Welcome to Walking Is Drawing

Welcome to Walking Is Drawing. I'm Tim McDonald, an artist and Associate Professor of Art at Framingham State University in Framingham, MA. This blog will document my sabbatical project which I just this moment titled Walking Is Drawing. Over the next several months I will be walking the mountains that Henry David Thoreau walked in (and around) New England. I will make art based on this experience. What form it will take is as yet unknown to me. Paintings, collages, drawings, video, photography, field recordings... all of these? Maybe none of these.

There are 11 mountains and 15 walks. While I follow Thoreau's footsteps, I'll be tracking my movements with a GPS device built by my colleague at Framingham, sculpture professor John Anderson, a sculptor, animator, cyclist,  and all around mensch. The device will allow the mountains themselves to participate in the making of drawings. This is in keeping with the chance-based work I've been making over the past few years. Whether it is using fire or melting ice to make a drawing or using found materials in collage, I try to impose myself as little as possible on the material... kind of taking the "capital A" art out of the art-making process. The drawing below was made with ink and melting ice.

fragile

burning, ink, charcoal on paper

2010

41 x 30 inches

Over the course of several months I'll be documenting my progress. I'm very excited about the possibilities inherent to this project/process. I'm kicking off the project with a printmaking workshop at Crown Point Press in San Francisco next week. John Cage, composer, writer, thinker, visual artist, student of zen, and user of Chance Operations in his artistic practice, made prints at Crown Point and some of his first work there incorporated sketches from Thoreau's journals. In a way, I feel as though I'm sharing a trail with them both. Stay tuned!