artist statement:

 

 

I like to draw details that get overlooked-- the shadow of an ice cube in water, say. Things that don't exactly make sense. Things I would edit out if I were trying to make a recognizable object.

 

 

For me the challenge of drawing is sorting through all the information that exists in the waxed gum wrapper I find folded in my pocket.  The details are overwhelming.  How to make all of that -- whatever that is-- into some lines on a paper? How to honor each odd, mute force? 

 

 

I am interested in this kind of seeing --not of a world of known, knowable, sure things, but of a world brimming with information beyond my ability to hold down.  I try to draw these things I see but cannot explain.  I drew the inside of the folds in one rather stiff, gray backpack for at least 3 years. (But then I had washed it too much and the folds just mushed.)  Now when I sit down at my table with a pencil, the details clamour at me. There are too many, really, to even begin to get.

 

The more I look around me, or into the drawing, the more it opens up, as if under a magnifying lens-- there is stillness, razored cracks of light, thick, tangling blackness. The world is strange and beautiful and so full of life.  I am not sure what I am drawing anymore.  But I have the feeling I can't draw fast enough to get it all down.

 

The drawing takes over, pulls, with wide hands, me in, like a commanding dance partner, and I cannot claim to really be in control of them.  I just follow.  I don't seem to be drawing the outside world then, but nor do I feel like I'm making it up-- it's as if I'm drawing something just beyond the surface of the page.  I'm drawing something I feel there, insistent, impatient, almost bullying.
 

 

I find drawing beautiful because I can erase, but never entirely.  Drawings show their own history, all their mistakes, all hesitation, or anger, or grief, or quietness, or joy-- all the precise moments that it took are registered.  Drawings can never quite cover up.  They stay raw and open.  They say, we are never done withour work, are we?

 

 

I can only show and explain what I see by drawing it --these are not things that have names. I trawl my fingers through. The drawings are love letters to looking-- to witnessing all the alive-ness of unremarkable things around me-- just wordless ones.