Sam Wadsworth: The Nudes: From Drawings to Woodcuts

In the transition from the drawings to the woodcuts, the simple things about line and colour that seem to be coming from my relationship with drawing, and in particular the nude, are the same , but just said louder

 

The woodcuts are proving to be an effective method for capturing the movement and rhythms of  drawing, but in a permanent and considered stillness.  Once they are formed in wood, the lines will always stay exactly where they are; but  hopefully still communicate movement and the tangibility of form.

 

The translation from drawings on paper, where space is only imagined, to sculpture, where the space is real, allows the line and colour to exist without the confinement of the edges of the paper.

 

With the drawings, the pencil or oil pastels fly fast around the paper in a 3 dimensional space in my head, so it seems very natural for the drawings to be realised in a much larger, sculptural work. Although I do feel that they are very much still paintings in their own right.

 

The drawings are very fast, active and responsive reactions to what is in front of me, and of what I already know and what I imagine. 

It is my hope that these 3 elements come together to become the truest thing that they can be, it is the truth of a thing that is important to me as oppose to it's honesty. 

 

I think that perhaps the drawings are notes and were always meant to be made in to sculpture, it has just taken me 20 years to realise that.