Traverse B by Patrick Kelly
- Title: Traverse B
- Artist: Patrick Kelly
- Medium: Graphite
- Size: 11"h x 15"w
- Creation date: 2014
- Added to collection: 2016
- Donor: Purchased by Portland Community College, Rock Creek Campus
- Campus: Rock Creek
- Location: B3/2 Drawing gallery rm 228
The use of traditional materials for this drawing (graphite, black paper) do not resemble any traditional drawing. They look sculptural, like poured lead; or they look photographic, as if the textures describe a complex geologic formation; or they look interactive, since the graphite's reflectivity shifts dramatically as one moves even slightly. But no, this is just a drawing-- made with such laborious and obsessive intensity that after one realizes what one is looking at, wondering how it was made immediately involves the viewer's imagination of time: this took hours and hours, perhaps days, perhaps weeks. The thickly built up marks become a trace of time, like rings on a tree. Patrick Kelly has made an artifact of repetitive action that becomes a kind of calendar.
This drawing, along with "Carbon Trace 19" in the Rock Creek Art Collection, were part of the artist's series he exhibited in 2015 at Nationale (Portland).