I make drawings on paper, in ink and watercolor, ranging in size from miniature to monumental. Built through the slow accretion of marks, the drawings become abstract fields. An accumulation of stippling, scribbling, circles, dots, and lines of varying lengths has come to be a personal language. Fine-line Staedtler permanent ink markers offer a tapered nib and generous ink flow; Arches 140-pound hot-press watercolor paper is heavy, strong and smooth.  The combination allows me enormous control over the width and density of line. I am drawn to the tension between order and disorder, energy and entropy, control and disarray.  I want the eye to have spaces in which to rest, to breathe, until pulled back into the obsessive aggregate mark-making. The drawings have been described as hallucinatory or disorienting at one end of the spectrum, and meditative or contemplative on the other.

 

For decades I worked as a journalist, meticulously researching a given topic, then laying out the gathered facts for the reader with logic and clarity. In my artwork, I bypass the “on assignment” side of my brain. My eyes and hands have access to the inarticulate, the irrational, the illogical, while retaining the semblance of control through the grid, the square, the repetitiveness of the mark. One of the great pleasures of making art is that it speaks to the viewer directly, without my interpretation.  Once a piece is completed, I am, quite literally (and entirely happily), out of the picture.  I put down lines and bits of color:  You fill in the story.