Sketch Book for the Artist

Convolutions

THESE CONVOLUTED DRAWINGS were made almost 500 years at a touch. His entire drawing wrestles and weaves the viewer's

apart. They share between them the pleasures of inventing a eye into its retracting folds. Opposite, Grimes' delicately

hybrid beast. A snake eating its own tail is a universal image cavorting figures dive into and consume each other. Grimes

of the eternal and continuous. However, sometimes artists found the genesis of her beast not among animals, as we might

purposefully tie a knot in the configuration to disturb, topple, expect, but in the seductive landscape of Leonardo da Vinci's

and play with its perfection and meaning. Michelangelo's oil painting Madonna of the Rocks. In her studio, remembering

dragon, below, a stunning hybrid of a swan, lion, snake, and the cavernous, pinnacled, and mist-swathed land, she formed

dog, wraps and coils its lithe body ready to strike or whimper a series of ghostly pale, gamboling copulations.

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

Florentine painter sculptor; poet, architect, and

engineer Among Michelangelo's great works are the

painted ceiling and altar wall of the Sistine Chapel,

the dome of the Vatican, St Peter's square, and marble

sculptures including Pieto, David, and dying slaves.

Chalk and ink A quill dipped in brown ink was worked

over black chalk on this reused sheet. Two previously drawn

faces become humorous antagonists to the beast. Scaly,

muscular tension is carved out of the paper using layered,

hatched lines, phrased over the contours of form and

bridging darker areas of shadow.

Dragon

1522

10 x 13^3 / 8 in (254 x 338 mm)

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

GODS

AND

MONSTERS