ARTIST STATEMENT

My art work explores drawing as an interdisciplinary practice, and juxtaposition as a means of suggesting sweeping literary themes.

Mixing gravity with levity I hope to raise questions about language, perception, and history.

The First Words series is reminiscent of a set of flash cards preserving the first 20 or so words used by my son. One is drawn into the child's world, weighing the apparent necessity of words like "bird" and "more." If you could have only 20 words, what would they be?

The Travel Journal series reflects on my experiences as a tourist, primarily in India and in the United Kingdom. The weight of history is offset by the disconnected feeling of being a tourist. These works are the result of consuming architecture, history, and culture as a temporary visitor.

The Color History series takes a single color as the subject of each piece. I then seek to amplify both broad cultural associations with that color as well as my own idiosyncratic hang-ups. Thus, this is a study of color as it is influenced by context.

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DRAWING AS CRITICAL THINKING
Drawing is a process through which we think critically about the world. Drawing may be associated with certain media (paper, pencils, charcoal, etc.) but because it is a process it is ultimately free from any particular materials. Therefore we can draw a line in the sand, draw with a stick in the snow, and so on. Drawing is a meditative process by which we discover knowledge visually.

The first sentence of this essay implies three key points: Drawing is a process. Drawing is linked to thought. Drawing is a critical, or questioning practice.

Most traditional art disciplines are clearly aligned with certain media. Painting with paint, ceramics with clay, weaving with thread, etc. Obviously in Modern and contemporary art practice these traditional categories are routinely violated. Painting in particular has a tradition of co-opting the materials, processes, and histories of other media such as fiber arts and sculpture. But drawing has always been an in-between medium. As hand-maiden to the arts drawing had a lower canonical status through much of art history, but it also enjoyed a position of being indispensible to the training of an artist for many centuries. It has been the way that artists practice and apply visual thinking, whatever form their final product might take. So drawing is process, not product. It is a way, not a destination.

Drawing has few absolutes but its' most common salient feature is the use of line. Line, in turn, has an unmistakable temporal quality. It unfolds over time, having its beginning, middle, and end. This helps reinforce the connection to process, but it also serves to deepen the connection between the drawing and the artist's thinking. As lines move, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, they mimic both our roving eye-movement and our shifting thoughts as we consider now this detail, now the whole image. Our thinking is mirrored further through layering - through the build up of tentative sketchiness, followed by erasure, and assertive delineation. Thus, when we look at a drawing we see the artist thinking out loud. And when we make a drawing we literally think concretely and visually. Therefore drawing is at its most fruitful when used to find out what we think, to flesh out our ideas, through a process of exploration, revision, and concrete realization.

Drawing as critical thinking is precisely the realization of this fruitful potential. Whether an artist is drawing from nature, drawing from culture, or working in a mode of abstraction the process of drawing allows them to think critically not just about how things look but also about how we look at things. The drawer is engaged in the visual world and also in the nature of their own limited perspective and means of perception. The best drawing not only involves discovering knowledge of the visual but also asks questions about how we know what we know.