Jessica Helfand: Drawing, painting & reflecting on Rome

For years now these drawings have crept into my work, and I try to make sense of them — repetitive, rounded, calligraphic lines that lie somewhere between scribbles and handwriting exercises. Born of the same essential mark, they are never the same twice, although by all appearances that’s what they aspire to be.

It occurred to me at some point that there was something in this tension between structure and freedom that lies at the core of everything I make in the studio, but which exists in its rawest, most primal form in these drawings. As they continued, I focused on the nucleus being the same, and the extension of that nucleus changing, evolving, warping, deconstructing. Its migratory shift became my principal interest.

Over time, these drawings became linoleum cuts, monoprints and finally oil transfers on paintings. Here in Rome, where the ancient texture of cracked stucco and stone mix with the deep, opaque hues of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, I initially limited my investigations to the yellow ochre that is everywhere here. I found, too, that my staring at these lines in the studio drew my attention, in the city, to the fissures in the pavement, the erosion in the cobbstone, the cracks and breaks in the surface of everything here in the eternal city.

In the interest of time (and economy) I’m working primarily on paper, and pushing my experiments through a series of media: from oil to acrylic, pen and ink to watercolor, torn paper to clay to wire. How do you define a line? Where does it start? Where does it go, and if indeed it does go somewhere, when does it stop being a line and become something else? When does it represent flat space, and when and how does it go from a two to a three-dimensional representation of that space? What if you follow it, and it breaks, or shifts, or migrates, or deviates into something else? When is a line no longer a line?

It is that fundamentally abstract space between the unknown and the known that intrigues me, and which frames this body of work. My drawings, I am sometimes told, resemble calligraphic form: Do people tell me this because they know I am a designer, and therefore my references must, by conjecture, be typographic? (As a counter-argument to this, I’ve started making imaginary alphabets.)

Finally, I am learning, too, how to “be” in the studio alone — how to carry on a dialogue with myself and with the work — and how not to require (indeed, how to resist) too much external input. Philip Guston wrote brilliantly about this syndrome — about all the “voices” in your studio (and in your head) that you have to get rid of before you can do real work. My favorite quote — now my mantra — comes from him:

“What kind of work would you be doing if you thought no one was looking?” he once said. “Do that work.”

There’s no question that three months in Rome seems a heavenly holiday. But for me, it marks a major shift, where the comforts (and familiarity) of my former studio life have been all stripped away, and I am starting over, learning by doing, with no preconceived notions about how and what to make. Lifechanging.

Jessica Helfand is a partner, with William Drenttel, in Winterhouse, a design studio in Connecticut. Their work focuses on publishing and editorial development; new media; and cultural, educational and literary institutions. She is currently senior critic at Yale School of Art and is the author of several books, including Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture and Reinventing the Wheel. She has also written Paul Rand: American Modernist. For those interested in the history of visual culture, we highly recommend her Scrapbooks: An American History.