Art at the Weatherspoon: Diana Al-Hadid piece (Free writing)

Artist: Diana Al-Hadid (born 1981)
Piece: Untitled, 2010
-materials include charcoal, conte and pastel on vellum
-in both her drawings and sculpture, Al-Hadid seems to usually depict ruins-like architectural forms
-influences include: Eastern and Western art, Biblical and mythical narratives, Arabic storytelling, Gothic architecture, Islamic ornamental art, scientific advances (physics and astronomy)

The piece appears to be a muddy array of dark and light lines, blurred around the edges, sometimes rough, but almost drippy like cave walls...at first it seems sloppy and haphazard, but looking closer, you can see the deliberative marks. Couldn't possible be accidental, yet I still feel some of it is--so spontaneous and eccentric.
Lines...The whole piece is made of lines, it's the basic unit of the entire composition, like cobblestones make a street path. Mostly vertical lines, occasionally diverging to the right here and there, creating diagonal (to the southeast?) streaks off of the main marks. The lines are both heavy and dark and light, black and white (the piece is monochromatic), layered and layered and layered on top of each other, which ends up creating overall value changes, implied/visual space and form and texture. I think probably the conte and pastel are what she used to render the heavier lines, and the charcoal the lighter lines. Lines vary from opaque to somewhat transparent, (I notice this particularly on the light streaks that have been layered over dark). Also organic, the lines were not made with a straight-edge or ruler, though they are for the most part straight and vertical. The edges of the lines are inconsistent, showing differences in the pressure of her hand on the page with the charcoal/conte/pastel. Some of the lines strike me as very scratchy, others seem nice and drippy...she applied the marks with a firm hand, although you see some more light and feathery marks near the edges of the piece.
Like clouds or eddies in water, the elements (lines) are so intricate and chaotic and changing, but you could probably imagine the shape of a ruinous city on a cliff or an underground cavern town, the same way you "see" shapes of things in clouds. Groupings of light and dark lines (of varying distances from each other) give impressions of towers, maybe, or spires dripping skyward. The shapes are not clearly defined, but left up to the mind and imagination of the person viewing the artwork...similarly, form is not clearly delineated, but the arrangements of light and dark streaks somehow create shadowy muddy forms that might become something more in your head. Places where the dark lines gather closer together recess into the page while the lighter spots push outwards towards the viewer, creating the optical illusion of 3D form within a 2D piece. Together the dark and light areas work together to create those imaginary forms of towers I described before. Or perhaps they create something like large rock faces in some places, areas that are more flat off of which light seems to reflect, or light vertical bulges of a cave wall.
Wide range of values used in the piece, again, lots of very light (light as the page color) and very dark streaks. There is no smooth gradient of light as in chiaroscuro-style works, but how close the streaks of dark and light are to each other create areas of very dark or very light or in-the-middle greyness.
I keep describing the piece as "drippy" like water on a shower curtain or dripping down your car's front windshield in the rain, although the artist obviously didn't use any wet media, it is just the way her lines are applied on the page--vertically and not too jagged--that remind me  of dripping water. Then there are the areas of diagonal lines and blurred charcoal that seem like wind blowing dust from the surface of the "ruins." The actual texture of the lines on the page look like they're probably mostly smooth, not terribly rough or bumpy. Some of the crackling, irregular dark lines give a temporary sense of roughness, like that of a rock, but I only see these in a few areas.
Arrangement of positive and negative space in the piece: negative space exists only around the edges of the piece, the positive space is to the center-bottom-left area, and is heavily populated by lines--there are no negative spaces within the main positive space. Arrangement of the clump of dark lines on the page gives it a window-to-another-world quality, with a frame of negative whitish area around it. The dark area recedes greatly into the page, again, fading around the edges into this strange area of nothingness and white void, which gives the positive space no real context, it's just floating like a fantastical city or cathedral somewhere...
Unity and variety...the unity in this piece is the similar character of all the lines, both light and dark--their similar character and personality and expressiveness, their vertical direction, firmness, determine, unambiguous...while the lines are not clones of each other, they are clearly apart of the same population and species of lines. The variety is in the individuals that are each and every line, the slightly different paths they take, the differences in color, and differences in width and pressure on the page.
Again, the piece is asymmetrical balanced, very heavy from the center towards the bottom left, sinking, sinking towards the bottom and into the page. The movement of the artwork I think is determined by the direction of the vertical lines, as well as the strange off-shoots of vertical lines towards the right. I read the piece from the top to bottom I think...something about what reminds me of water makes me read it that way I think. You might could read it from the bottom up, the forms/"towers" growing or stretching upwards. Don't honestly imagine anyone reading the piece horizontally, left to right or vice versa...you'd miss so much, and the lines practically demand that your eyes move vertically over the piece in one direction or another. In that sense, rhythm in the piece is different depending on how you read it...it seems very slow and gradual, biding its time, to me. I read from up to down, so the motion is smooth and mostly uninterrupted. Reading the piece from side to side, I imagine would give someone a very jarring and quick rhythm--sharp changes between light and dark, more or less gradual in some places, constantly line after line after line after line. This would be I think like driving through a city rather quickly, catching glimpses of things passing by as opposed to standing from far away or on a building top and gazing for a long time, over the course of an entire day or season, observing the slow and gradual change, the build-ups and sinks, the unification and diverging of the lines.
I think the most difficult thing in watching this piece has to do with the focal point...I just spoke of the rhythm and movement, of my eyes at least, through the piece. I couldn't possibly say where it began though, what I saw first, and if I closed by eyes and tried to look many times, I think I'd see something different first each and every time. The piece is so complex and chaotic and heavy that the only thing that is certain is that your eyes will probably land somewhere in the dark area of the page, amidst all the streaks of dark and light.
Honestly, I don't think proportion has a very big role in this artwork, as it doesn't truly and definitively describe any forms, so it is hard to compare sizes of shapes or forms...the main dark area on the page is massive, takes up most of the space on the drawing surface page, over 3/4s of it I believe, which is significant. Size of the drawing itself doesn't bring to mind any particular comparisons...it has to be about 2/3 of my height at least, but the size of the artwork doesn't really point to any relative size outside of it. The perceived towers and buildings or whatnot inside the piece are purely fictional...I see a somewhat uniform size between them all because that is how I imagine it is, but there's no way to measure this or give it certainty.
I love caves, love love love caves, and this is probably why I paid attention to this piece. In seeing and imagining rock walls dripping with water, I came to associate the lines with small streams of water, as rain makes on surfaces. Reading the plaque next to the piece, I can see and associate the virtual forms and shapes with those of buildings or architecture...the starkness certainly is reminiscent of Gothic architecture, another style of building I really love. Feelings the artwork brings up are various...foreboding (from the darkness and the complexity of lines, the uncertainty of the shapes or what it represents), nostalgia (how it reminds me of a ruined city or an underground cavern or some other group of dusty, abandoned architecture), an imaginative excitement from seeing what details or imaginary shapes I can find just by looking closer at the piece, as well as a sense of being lost, not sure of where to go, or where to look first, or what any of those dropping falling streaks of light and dark marks even mean, where they go, where they fade to...