A while ago, upon a visit to Liverpool I visited the Tate museum and was really inspired and blown away by some of the art pieces and installations on display. Amongst works that I have become familiar with via university, I came across so many more interesting artists that I never knew existed before. Some of the thoughts they presented were wonderful, and the ways in which they presented  them were so special and unique and reminded me why I love art.

One particular piece that stood out to me was an exhibition showcasing the work of Romanian visual artist Greta Bratescu. Before I describe her art, I will describe to you what she does and who she is. She studied fine art and literature in Bucharest in the late 1940s until Communist party interventions into university administration resulted in her expulsion. Regardless, she continued to draw, documenting workers in Hungary and the USSR for the Artists' Union, doing graphic illustration and working for an animation company alongside her own artistic practice.

In 1969, Bratescu returned to university to complete her degree and since then, her work has encompassed drawing sewing print-making, film and installations. In many of these works, such as her 1977 film Hands (Les Mains)  the use of the line - on paper, in thread, or performed in space is used as a defining tool, describing individual people and unique things, perhaps a response to the uniformity and collectivity of communism.



This use of line is evident in her most recent work Game of Form (shown at the Liverpool Tate)  an ongoing series of paper collages. She describes them as such: 'These drawings, which are sometimes made eyes closed, are the trace left behind the frolic of my hands; sometimes they represent the trace of the cursive paths which the paper imposes and at the same time they require each other."  




Below is an attempt of free drawing using lines as separation tools. I would like to take this to a further level and actually cut out physical lines out of paper and experiment with drawing different shapes that express the relationship between hand, pen and paper.