14" × 17"
Plotted Micron & Painted Pigmented Ink on Drawing Paper
Plotted on a Bantam Tools ArtFrame
1 of 1 | part of the Critters Encore series

Al Larsen is an artist, musician, and educator, and currently serves as Director of the Creative Media BFA program at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. For CRITTERS ENCORE, Larsen begins with spontaneous notebook sketches, which are transformed through digital and machine-assisted reproduction before being developed into expressive painted works. The exhibition reflects his interest in preserving the immediacy and character of the original hand-drawn marks as they move through different tools, materials, and stages of interpretation.

Artist Statement:
In general, my work unfolds as translations across media. Lyrics are set to music, become songs. Songs beget performances, recordings. Recordings lead to videos, record sleeves.

Performances demand posters, handbills. Printmaking has been a constant: letterpress, linocut, silkscreen. Drawing is in there somewhere, everywhere, in different ways at different stages.

I tend to fall in love with the rawest, most spontaneous manifestation of an idea. The thumbnail sketch that becomes an ideal, a template to be reproduced at different scales across time, processes, and media. Whether it’s a print, a performance, or a recording, I’m always looking for the same sensation, a feeling that the work has just arrived, without forethought or expertise.

The pieces in this series start as distracted sketches. Junk I draw in my notebook when I’m not trying. Maybe it’s nighttime and I’m just processing the day. A mix of doodles, song lyrics, observational drawing, and scribbles.

I try not to care that the drawing turns into anything. But when a page has some good energy, I might take a picture and convert it into a vector file.

In graphics, a vector file is a way of representing an image as points and lines or arcs between points. The way I do it, the drawing gets dumbed down a little, smoothed out, algorithmically stylized. It doesn’t make the image better, but it does make it alien. My hand, but not quite my hand.

To make the pieces in this series, I draw the file with a Bantam Tools Art Machine.

It’s a simple mechanical device that holds a regular pen and draws a vector file perfectly. The robot draws the alien vector version of my distracted notebook drawing, returning it to paper.

The next step is to ink the images. I use brushes and mix colors as I go, putting my hand and eye back into the image. Now the pressure is on to make it “come out,” but I try not to think about it too much. Sometimes I feel like I’m a kid coloring carefully in a coloring book. Sometimes I’m just making marks on the paper.