OK, so there’s nothing vaguely midwestern about Il Lee. Born in Korea. Lives in New York City. This mid-career retrospective is in San Jose. But just try to use a ball-point pen as your primary medium for making large-scale minimalesque work without, ahem, drawing comparisons.
These are quite beautiful.
And they affirm for me what makes good ol’ handmade 2D artwork so amazing: the potential for creating a world of complexity, surprise, and richness from the most unassuming of means.
They also remind me of a Beuys aphorism, the title of a show of his drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago from the early 90’s, “Thinking is Form”.
Glad you like them. I’ve been a fan of his for a while.
I heard he turned down sponsorship from Bic and Paper-Mate because he’s a died in the wool Uniball man…sadly Uniball never made an offer. Not really.
Even on the internet, they have this looking-into-the-abyss effect. Your comment is well made, Matt. They’re unassumingly great drawings.
Wow, these are amazing. ‘What’ they are and ‘how’ they are combine beautifully. I know they’re Uniball, but I smell BIC when viewing them.
I stumbled upon your discussion of Il Lee! I saw this retrospective at the SJMA summer of 2007. Always liked his work and liked it even better in person. Sometimes works on canvas (very smooth), sometimes on paper (untextured but soft). Both very visceral. The ballpoint pen has bizarre qualities when layered like that – it pulses from warm to cool, feels like a heartbeat, rather like Rothko. Weird sense of surface – sometimes it catches a gloss and flashes but other times it reads like a black hole sunk into the fibers. Bought the book – Il Lee started out representationally with fiendish cross-hatching – you can see the seeds of this work in his earlier etchings. If he’s ever in your area make the effort to go and see him. I drove 5 hrs from L.A. to catch this show.
The large scale works on canvas and other large scale works on paper are awesome, otherworldly and dramatic. He should be in many more museums as the works are an impressive showing of creativity using the most basic utilitarian tool — a simple ballpoint pen.
WOW