HAPPY PORTRAIT MONDAY!

Anouk Griffioen, Untitled (2012)
charcoal on paper

Today's Portrait Monday is brought to you by Anouk Griffioen and Winsor Gallery intern, Alex M. F. Quicho.

Anouk Griffioen is a young artist working out of the Netherlands, whose large-scale charcoal drawings are an embodiment of a compulsion towards beauty and solitude. Her subject matter is the distilled result of a lifetime of collecting images -- whether snapshots taken at museums, images ripped out of magazines, or photographs staged by friends. The drawings themselves are dark, intricate collisions of many separate worlds. In addition to becoming lost in the drawings' movement and detail, I find something compelling about their documentation as well -- often taken after the work has just been completed, or is still in a state of interstice, the photographs exhibit the sheer materiality of the both the drawing and the studio in the curl of the paper, the clutter of the activated workspace, and the soft horizon of charcoal dust that speaks volumes of the physical action of making the drawing itself.