Desire Lines

Josh Elrod Bio:

Obsessed with drawing from an early age, Josh Elrod has spent his life creating images, in one way or other. After receiving a commercial art award at Hillsboro High School, Josh went on to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. He spent many years pursuing his other passion, drumming, which was expressed with the dub, noise, and pop groups he formed and played with. He spent 10 years performing in New York and internationally as a "Blue Man" in the critically acclaimed off-broadway phenomenon, Blue Man Group. 

He founded the Daily Drawing Agreement, a daily drawing practice which has included many New York artists. He and his wife Ivy own and operate a contemporary design and lifestyle store in Germantown called Wilder.

He currently lives and works in Nashville, TN. 

Statement:

The concept of desire lines comes from architecture, and is used to denote paths on earth and grass signifying where people want to move versus where they’ve been assigned.

This group of paintings evolved out of the single line paintings I began making last year. They are a bridge between two disparate styles of working, the stream of conscious drawings that I make and the newer, fluid line paintings. The paintings underneath the lines inform the drawings that were made on top, but not always. The lines, characters and objects that appear are not previously known to me, they appear spontaneously and are not premeditated.

Desire as line, negative space as desire, the impulse of desire and the failure of desire.