ARTIST STATEMENT

My recent work is in charcoal. I wanted to focus on composition, and to simplify. In the midst of the contemporary complexities of multi-media, installations, the continued search for new materials and innovative techniques, there is a great directness and timelessness in putting charcoal on paper. I also decided to respond to physical things I could directly observe, rather than working from photographs, my imagination, or abstractly. Adhering to this approach, a wonderful dialogue develops. Formal concerns surface. Color options suggest themselves. Alternative media come to mind which could enable greater intricacy or detail. A charcoal drawing is most complete and successful when it implies and embodies other works. What initially seems like the medium’s limitation or deficiency, is illustrative of its scope and capacity. 

Open Edge [Cockle #2] is illustrative of an ongoing series of drawings using sea shells as the compositional element. The intent is to respond to the amazingly sculptural shapes and patterns of the shells in such a way as to create a sense of the life that flows around and through them, a space that both creates them and is created by them. The halves of the actual cockle that I held for this drawing were not a true pair, but were close enough so that the hinges matched – a fitting metaphor for the dialectic between an organic shape and a rectangular field.