statement: works on paper
I have always drawn on paper, from my earliest childhood. Pencil or other mark making implement and the hand is as rudimentary, tactile, simple, immediate, direct, familiar and thereby, within its limitations, as visceral as it gets. It is something everyone can relate to and is as old as humanity. I love to draw. It aligns itself with my thoughts, it translates my thoughts into image or symbol unfailingly. There may be refinements, adjustments and alterations for increased drama, information or aesthetic exploration, but the initial drawing never fails. The notion of error is irrelevant. So I draw more and more now. The metal pieces are exclusively from drawings. I suspect that when I return to painting, it will be much more engaged in drawing than ever before.
I may never fully resolve the conflict between my conviction that the strongest statements are the most raw and my tendencies toward a somewhat lyrical set of marks and a certain clarity of form, but drawing, intrinsically has a rawness built in that gets me closer to something true. The urgency I feel about making work at this point, given there is a lot to do and time is getting short to do it, makes drawing that much more important to pursue.
About 25 years ago, I started to work on vellum too. This is a type of paper, but synthetic. I drew on it and painted on it. I have continued to do so representationally and non-objectively. It leads to all sorts of controllable surprises with wet media. It has a different kind of “light” built in than traditional paper does. There are many works on paper.
I may never fully resolve the conflict between my conviction that the strongest statements are the most raw and my tendencies toward a somewhat lyrical set of marks and a certain clarity of form, but drawing, intrinsically has a rawness built in that gets me closer to something true. The urgency I feel about making work at this point, given there is a lot to do and time is getting short to do it, makes drawing that much more important to pursue.
About 25 years ago, I started to work on vellum too. This is a type of paper, but synthetic. I drew on it and painted on it. I have continued to do so representationally and non-objectively. It leads to all sorts of controllable surprises with wet media. It has a different kind of “light” built in than traditional paper does. There are many works on paper.