My drawings are executed in graphite, on gessoed paper which is mounted on cradled panels. I use chalk-based rather than acrylic gesso, so that even the lightest marks of the pencil register distinctly. Mounting the drawings on panels allows me to display the drawings without glass, making their material and physical properties more readily apparent. The images are built from discrete touches – hatches, dots and stipples. I often use spray fixative to seal initial layers of marks and then add subsequent layers, thereby deepening and extending the tonal range of the drawings.
The concept of modesty is centrally important in my work. Far from an avoidance of ambition, the power of modesty is released when one demonstrates respect for the mute force of things. When we really pay attention to the world around us we begin to understand its humbling resistance to casual summarization. In large part I choose drawing as my primary medium because I understand it as inherently modest. In the deployment of simple drawing procedures - in measuring, gridding, asserting and revising I seek an ordering of the world akin to the ordering associated with literal building and dwelling. No matter what it nominally represents the subject of a drawing is equally the mark of its author — the trace of decisions and gestures made in real time and space. A drawing is an aggregation of touches referring simultaneously to objects in the world and to the consciousness of the artist pressed into material permanence.
For past three years, I’ve taken the subject matter for my drawings from the vernacular architecture of malls and commercial buildings. In these structures, what initially appear to be blank and nondescript walls and surfaces often contain subtle evidence of wear and age that I find deeply moving. In her recent book, The Ruins Lesson, poet and historian Susan Stewart offers a historically/theoretically grounded explanation for the fascination and pleasure many find in worn and dissolving surfaces and forms. Stewart builds her account on art historian Alois Riegl's distinction between an artwork’s “historical value” (arising from understanding of its origins in a unique time and place), and its “age value” (arising from awareness of time’s passage, visible through traces of erosion and fragmentation). According to Stewart, Riegl believed that the pleasure taken in a work’s age value comes from a distinctly modern perception of the organic nature of artworks – that “modern man recognizes his own life in a monument.” Stewart uses Riegl’s concept to more specifically examine the ways that artists shape matter into form and how as those forms decay, they become material for creative re-use. I share Stewart’s belief that our attraction to sites of mutability isn’t morbid or voyeuristic. Rather, it’s connected to a recognition that they are abiding sources of creative potential.
THE JUDGMENT POEM (from Hexagram 62 of the I-Ching* “The Book of Changes”)
PREPONDERANCE OF THE SMALL. Success.
Perseverance furthers.
Small things may be done; great things should not be done.
The flying bird brings the message:
It is not well to strive upward,
It is well to remain below.
Great good fortune.
THE IMAGE POEM
Thunder on the mountain:
The image of PREPONDERANCE OF THE SMALL.
Thus in his conduct the superior man gives preponderance to reverence.
In bereavement, he gives preponderance to grief.
In his expenditures, he gives preponderance to thrift.
The master said: “Striving upward is rebellion, striving downward is devotion.” Modesty stemming from recognizing your limitations is a fine quality, but it can be seen as weakness if it is not accompanied by conscientiousness and dignity
“The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.”
Gaston Bachelard
A shadow on the wall
boughs stirred by the noonday wind
that’s enough earth
and for the eye
enough celestial participation.
How much further do you want to go? Refuse
the bossy insistence
of new impressions—
Gottfried Benn “A Shadow on the Wall”
I emerge from the mind’s
cave into the worse darkness
outside, where things pass and
the Lord is in none of them…
I have heard the still, small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos. I
have lingered too long on
this threshold, but where can I go?
R.S. Thomas “Threshold”
“If only, some say, we could do without any image. How so much better, purer, faster our access to God, to Nature, to Truth, to Science could be.” To which other voices (or sometimes the same) answer: “Alas (or fortunately), we cannot do without images, intermediaries, mediators of all shapes and forms, because this is the only way to access God, Nature, Truth and Science.”
Bruno Latour
“Reality is an activity of the most august imagination”
Wallace Stevens