On My Drawings Illustrating Poems by Becquer

Abstract

I discussed my approach to artistic expression through black and white figurative paintings in Ref. 1, and related to that work are my line drawings executed in India ink. These drawings were made to illustrate 95 poems by the Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Becquer entitled Las Rimas [2] in English translation [3]. The translations and drawings for two of the poems are reproduced in Figs. 1 and 2. The approach to the line drawings is similar to that of the black and white paintings, except instead of using a minimum of brushwork in light values on a dark ground, I employed a minimum of inked line on white paper to parallel the poet's use of few, but highly expressive, words. I decided in favor of line drawings instead of paintings for the illustrations because the drawings would be less weighty in appearance and, hence, less dominating on a page on which the text of a poem is printed.