I am having a look at a 2006 magazine with a special number on the city of Hamburg; the pictures accompanying the articles are very good and very well executed as for colour is concerned. This contemplation transports me, once again, to the reflexion of colour and painting, the line and the form, and I get to the question I ask my self thousand and thousand of times: “Drawing: yes, drawing: no?”; when I ask myself this question I am not thinking nor doubting about the importance of drawing, which I consider essential per se for a painter; what I am thinking of is the importance and the independence of drawing in art as drawing itself is art, just as sculpture and poetry are.

    And now I go back to the question for myself: Drawing: yes, drawing: no? I mean, in the analysis of this dilemma: if the painting that is going to be carried out on the white cloth must previously be drawn as a guideline for the artist. Some say that drawing helps to compose the work to be carried out; others use arguments justifying the fact of drawing in the canvas before painting. All the “ways” are valid if they help the freedom of expression of the artist. And it is here precisely, total freedom in the execution of the work of art, where the artist must have no tie whatsoever. A previous drawing restricts your freedom in the moment of creation because it is marking you the way that paintbrushes must follow in the material realization of the painting. One may argue about this matter that that drawing is only a sketch to place the figures “or whatever” in the cloth; I, on the contrary, believe that instead of being a help for the painter it may become just the opposite: a fight between the drawing and the colour, lines and shapes that at the end can make the painter to become the referee in a conflict that he himself has started, and therefore he may drift away from his real duty: painting. In order to paint, the painter has his hands and his “guts”. The preliminary drawing in the canvas forces the painter to follow lines marked beforehand (though it is him who has marked them), and this makes the total creative freedom to be diminished, though it may only be in those trance “moments” when your hands are led and you give yourself as a mere instrument in that creative process. That being and not being demands from the painter a state of lucidity that it is only achieved with the devotion of a neophyte. Because each new work is a new entity that wants to be born free and be represented in all its splendour, without smudges.

    Many may ask themselves if, according to these arguments of mine, the masters of the past, that even used grids, painted freely or not. I shall answer to this question that these masters used these methods in order to produce a piece of work that they had already created. So it was a second or third phase of a reproduction.

    Also those “real masters”, that have existed and still exist today, that draw in their cloths the work they are going to execute, they work and carry out their painting freely. Because the work they carry out is not done on top of the preliminary drawing; they rather start their creative work when they carry out that drawing that is part of that creation.

    In all my documents, some are philosophical or theological thoughts about art and others are digressions, I intend, and if I manage, even better, to express a series of thoughts, ideas and conclusions that come to my mind while I work, every day, without having the intention of being an absolute truth, but my truth… in that moment… and with all the internal and external influences and nearly always as the fruit of my inability. That is why I try to undress myself as a painter in order to be able to express myself with my painting, with the highest degree of purity.

Jorge Rando, Hamburg, July 2007