"The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr..."
graphite pencil on paper, 16”X13”, 2023, Oleg Lipchenko©
Time lapse recording of drawing process.
This drawing was created as an improvisation being impressed by "The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper" written by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, German romantic writer.
Let's see how the improvisation started - as always, from tabula rasa. I recorded the entire drawing process and then shrink the footage down to a few minutes.
E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann is a German writer, composer and artist, one of the most influential creators of romanticism. He is widely famous for The Nutcracker (thanks to Tchaikovsky ballet) and The Sandman, but his other novels and stories, such as Murr the Cat or Little Zaches, are relatively unknown.
Images, figures, faces, various details, lines and symbols spontaneously appear on paper. The drawing grows by itself, spreading over the page, and the resulting shapes form sometimes unexpected combinations, which, in turn, dictate the next moves. It resembles a kind of interactive game where you put something on paper and get a strange and unusual reaction in return, or a conversation with an interesting person who can ask you a question in response to yours, or interpret your thesis by turning it upside down.
Murr's memoirs paint us a picture of the world from a cat's point of view, and this is not so much about the relationship between cats and people,
but a different perception of reality in general. Murr's reflections are philosophical and force us to philosophize, that is, to formulate questions and seek answers to them.
My drawing is not an illustration of Hoffmann's work, but rather a visual reflection of his thoughts and my ideas that were born in the process of reading.
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Music:
- Lazy Walk by Cheel
- Digital Ghosts by Unicorn Heads
- My Peeps by Aaron Lieberman
- Hero's Ascent by Chris Haugen
- Steel by RalphReal
- Hollow by Lish Grooves
- Wide Boys by Underbelly & Ty Mayer
- Fond Memories by SYBS