Artist’s Statement

Drawing

Most often, to develop a drawing I improvise: I might begin with something recognizable, but from there one stroke propels me to a second stroke, another stroke is added as response to the one before, and on and on. The paper, cold pressed, with its ridges and bumps holds the information for the drawing’s  purpose and texture. The graphite sits on top of the rough surface, the softer pencil leaving more graphite behind, the harder pencil creating a shinier surface with less texture. The pencil strokes, at first seemingly aimless, begin to remind me of deeply held thoughts and ideas, while the surface of the drawing begins to ask for composition, depth, color, edges, and weight.

The drawing surface eventually takes on the look of something old, well-handled, even archaic-an artifact. We know through science that our experiences can be stored in our DNA: An ancestor’s  experience can be stored in my DNA coloring my own life perhaps with a sense of some long ago life. As the drawing expands so does the awareness of how these experiences are playing out in the drawing. A word or phrase usually begins to repeat in my mind- ultimately perhaps the name of the work. These words almost always relate back to the same few ideas, traces of genetic memories, myths, mapping the  subtle awareness of identity and experience before  they are concretely known. The drawings become a means to identify what is hidden in an everyday life: that sense of the magic perhaps we feel but can’t see.

Painting

A painting may have a more concrete beginning but progresses as with drawing in an improvisational way. One stroke building on the next. One color placed in multiple places through out the painting, testing itself beside another color. The impulse is always the same, as with drawing, “a few ideas, traces of genetic memories, myths, mapping the  subtle awareness of identity and experience before  they are concretely known.”