ART
Ink Jet pigment ink on found paper, gauche, charcoal, ink on paper, pencil on paper
These drawings of mine – except the pencil drawing of the three friends – are part of a series of 25 for an artists magazine in Denmark around a Friends theme. The invitation came from the founder of the Denmark based magazine who saw my drawings in last year’s Body and Soul Berlin Artist Magazine #45 where the theme there was I want to tell you.
Charcoal, gauche, found collage on paper
This opportunity in 2025 came initially via Instagram from a Kyiv/Ukraine artist/designer based in Berlin who is an outstanding internationally known printmaker – lino cut relief print is her expertise area – and who is part of the design team for the Berlin magazine. I have a private Instagram account that I set up during COVID – on_being_isolated and so if nothing else, Instagram has become a portal for my art practice. The June 30 deadline and theme have hints of term papers while keeping me focussed and organised. One of the most important practices for an artist is to keep making marks and these invitations have been a prescription for this for me.
Friendship/friends have featured as a central life dynamic for me. I still chat and visit with a friend that I met in kindergarten in Melbourne over 70 years ago! My wife and children have become best and closest friends while my time in organised religious groups, Medical Imaging and Jugglers/The Stairwell Project have given me a range of remarkable friendships.
When I first read the C S Lewis quote I decided to include it in the series as a provocation while holding that friendship, art and philosophy are life lines for me. I would be “lost” without them. The ink stick figure gauche pieces find their origins in loneliness and that the spaces between friendship and “the other” are real. Not as an agenda for bridging necessarily but as a reality of modern life where individualism and isolation have serious impacts on community and an individual’s experience of living and being.
The “Friends Zone” is a drawing from the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker where a “stalker” leads two friends to a zone where all desires can be realised. The drawing taken from a film still evoked for me experiences I have had of complete stuckness in a friendship where the next step, word, piece of advice or decision were nowhere to be found.
Friendship can be “strong as death” – it is certainly a version of love – and it can be stuck. It can be the most wonderful shared experience over years with never a moment of strong argument or a short lived geographical or institutional experience.
Friends and friendship is an interesting theme to represent with marks.
Peter Breen
Peteskibreen's Blog 