Michael McGuire:
Michael McGuire is an artist living in Chicago. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BA and later received his Masters of Architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His range of work takes him from digital photography of the city to elegant ink drawings on watercolor paper.
His current work is pen and ink drawings he says, " I have been drawing inspiration from plant forms for many years. This past winter, with its numerous snowstorms, I saw these plant shapes in a fresh way. The reductive quality of winter weather simplified the contours of the leafless plant life while emphasizing the chaotic and complex system of nature. For this series of drawings I use the camera as a tool to assist me in seeing. I shot photos of vegetation and trees after snowstorms and created high contrast, black and white images of them. I then used these images to trace a quide onto drawing paper and crosshatched in the darker areas. The crosshatching acieved a varoied and textured tonal range emphasizing the hand made, one of a kind quality of these drawings. the drawings, being so closely tied to their photograpgic sources essentially becomes crosshatched photographs."
