Subway riders lost in their own thoughts or asleep entirely, flora and fauna of all varieties, many from the taxidermy at the New York Museum of Natural History, quiet still-life's and gesture drawings full of life and motion; Guno Park's drawings seem to cover every conceivable subject matter but have one thing in common: an arresting sense of volume and form told through a masterful artistic hand.
Guno Park "MTA Sleeper"
ink on paper11" x 15" 2016
Unlike contour drawing, that describes a given form by its outline, a kind of peripheral description of the subjects exterior shape, cross-contour drawing describes a form by it's interior volume. Lines bend and arc, rolling over convexities and converging in concavities, expanding and contracting over the surface. While a contour line can describe a shape in a single, exterior stroke, cross-contour is the sum of countless strokes that combine to describe an overall image. Guno Park's cross-contour drawing is unrivaled. With a precise, hatching stroke, he indicates not only the folds of a puffy jacket worn by a sleeping subway rider, but the pinching of that fabric in areas around stitching. By condensing his lines, he creates the illusion of the inky dark in the eye-socket of a skull, or by only a bare minimum of strokes the sun drenched pate of that skull. That he is able to so thoroughly describe form and light through the hatching strokes of a ballpoint pen is awe-inspiring.
Guno Park "Skull's Crack"
ink on paper 13" x 10.75" 2016
Even in quicker gesture drawings, like the one below done from a live model, Guno is able to par down the number of hatching cross-contour lines to the essentials, describing the female form in a few quick and unfussy lines that capture the pose and gesture masterfully. Color temperature is added with a light wash of watercolour, a modulation of cools and warms that wrap over the figure and add to the illusion of dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface.
Guno Park "Back Twist"
ink and watercolor on paper 9" x 12" 2015
More of Guno Park's work can be found at:
http://collierwest.com/collections/fine-art-guno-park