Somehow, Gretchen Frances Bennett’s drawings shimmer.
The artist pulls from personal photos, film stills, and the deep, ever-replenishing well of YouTube and Instagram to base her drawings off of, preserving glitches, fuzziness, accidental tears, and worn edges in the final product. With colored pencils, she elevates photos and pixels from the mundane to a spiritual level.
There’s nothing particularly special about the materials she uses, though she tells me that she prefers non-waxy colored pencils so that the colors gradually build up. But the resulting compositions—complicated by the visual equivalent of the sound of static in a radio transmission—look almost like holographs appearing before you underneath the soft museum light. The pencil strokes are short and layered, seemingly vibrating, as if quietly humming or beaming in from another planet or consciousness.
