“What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
George Eliot
My drawings are densely layered, winding, melancholic, and playful reflections of the mind’s life. I am deeply drawn to the subject of nostalgia, best described by the writer Michael Chabon as “…the ache that arises from the consciousness of lost connection.” I find this ache to be poignant evidence of our human consciousness and attempt to capture it with drawing.
To draw is to record. As I work, from the first mark on paper, to the last, I am setting out to fix what is fleeting. Each drawing contains an accumulation of images culled from mental scraps and observations. They are made with a combination of processes, beginning by airbrushing an atmospheric base and constructing the rest in layers of acrylic ink, graphite, and gouache.
I render the same subjects, over and over with tender attention; depicting common objects that are symbolic of work and leisure and others that signify how we measure things like distance and time. I place these objects in the drawn landscape: big skies, the rural Midwest, or romantic seascapes, using landscape as a tool to contemplate scale and activate one’s sense of time. As our consciousness is brimming with incomprehensible mystery, so a strange hierarchy is created in each drawing through the sometimes-illogical arrangement of objects and space.
In my work, the human is never represented, always implied, a presence indicated through absence. This is communicated with a pair of shoes, an overturned beer bottle, a flannel shirt, or a black capped chickadee, as birds are an “indicator species,” a proxy whose attendance reflects the environmental conditions also necessary for human existence.