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Artist Statement:

For my medium I chose to use a whiteboard and dry erase markers to create a mural. The aspect of this medium that I really wanted to explore was temporariness, or eraseability. Whiteboards are erasable. The things we write or draw on them are easily removed, accidentally, purposefully or by necessity. There one minute and gone the next. Each time they offer a clean slate and a fresh start.

The idea of temporariness also inspired the depiction of a sunset. Sunsets are also temporary. There one minute and gone the next. They signal the end of a day, and a chance to start over tomorrow. Subject isn’t the focus of this project, but it was interesting how well my subject fit in with the medium I was exploring.

One thing that I got from McCloud’s Show and Tell piece, was that you can use your subject to comment on the medium. He uses his comic book character to comment on comic books and their significance, and I took that and used a sunset to comment on the temporariness of the drawing itself.

 

I started the mural knowing I was going to erase it, but when the time came to actually erase, I had a really hard time doing it. Maybe it’s the fact that it took me 2 hours and 47 minutes to complete the mural, and a total of 2 minutes to completely erase it. When I got part way through erasing, I realized that I could play with the process of erasing itself, which resulted in this:

I was kind of kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner, because there were so many cool things I could have played with, but that’s part of art I guess, you live and you learn and you save good ideas for the next time.

When I chose it I didn’t realize that whiteboard art was a thing, but as I researched it more I realized that there are several other people who participate in this medium. I found this really cool blog: http://www.cubescrawls.com/ that is full of different whiteboard art projects. My favorite one that he did was a copy of 'Starry Night' by Van Gogh all with whiteboard markers. It was really cool to see what other people did with the medium, and I definitely see more whiteboard murals in my future.

~Brontë Campbell