Drawing, for me, is a bit like breathing. It's something I feel compelled to do.
I see drawing more as a means of understanding the world than as an aesthetic construction for transcribing or recording an image. I am interested in the way that the process of making a drawing about something is a way of decoding and understanding that thing.
Drawing is a tool for decoding and understanding the world, not just a simple exercise in aesthetics.
I am trying to draw a character that has no 'character'. A thing, an animate object, that is as generic, as unrepresentative of anything as possible. By working this way I feel I can make cartoons that are truer to the idea of drawing as a means rather than an end. Rather than being distracted by the character as a decorative element we look beyond the appearance of the character.
Through a cartoon character we can enter a dialogue with the graphical space, the drawing.
A drawing is a series of gestures.
A drawing is a thing that is made.
What are marks on paper supposed to represent? How can a mark be anything other than a mark?
Thinking about Plato and his Theory of Forms: No one has ever seen a perfect circle, nor a perfectly straight line, yet everyone knows what a circle and a straight line are. Truth is an abstraction, divorced from the 'external' world.
By drawing an idea of a thing (something that doesn't exist) rather than the thing itself we can escape the impossibility of drawing something that does exist.
If a drawing is only a means of understanding something, can or should the drawing itself have any aesthetic value. Do questions of aesthetics undermine the truth of a drawing?
What should matter in a drawing is whether or not it is true, not whether it looks 'good'. The things that constitute a 'true' drawing, all the mistakes and inconsistencies it contains, are right (even if they're wrong).