August 2007


“Draw with your arm” was something my teacher told me over and over again. It taught me to handle my pencil in the same way one would handle a brush to canvas.  It allowed me to bring the same kind of energy to pencil work that one would bring to a painting.

Using Faber-Cassell graphite pencils and color polychromes on a variety of cold press papers and boards my work is a build up of graphite layers to create texture, translucency and depth.  As pencil is layered it creates it’s own definitions of shape and pattern and thus there are no lines in my drawings, they simply become - and yet they are all lines.

Starting always outdoors my sketches are intended to capture an instant and become the basis for an exploration of technique. Most times I will do several sketch impressions all from one vantage point.  There is no challenge to finding subject matter.  Everywhere I turn there is a drawing waiting to be captured and manipulated into layers of pencil and tonal studies that offer the viewer a hint or suggestion.  The same instant impression or clip in time, that was my challenge to see, hear and feel and return it to paper.

Later, in my studio, the image serves as a record of the moment – the smell, sound and sight at the instant it was captured.  The grace of my pencils meeting fresh paper simulates the distant sounds of nature at the time the drawing was unveiled. The rythmn of movement in my arm simulates the swaying of the trees or ripples in the water. The vastness of an undeveloped white page of paper simulates the peace I felt while discovering yet another drawing waiting to be exposed.

My original works are all “1 of 1”.  Justice can not be done to a feeling or emotion caught in time by reproducing it 100’s of times on a print press.  Nor can originality be maintained by working from a photograph – a copy in itself.  Doing such would supress energy and rather than letting imagination do it’s incredible work, drawing would just become a labor confined by rules.

For 25 years I fought the temptation of becoming a full time artist. The realities of life would ultimately have meant some type of compromise. But now things are different - now it is art on my terms.