Garden Drawing #29

Over more than a decade, Julia Fish has been investigating the spatial relationships and the placement, function, and purpose of ornamentation in her home in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. Though deliberate, systematic, and focused, Fish’s project—which has in a sense become a portrait of her home—has evolved organically. She has explored different facts of her immediate surroundings, making them the subject of paintings and drawings that maintain a carefully calibrated tension between abstraction and representation. Garden Drawing #29 is part of a set of over 100 drawings that evoke the light, shape, and pattern of the garden at her home. Made with black ink on inexpensive Japanese paper sheets graphed for writing practice, the drawings in this series recall the delicacy and airy quality of traditional Asian ink paintings.