After Linda Wallis
Volume Editors
In this ekphrastic exercise, four of Volume’s Editors respond to artwork by Linda Wallis.
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Things
Colored pencil, 11 x 15 in. (28 x 38 cm), 2021
“Things” or a Portrait of Romance
Love story 1: We go to the park. I am tired and bored with pleasure.
Love story 2: The waiter offers Parmesan. You like mushrooms in the carbonara.
Love story 3: I am an opposite with no attraction.
Love story 4: I am seven-toed.
Love story 5: The one(!) The parents show up and we all go home.
—Libby Goss
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Celebration Table
Colored pencil, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2021
Party
After the party he leaves the table exactly as it was
so that when he comes down the next morning
it is as if everyone has only just put down their glasses
or this is merely a pause in which the models have risen to stretch.
—Kris Johnson
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Blue Arrangement
Colored pencil, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2022
Thimble
To my blue inventory I add a blue enamel thimble. The thimble is a small room in which my great grandmother stiches a blue mountain to its reflection. At the heart of the mountain is a chamber so blue that it might as well be black. I feel along the seam until my finger brushes over a small knot. The knot feels very much like the end but really it is the beginning. Somewhere far off there is a bell tolling. That bell is this blue day and the anemones pushing through the soil like the dead awakening. If I crouch low and feel my way across the ground, I can find that blue space where sky becomes land becomes darkness.
—Kris Johnson
Things
Colored pencil, 11 x 15 in. (28 x 38 cm), 2021
“Things” or a Portrait of Romance
Love story 1: We go to the park. I am tired and bored with pleasure.
Love story 2: The waiter offers Parmesan. You like mushrooms in the carbonara.
Love story 3: I am an opposite with no attraction.
Love story 4: I am seven-toed.
Love story 5: The one(!) The parents show up and we all go home.
—Libby Goss
Celebration Table
Colored pencil, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2021
Party
After the party he leaves the table exactly as it was
so that when he comes down the next morning
it is as if everyone has only just put down their glasses
or this is merely a pause in which the models have risen to stretch.
—Kris Johnson
Blue Arrangement
Colored pencil, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2022
Thimble
To my blue inventory I add a blue enamel thimble. The thimble is a small room in which my great grandmother stiches a blue mountain to its reflection. At the heart of the mountain is a chamber so blue that it might as well be black. I feel along the seam until my finger brushes over a small knot. The knot feels very much like the end but really it is the beginning. Somewhere far off there is a bell tolling. That bell is this blue day and the anemones pushing through the soil like the dead awakening. If I crouch low and feel my way across the ground, I can find that blue space where sky becomes land becomes darkness.
—Kris Johnson
All artworks copyright Linda Wallis.
Linda Wallis is a Nottingham, UK–based artist working primarily in colored pencils. With a love of form and a sense of the bizarre, her drawings teeter between the plausible and the ridiculous; a strange array of objects and shapes that appear to depict something tangible. In 2017 Wallis made a dramatic break from painting city and townscapes to focus on what she believes are manifestations of her unconscious. By reappropriating pattern, form, shape and texture from everyday and ordinary things, she brings to life an eccentric array of mischievous constructions on paper. Linda’s work is held in private collections in the United States, China, Ireland, Tasmania, the Netherlands and United Kingdom.
Read about our editors here.
Linda Wallis is a Nottingham, UK–based artist working primarily in colored pencils. With a love of form and a sense of the bizarre, her drawings teeter between the plausible and the ridiculous; a strange array of objects and shapes that appear to depict something tangible. In 2017 Wallis made a dramatic break from painting city and townscapes to focus on what she believes are manifestations of her unconscious. By reappropriating pattern, form, shape and texture from everyday and ordinary things, she brings to life an eccentric array of mischievous constructions on paper. Linda’s work is held in private collections in the United States, China, Ireland, Tasmania, the Netherlands and United Kingdom.
Read about our editors here.
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