“Mindless drawings. Excerpts from the sketchbooks ~2014 – 2024”

Solo Exhibition in the Tartu Art House, Estonia

I draw those when bored, or when there are too many other things to do. When it’s freezing, unlit, and slow, or on a summer vacation, careless at the beach. At the coffee shop, facing the window, or waiting for a doctor’s appointment, in a luminescent corridor. A bit tipsy at a music festival. Or just after an unsettling bad news phone call. In bed, before sleep. In the car, before the red turned green. On an airplane, to settle turbulence, whatever that is. In a bath...

When drawing those, inevitably the gravitation creeps in with its weights, masses, balance, motion... Surfaces emerge with pen strokes ticking like a thin red seconds arm. Drawing is a time-based medium for me (like music or film). When looking at a finished drawing it is natural to re-live the pen strokes, guess their speed, rhythm, intensity, sequence... Sometimes I lead and sometimes I’ll move out of the way and let the drawing do itself.

Those are mostly ink, nibs, brushes, point markers, pencils, some collage or accidents. As most are in notebooks, page by page, I never have a chance to look at them at once and I was curious how it will look like. In no particular order, so if any logic emerges in the exhibition sequence, most probably it is accidental. Graphic gibberish, but let’s call it poetry.

Tartu Kunstimaja, 02.02.–03.03.2024
Exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia





Photos: Kunstimaja, Jürgen Vainola