Something Old, Something New
Over the next few weeks, I plan to add new sections to the galleries, reflecting the work I created over the past decade. When I started updating my portfolio site, I used a digital camera to capture the best images that I could, instead of relying on my cellphone to share my art. The earlier sub-series that shaped the current work have yet to be properly documented as a result. Additionally, the newest work hasn’t been fully documented either, as my partner and I were out on the road when I started another offshoot series in the pen & ink work that has distinct and different themes.
When I was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago working on my bachelor’s degree, I used drawings to create projections that I used in performances, and later as videos displayed in installations. These were stylized pieces that suggested a narrative and showed my influence from graphic novels and comics. My first solo show at ARC Gallery in Chicago featured videos of the sequences combined with sculptural interpretations of the drawings to create a moody, expressionistic, immersive installation. While I never completely stopped drawing, it receded while I explored music, performance, and expanded cinema.
In 2015, I left teaching to manage my health and re-engaged with myself as an artist. At first, I explored watercolor, and my work became less representational and more abstract than it had been earlier in my career. Then I returned to my central practice, pen & ink. At first I thought I would make a few pages of crosshatching with no figure, just fields of marks. I intended to use them as backgrounds for a new video piece, but they grew into their own series and started forming abstract figures. I called them Hatchworks at first, and then Entanglements. By 2019, the watercolor returned, merging with the pen & ink. In 2021, the Primes series began to emerge from the earlier work.
While I still make work in the Primes series, new explorations started in 2024, including a set of smaller works done in black, green, and sepia inks that feel and look like abstracted Western US landscapes. Most of these pieces range from postcard size to 9×11″, with larger additions soon. Another set of abstracted silhouettes combines with the line work I have made for the past several years. Most of these works are 12×12″ and feature trees, and geometrics resembling highways. Some will remain black & white; others will explore an expanded color palette that might resemble the watercolors from 2015-2017.
Hatchwork 4. Ink on Holbein MultiDrawing Paper. 6×9″. 2015
The newer work shows the influence of recent travels on the direction of my content. While I remain fascinated with combining lines, dots, and geometric forms while utilizing a limited palette, I enjoy making work about my observed environment. Very little of my art before 2024 reflected landscape, plants, or anything outside of urban exteriors or interiors, or anthropomorphic forms. Before the 2015 shift, my solo work featured stylized, representational forms. During this decade, abstraction, balance, and minimalist work defined my output. Now, I work to combine lessons learned into developing the next art I create.
Abstract Landscape with 2 circles. fountain pen ink on Holbein MultiDrawing Paper. 11×9″. August 21, 2024
