Drawings

Please click on the drop-down menus to view galleries or click on the following links:

Sketchbook I, Sketchbook II, Sketchbook III, Sketchbook IV

Essay:

Note on Drawing: My Process

First stage: listen.

Next: Observe changing light and how form is created by it.

Next: Travel into secluded and wilderness locations to completely immerse oneself.

Next: distill forms from these experiences through constant practice.

Next: Develop vocabulary of forms/marks/shapes and applications.

Next: combine and recombine forms according to chance and aesthetic sense.

Next: repeat in ever more complexity as one travels through life

There is a flow. Veins of energies and material gestures run throughout the Earth.

Light and color change ceaselessly. Painterly skies pattern the upper void. Shadows cruise across the land.  The forms repeat and are undeniable.  Fissures, peaks, meandering channels, great falls of water, piles of stones, spiraling clouds…  Observe how the gestures in Nature and in Art may be large while the small detail later added may be delicate…see how the world can encompass both power and finesse.  Simply look at a mountain range, studded with pines or a bird hovering over a great sea. Or a vast ocean wrinkled with fleeting, foamy crests…

The analytic and observational process of studying ‘Great Nature’ thus conditions and invites the synthetic process of improvisation and play into the mind. The mind can become progressively unfettered through deep study and observation of the inherent creative processes of the Natural world and the organizing patterns observed throughout it.  Parallel forms in sky and river and tree may be ascertained. This study in turn can lead to the eventual, almost mystical recognition that true human nature and Great Nature itself are indeed one. We are bound up in this Earth’s creative energies as surely as any sand dune or thundercloud. When this is recognized, then the mind can partake in joy and awe of all the creative processes at work in the natural world.  Perhaps in time, we may even learn to live in harmony with its ways.  This is the allure of painting and drawing for me, for it allows a full, plastic expression of that elusive understanding.  First we must know in order that we might have empathy, and then out of empathy comes co-creation.

My drawing is the first act of expression of this insight.