MARTIN BRIEF
Hope
oil pastel on paper, 5.625” x 7.625”, 2017–2019
oil pastel on paper, 5.625” x 7.625”,
2017–2019
Each small piece in this project begins as a carefully executed oil pastel drawing of the word “hope”. The drawing is then smudged until the word is transformed into a haphazard shape. The use of smudging rather than erasing or blacking out the word emphasizes transformation over negation or obfuscation. By physically redistributing or reorganizing the oil pastel the drawing is allowed to remain materially the same but visually radically different. In this way each drawing is literally, physically, and figuratively “hope”. The entire project consists of 1,461 drawings, the number of days from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021.
