Louise Despont is an artist who works and lives out of New York, where she was born in 1983; and Bali, Indonesia. She possesses a bohemian flair that bleeds into her artwork. Ms. Despont chooses to create very large drawings on seperate sheets pulled from antique accounting ledgers, draftsman paper, and other gridded papers. With the help of her assistant, Nicole Wong, Ms. Despont uses colored pencils, graphite, and a hefty collection of architect/artist stencils to make her ideas a reality.
She creates her intricate artwork with elements pulled from her infinite amount of inspiration images—old photographs, Buddhist medical charts, various textiles, patterns, beehives, architectural schematics, soundwaves, etc.
Many different elements may be chosen and woven into these designs, which are themselves very expressive and geometric, but also fluid and earthy.
More often than not, Ms. Despont finds herself working on her living room floor than at an artist’s table. She fully invests herself into every drawing, and into her work projects as a whole. According to Ms. Despont herself, her work is 90% research and 10% action. Oftentimes, she spends months just collecting images and making portfolios of every photo she finds. Because her pieces are so large, they have to be fitted into even larger frames; and because so much goes into their creation overall, it takes some time to get each drawing into a gallery, and at times she can do only one show a year.
But she never lets that stop her from brainstorming or innovating.
Oftentimes, the antique accounting ledger paper she draws abstract shapes, florals, or designs on contain old checks and balances from their past owners. By letting these numbers and words show through without bothering to change them or white them out, Ms. Despont makes the figures part of her work, which in itself looks antique.
Ms. Despont has also stated that while her work appears very calm and naturalistic, she actually calculates every mark she makes. By using stencils, she creates designs that are so beautifully designed, one would never think they were made with a stencil at all. Ms. Despont’s base of operations is in the comfort of her home, and she often finds herself streched out on her bedroom floor with her huge, sectioned layouts.
And she has said that she really prefers to work this way. “I find that being able to work at home—that I wake up in the morning, I have breakfast, and I start working—it’s a very smooth transition to a quieter, more centered place.”
Also, because Ms. Despont creates all of her drawings using relatively inexpensive materials, she does not have to wait until she has large amounts of money or has recieved donations to create the pictures, which she just likes to “just let happen.”
All of her drawings started with simple marks that turned into something more.
“Those marks contain the seed of the drawing,” she commented in Louise Despont Draws Deep. This is something that is true of virtually any drawing, or any work of art.
And in Louise Despont’s case, it is the foundation of her media.
