Sounds of Dawn

Description

Renouf’s art encourages the viewer to recreate mentally the process of making her work. In many of her drawings, such as Sounds of Dawn, she covers a sheet of paper with pastel chalk, then incises lines on it with a sharp needle (or sometimes an eraser), revealing the white layer below. The eye is drawn to the central parallelogram, composed of short, not-quite-parallel lines. This form seems to emerge from the surrounding color area. The subtractive nature of her drawings is echoed in her paintings, in which she creates an irregular rhythm of backgrounds lines by removing threads from the canvases before sanding and painting.
Sounds and music are important to the artist, as suggested by the title of this drawing, which evokes the break of day and the sounds associated with awakening life. The repeated lines and intervals in Renouf’s works have been compared to the repetitive sonorities of contemporary composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich, whose music the artist often listens to while working.