I use ‘self-made’ photographs of my head as a model for my drawings.
My drawings are not about who I am or how I feel, but about what I want to see in myself. The type that I want to represent. I have to be able to recognise that in the photographs I make and in the purpose of the drawings that I make from the photographs. This means that I am constantly creating new characters, new versions of myself in abstract portraits. I am a housewife, student, mother, lesbian, sportswoman, secretary, girl, diva, etc. The further the drawing becomes removed from the starting point - the photograph that I use as model - the more interesting it becomes for me.
Can I also look like this?
I combine this fictitious self-examination with considerable attention to the act of drawing and my formal mastery of this. I work with charcoal and crayon on paper. I try to get the right line in the right place in the drawing. For this I use cotton buds and tissues, traces of which are often to be seen in the drawing. My ultimate aim is an accomplished drawing: thus and not otherwise.
I create the faces in my drawings from separate elements. Ears, nose, mouth, eyelashes, eyebrows. Each part must also possess an intensified, independent presence.
The large format of the drawings gives me this possibility.
During the process of drawing I have all sorts of associations which have to do with my daily life, the things around me.
Parts, details of cameras for example, bills of birds, utensils, kitchen appliances, chicken bones, legumes, car bonnets, rubber dinghies, shrimps and chestnut shells end up in the drawing.
Not literally, barely recognisable and certainly not symbolically.
Rosemin Hendriks Untitled 2009 Charcoal on paper 101 x 120 cm Courtesy of Galerie Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem, The Netherlands
