Restless 

I draw so I can free the moving line. My body is always in motion, if even at the slow, cellular level. My mind is restless, too. Because drawing is about movement, it is about being alive. 

In the city, I go through my day observing myself and others around me. Our lives and actions are so many moving parts, bumping up against each other, or getting entangled, or not intersecting at all. Any symbiosis can seem like a miracle. On paper, I organize a scatter of marks into unanticipated coherence as an act of hope. 

A few years ago I was camping deep in the Oregon forest. I felt myself insignificant there in the great woods, a vast network of tall trees that seemed to be communicating horizontally. I pulled out some paper at my campsite and played with color. I used water-soluble crayons to make loose verticals, and a squeeze bottle to run horizontal lines of water through them. I worked at connecting them, until color lines spoke to each other across the raw space of the sheet, the way trees communicate across a forest. Implied grids became a metaphor, a visual measure against which to process unpredictability in the world. How much drama can the drawing absorb, can we absorb? 

Under that gray sky of the northwest, the disappearance of sun for weeks at a time oppressed me. I needed to think about light in a new way. Even when the sun did not show, light had to be there—held and compressed in the green chlorophyll of plants and trees. I saw light to be inside the color. And I began to think more about unlocking that energy to illuminate the gesture of line.

Working during the isolation of 2020 and 2021, I had difficulty getting marks to connect to each other at all. I found that the less controlled cross-current of water provided a way forward. The work then unfolded as a conversation on the paper, a dialogue outside of myself. In a drawing, something always happens out there that I could not make up.  

September 2021

Dwelling in the Field of a Drawing

The human urge to create a dwelling place for oneself is an underlying impulse when I draw. Each drawing involves searching and settling behaviors related to that urge. I send out the first lines to feel out the space and give voice to different states of being. Slowly, relationships build between marks, and they activate the field and each other with their particular energies. Drawings come to resolution over time, and in many cases that resolution is quite tenuous. It is as if the marks are in barest agreement to cohabit but nevertheless work together to provide some positive affect on the psyche: to create structure, to create space, and to allow the space to expand. Other drawings are characterized by overall solidity and weight, yet contain a sense of an underlying instability. At first look, some of these appear as configurations of black shapes—yet line is key to the process here too, as the black is drawn by rolling many lengths with an ink brayer, over a linear structure made with tape.

Much thinking about the human conditions of dwelling—logistic, psychic and political—continues to drive new work in drawing. I do not represent what I experience, but ideas may inform the intention of “finding residence” on a sheet, in effort to hold a sense of humanity in the drawing field. In this way, some ideas that have arisen and flowed through the work are: the humanness of handbuilt structures, the natural world as a nurturer; the marginalization of creativity (and how artists reside psychically or literally at the edges of society); artwork as a dwelling place; verbal articulation as a way to mark one’s own territory; the economics and despair of homelessness; homelessness as a spiritual aspiration; the balance between structure and spontaneity in the “home” place that may be sought by a dweller; ritual-like versus exploratory acts of dwelling; social migration as impetus for making new dwelling sites; forced migration that takes them away; and how physical dwelling places and human dwelling habits reflect connections or disconnections between people and land.

This issue of how humans relate to land preoccupies me, and has led me to spend time in geological sites in the west. Among them: the high deserts of northern New Mexico and southern California; the basin and range lands of Wyoming and Montana; and caves and canyons in South Dakota. Studying exposed rock faces has helped me to understand them as evidence of the earth’s gestures. We as humans interact with energies and movements that are much slower and much older than those produced by us. Even so, the earth is restless, moving constantly.

Line and Wall

The blank wall is a gift. I try to begin work at the site empty of ideas, in order to be open to what thoughts may arise there. Developing the ideas directly on the wall is more interesting to me than transferring them from a small sketch: I can see the changes in actual scale, instantly. The process is unsettling. Many drawing solutions become visible over the course of my time spent onsite, though inevitably I leave the room with just one. This final outcome is always something I didn’t anticipate at the outset. 

I think of the line as being flung out into space to negotiate the unknown. Even as the blue tape lines physically adhere, they are the most “unfastened”: it is ephemeral as a throw-away medium; physically removable; and of a blue that visually hovers over the surface or seemingly pushes through it. I begin placing the lines to mark out visual footholds for an ongoing mental travel—travel that suggests both freedom and belonging in the space. In these sites, the architecture of the room is fixed, but the mind wanders within it. This is how we develop a sense of home, of place. In my home, I travel. 

For me, drawing starts with the problem of the line, how to form it and how to follow it. It ends with the line, too. Line keeps its independence. It is searching for its place and for connection, though never completely absorbed by the community of its fellows.