

Brandon Zebold
Brandon@ZeboldStudios.com