“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.