- Fore In contrast to the staple means of my work, hard line architectural drawings developed in long periods of time, the Waterborne Series is a collection of sketches, captured and abstracted from live models, start to finish, in moments of streaming creativity. Collectively they reveal a view into my creative thought processes played out in an ink and watercolor medium that uses the natural forces of water for the means of humanistic expression and lives my larger goal of bridging landscape and architecture‌ ‌Water brings life. The forces of water carry sediment that draws the shape of the land, and Human Figures are born as the flow of water carries pigment across a white page.
w a t e r b o r n e figures in ink and watercolor | 2008-2009 -alex gryger-
red veil 8|8|09
coastal
date unknown
fog-distance date unknown
crossroad date unknown
landslide date unknown
lake
date unknown
sirens I
date unknown
sirens II 8|22|09
river man 10/3/09
west wind date unknown
blue wash date unknown
red vale 8|8|09
- AftIn my practice of architecture, I ultimately want to create buildings and landscapes that pose the possibility for one to re-experience the surrounding world in a new light by living with the spaces born of my creative vision. To this end, I approach design as the assembly and re-assembly of my internal observations, ideas, and metaphors concerning the project at hand into the external spatial and tectonic structures of my buildings. If successful, they will be discovered by the occupant, not through immediate images alone, but through his or her personal narrative of inhabitation: of living with the building.
So when I set out to make a portfolio of the figure drawings I created at “Michael Alan’s Draw-A-Thon Theater,” in the year between 2008 and 2009, it came naturally that “Waterborne” took shape through the editing process in which I assembled a series of drawings into new relationships, each telling of a character or spatial moment, that establish the defining points and atmosphere of a new place: a structure to contain the images. As such, the book does not tell a story directly. Rather, it invites the reader to inhabit the book and to find his or her own narrative within this assembly of images that I have put onto paper. -Alex Gryger February 2010
all images and text are copyright 2010 by alex gryger