• re: thinker
    |   by Jacob Canter   

    This is really impressive work, Austen! I've always been interested in charcoal work, and I'm wondering how you first started using charcoal, and how the material informs your artistic process? Did thinker turn out in any surprising ways due to using charcoal, or did the idea for the image only come after deciding that you would use charcoal?

    I guess I'm just curious about how you got started on this piece. It's a great piece, and I'm wondering how it developed.

    Thanks!

    • |   by Austen Weymueller   

      Thanks Jacob! Sorry to take a million years getting back to you. Charcoal has always been my very favorite medium. I love the texture, I love the physicality of it, how it breaks down and crumbles as you draw. This was some of my first work with hard charcoal (which moves and feels very different form soft charcoal), and I liked it's precision. 

      This particular image was drawn from a sculpture when I was in Rome, for a field trip for my school in Florence (ridiculous/awesome, yes!??!), and probably one of the hardest pieces I've ever had to recreate. So I was not able to take much artistic liberty with the drawing itself, or even with the medium, but instead (for me) this became much more about trying to mimic volume on a flat piece of paper, and all of the complexities of that. Also, took me over 4 hours to finish :).