Petra Knezic

draw-ink.com

When you first lay your eye on one of Petra Knezik’s creations, it’s the details that hit you. Almost immediately, your eye wanders from one element to another, trying to soak it all in. Using an isograph with drawing ink, her works are the result of hours of meticulous attention to detail, each piece telling its own story. Based in Slovenia, Petra initially started with pencil and charcoal and was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci award in Florence Italy as well as the Canaletto Prize for outstanding work in her field in Venice, Italy.

Would you say that the ‘Soulies’ in your painting are blank canvases that the viewers can fill?

Yes, Soulies have been designed without a specific face or body type. They can and should be altered to your own wishes; they should become the projection of yourself or somebody else you want to see in a story. This way everyone should be able to feel what is going on in the drawing; everyone could be in the deepest depths of an ocean, and everyone could be the one saving that person with their love and light.

When we walk around on this planet, we don’t hold a mirror in front of ourselves the whole time; we don’t act like something because it fits that face we are wearing. We look from the inside, a place that wears a specific awareness of self, that we project through our actions to the outside. Like this, we should be able to think ourselves into somebody else’s shoes, try to understand why other selves act differently. Soulies should bring this attempt at empathy closer because you are not limited to yourself or somebody else’s face. You could be the one winning or the one losing, the one being saved or the one saving; it’s up to you where you want to see yourself. You can be any “Soulie” in the picture.

How important is the narrative of your work?

It depends. Most works are the narrative, without it, there is no work. Some are 60% - 40%, because I was exploring my rules of drawing, how they fit into a work or if they can explain something. But my works started out as stories, as something I needed to say and had to explain to myself first. I think it is interesting to look at a drawing and see what was bothering you because you felt it but couldn’t give it a name, but you could draw it. You always feel the story first, and sometimes that’s all you need, sometimes I read some information about the subject I want to draw and learn how to express myself better.

YELLOW, 1ST Butterfly Of The Season, Ink on Paper, 70 x 70cm, 27.5” x 27.5”, 2016

I don’t know if my works are aesthetically pleasing to people or not, I didn’t make them to be “pretty”, I made them to say something that was bothering me. I didn’t scream or go running or sing about something on my mind; I had to draw it. Because there is always that “why?” in my head, why is this like that and why is this like this, why do people hurt each other, why do we eat one animal and have the other as a pet, why and what and how and than you try to build a world of it. Answers to questions, depending on what I currently know and I have a lot to learn.

Your tool of choice is the Isograph, for those of us not familiar with it, could you tell us a bit more about how to start using it?

The Isograph is per definition a technical pen designed for architectural and other technical drawings. I am not an expert on its history or what other pens were and are on the market, but it remains important despite the digital age. These pens have different tip sizes, producing lines of different thickness and are colour coded. I have been using the smallest I could get, so when I say the drawing was created with ISO 0.10, 0.18, 0.20, it means I used pens that made 0.10 mm, 0.18, 0.20 mm thick lines.

They have a small container for ink on the inside that you fill yourself, and they have to be cleaned regularly. This pen uses liquid drawing ink, meaning it is water based and it flows through a narrow space in the steel tip of the pen. When you are drawing with them, you have to take care of how much force you exert on them, so you don’t break the tip, you have to think of what kind of paper you are using, so little particles don’t get inside the tip, and you should be using the ink provided by the manufacturer of the pens. Having only black and white at my disposal when I started, was perfect. I was familiar with it from home, and I always loved the technical drawings my dad made, but there’s also a difference compared to others, f.e. quality markers - there is still the medium of ink in its original state, flowing through a tool to make a statement on paper.

It is not soaked into another material or mixed with other chemicals to make it last longer or flowing through plastic tips; it is restrained only by the narrow space of the tip, no other manipulation. That feels less “plastic” to me.

We believe you have a book coming out soon?

Yes, I do! The first test prints just arrived, and I am more than happy with the result! I have spent seven years on a collection I named “Grids and Bricks - Underwater”, and for completing the stories and the collection, I decided to combine them all in a small art book.

I had a burst of inspiration putting them all together, and the result is a 300 sites full-colour book that can be read as one story connecting my collection and explaining it, as well as the individual stories of the works. I added a section for the process and progress behind each work and all other useful information. It was very important to me to have a conclusion I can put on a shelf. There was so much work behind those drawings, things that I will forget as I move on, I wanted to remember where I started from and what my thoughts were back then. Maybe in years, I will get to laugh at myself or the seriousness of my rules of drawing or maybe it will be a little part I will forget and will inspire me anew in years. Now with a few corrections, I have something to explain myself and my works and also, it was the only way to have the details printed in a bigger size than the small picture on my webpage. I can move on now with what I have learned and try something new.

The detail in your work is incredible, how much time do you spend on average on each piece?

To tell you the truth, I don’t know exactly. I know on average the medium sized works took about three months each, but I don’t know how many hours. I don’t have the possibility to occupy myself with art only and so when I had that luxury, when “it” grabs me to work out an idea on paper, I can work a max, of 16 hours per day (I set a clock one time), after that my fingers don’t work, they turn to sticks. But it is so much fun! You know how it’s going to look like finished, but then you don’t know it at all and then it has to be done already because you have a few others dying to come out, but there is no time. Positive frustration. “Swimming Pool” and “RED: waR lovE blooD” took the longest though, about half a year each and RED never wanted to be finished, in the end, I had to give myself a deadline because six months of sitting on the floor with your head down was not ideal. I needed a break after that.

Are the complexities in your pieces a metaphor for the worlds you depict, with all their interconnected dependencies?

They are a metaphor in the way that they are “layered”; like that they are complex. The situation is drawn like taking a picture in a moment, but the problem and the solution are simultaneously presented. I don’t really know how others see it, if it looks complex, I know where to look. But yes, there’s a whole lot of things there, and some symbols even repeat themselves through my works. But I want to say that everything can be simplified or at least taken into its building bricks and looked at from a different angle and than something that looks complex, isn’t.

What does art mean to Petra?

The first thing that comes into mind, right? It is a glove that fits so well you don’t feel wearing it. That is art to me, my instrument for expressing myself and explaining myself and the world. END

ANIMA, Story Of A Whale, Part 2, Ink on Paper, 51 x 90cm, 20.1” x 35.4”, 2018