Jim Dine: The Secret Drawings

Majestic, dynamic and dense drawings on the theme of origins from Jim Dine

This book presents for the first time Jim Dine’s (born 1935) Secret Drawings, a series of 45 drawings made between 2012 and 2018 in his studios in Walla Walla, Washington, and Paris. These works are the product of Dine’s intense, restless processes of application, erasure and most importantly reworking, using materials as diverse as charcoal, China ink, pastel, fixative, oil enamel and acrylic paints, as well as collage.

The textures of the papers―“what I had on the floor and lying around”―vary greatly, as do Dine’s tools, from sticks, brushes, knives and rotary grinders to the artist’s bare hands. For Dine himself, these drawings hold a more personal secrecy: “84 years ago (I am 84 years old) I emerged from a dark place … I have been depicting this landscape ever since … the thicket of marks and the anatomical reference is all here on the paper.”