Rosana Castrillo Díaz

Catalog designed for Anthony Meier Fine Arts

Essay, Rosana Castrillo Díaz on Paper, by Janet Bishop

from the essay by Janet Bishop
As subjects the artist has repeatedly turned to books, envelopes, stacks of cards, handfuls of rubber bands—things that allow her to explore relationships between line and volume, order and chaos, light and dark, and a vast range of values in between. In one such drawing, a book dramatically splays open. We do not see its title or any of its words, but appreciate the physical character of a worn volume with hundreds of individual pages bound into its spine, a bent endpaper, every fiber of the textured cloth cover, each stitch of the head or tail band. The drawings are astonishingly detailed and precise.
....For her drawings, Castrillo Díaz always uses the same materials: 0.3 to 0.7 millimeter graphite on 100 percent cotton watercolor paper made by Lanaquarelle, produced at the same mill in France since the late sixteenth century. Castrillo Díaz loves the paper’s neutral yet warm white hue and its soft, smooth texture. To translate source imagery to the paper, she applies grids over printouts of whatever it is she wants to draw and then grids out her sheet with the tiniest of dots. Some artists always start a new drawing in the same corner and move systematically, and Castrillo Díaz sometimes does work from upper left to lower right so that she can see as she goes and (being right-handed) avoid smudging her work in the process. Other times she starts in what she envisions as the darkest part of the image.

24 pages
8.5 x 11 inches