Happy Bone Nr. 4, 2017

Ballpoint pen on paper.

The fourth drawing from the series called “Happy Bones”. The subjects for these drawings are the bones of a cows spine that I found whilst traveling in Canada. While walking in the fields with my friend we stumbled upon a decomposed cow carcass. My friend turned one spine bone around and told me that his mother had showed these bones to him as a child and she called them happy bones. The next day I went back to them, there was something intriguing and highly fascinating about them and I could not shake the imagery from my mind the previous night. I photographed the bones this time with the idea of recreating these ironically smiling faces, imbued with black humor. Thus were born the ballpoint pen drawings, where all the backgrounds (which took 95 hours ) are layer by layer painted black with just a pen.   Quoting Andri Ksenofontov: ” Light bone on a pitch-black background is something completely different than bone drawn on a white paper”.