Todd Camplin

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to present, Todd Camplin: CALM & storm, an exhibition of new ink drawings on paper and clayboards. The exhibition, the artist’s third solo show with the gallery, opens October 10^th and continues through December 24^th, 2020. 

Todd Camplin’s ink drawings are as dense as they are weightless. Often taking months to complete, the painstaking process involves the repetition of small words, letters, and marks evocative of highly detailed maps and textiles. They perfectly capture his signature style in delicate and labor-intensive imagery. His compositions use language such that names, or other text, forms the basis for the abstractions. What can be called lines of text, or streams or strings, flow and repeat themselves in compelling patterns that he expertly renders in free form shapes.

His elaborate process for the drawings goes through several stages. He first sketches the overall ideas and lists of words. Then the words become shapes. He then lightly draws the entire composition in pencil and finishes with ink. His approach takes time with a steady hand and the meticulous mark-making is caught up in the storm of composition and planning.

John Zoto’s has noted, “Paul Klee, the Swiss master draftsman, described his own methodology, stating that drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk or more reductively a line is a dot that went for a walk. These statements from a modernist master of nearly a century ago aptly mark a starting point of Camplin’s work”.

Camplin was born in 1973 in South Bend, Indiana. In 1998 he earned a B.F.A. from Western Kentucky University. In 2006 he received an M.A. in Arts & Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. In the spring of 2010, he received an M.F.A. from the University of North Texas in Denton. He currently resides in Jefferson, Texas.