This is a large piece that I have been working on, on and off for the past few months. I started on it for a final project for a class a few months back and after getting some negative feedback I put it away for a while. I took it out recently and decided that I really like it regardless! Its 60" wide and roughly 90" high (I have yet to crop the bottom edge because I keep going back and forth on the exact dimensions that work best.) Its a combination of ink (india ink & ball point pen) graphite, two kinds of paper (an arches paper that came in a large roll on which the piece is on, and another paper which is layered on top in some areas) and several different kinds of masking tape (one just a shade darker then the paper, one that is the darker earthy yellow that you see and one that is black). A lot of the negative feed back was from people who didn't understand why I would put masking tape on my drawing/painting. I think they thought it was just something that I arbitrarily put on to hold down the other pieces of paper, but clearly if that was the only uses I could have found a better way to do that. I think the tape adds several different layers (literally and figuratively) to the piece. For one thing I used it for color and compositional purposes but I also really liked the ideas and meanings that tape could represent (I will go into that some more after I describe I this piece came about). The image is roughly based of a nude model we drew from in class, he was in a twisted and contorted position which I made sketches from and then made more distorted and abstracted drawings from the originals. Separately our class had taken a trip to the medical department and had the chance to draw from cadavers (which I posted a few images the drawings of previously). This experience also influenced this piece. The tape to me brought to mind damage vs. repair and using something created for use in the creative process but not which is not made to be used as part of the final visual piece of artwork, as part of the final piece. It doesn't have the precious quality of work made in traditional materials like graphite or ink on its own. It has a kind of damaged beauty which the cadavers had. The tape also has a fleshy quality, as does paper in many ways.