Edwin Aitken is currently working on a new artists book for floating world. Fellow Floating World Artist Glenn Holman has written an essay to accompany the work which is reproduced below along with one of the images that will apear in the completed work. More information about this publication will be avalable soon.

Some Thoughts on the work of Edwin Aitken:

A line that becomes an area of tone that becomes an eye. Which in turn mutates into the supraorbital process, that becomes an ear, calligraphic markings reminiscent of graffiti or language becomes the zygomatic bone that becomes a mouth. Language is an inadequate medium to describe a work by Edwin Aitken. Like all the best art, these are drawings that have to be experienced. These ‘Heads’ as Aitken calls them are not portraits of a specific person, they are however individuals, composite beings created through the process of their making from anatomical details and facial features that Aitken finds visually interesting or that suit his creative intentions. As such, these drawings are not of someone, but they could be anyone. The dense layering and marking and re-working of these drawings is created over an extended period of time, beyond this however these are drawings about time and above all the experience of time. We all live in time and within the brief duration of our existence we grow and change through our experience of being alive and these experiences mark us and change us most clearly on the face. We carry the history of our lives in the set of our features and the lines that mark the surface of our skin, like these drawings, we are not one person, but an amalgam of all the people we have been. Within these drawings it is as if Aitken is attempting to simultaneously draw out both these multiply selves and to compress the duration of a human life into a single image. The layering of marks and multiple viewpoints hint at an individual, who is simultaneously young and old, joyful and sad, alive and if not dead, clearly aware of their mortality. There is nothing nilhistic in Aitken’s work however, instead these are images of great compassion and humanity. The faces that gaze out at us from the picture surface are like the ghosts of ourselves, they speak of their own experience, of being created, of being drawn into life through the work of a consummate draftsman. They speak to us also of our own experience of being alive and of existing in time, our own hopes and fears, loves and losses, the mutability of our own lives, the dense layering’s of our own experiences and memories, our own very real mortality. When we gaze at these works, we do not see someone else, we see ourselves.

Glenn Holman
November 2011