In the summer of 1997 I packed up and headed back to school, first for three years at the University of Washington and then for four years at the Ohio State University. During these years I had little to no time available for the kind of drawings or paintings I had been doing during the previous fifteen or so years. I did however want to keep making a little art so I began making line drawings. To date I have filled three 6" x 9" spiral bound sketch books, three and a quarter 5.5" x 8.5" spiral bound sketch books, the better part of one 8.5" x 11" spiral bound sketch book, plus a few dozen unbound sheets. (The images currently included on this site are all from the first two volumes). I am not sure where the series is going or what I should do with the resulting drawings. While the quality is uneven I am very pleased with some of the images. Some even strike me as great works of art that can hold their own next to drawings and paintings I spent weeks on. But I don't want to start pulling the best pages out of the sketch books and leaving only the weaker ones behind. I like the integrity of the sketch books and being able to flip through them, seeing how ideas developed over time. In the interests of exhibiting I may scale some of the images up. I have already redrawn a few on heavier grades of paper and framed two of them up. Someday I would like to stage an exhibition just of line drawings but the cost of framing would be prohibitive and I have no idea if they would sell. Some of the ones I think are the best are also the most abstract and while I prefer abstract, and belive it communicates ideas that cannot be communicated with words or more concrete images, abstract doesn't always sell well.

Philip E Harding
October 12, 2006