Colored Pencil Drawings by Ingrid Calame

Ingrid Calame is an American artist based in Los Angeles, known for her abstract, map-like paintings inspired by human detritus. 

Calame’s works come from a painstaking process of recording cracks and stains from the physical environment. She first began tracing the shapes, textures and stains on pavements, cultural and industrial sites, reconstructing the places that have been overlooked or disregarded.

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Drawings #334 and #346 reveal part of Calame’s intensive process. Calame and her team obtained tracings from the dried-out concrete riverbed of the L.A. River, hand-stenciled numbers on the factory floors of the ArcelorMittal Steel factory floors, and from the cracks in an abandoned wading pool at the Perry Street Projects in Buffalo, New York. These tracings were then assembled and retraced in colored pencil to form the final layered drawings.

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“I go to specific locations to trace marks, stains and cracks on the ground on to architectural Mylar. From these tracings I make drawings and paintings. I clean the original tracings and layer them on top of each other. Once I’ve piled up the tracings, I place several rectangles of drafting Mylar on top of them. This determines the size of the drawings I will eventually make. I then start to trace the layers of rubbings that are beneath the rectangles, with a different color pencil for each layer, peeling back the layers one by one until I reach the bottom of the pile. The final drawings are always a surprise.” – Ingrid Calame

Drawings 179, 181, and 182 were generated by tracing the silhouettes of stains found on the streets of Los Angeles.

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