My drawings are traces of a spiritual, intellectual, and physical exploration of what I consider to be the most vital entity: nature. The word ‘nature’ is itself vague and eludes concrete definition, but it is obvious to the senses. As John Stuart Mill points out in his treatise Nature, it is all that is. Nature is our source, provider, and limitation. It is the forest, the way a tree branches, and the wind that can push a tree down. Nature is both a thing and a process. It exhibits order and chaos and exists in a state of extreme interrelatedness and sensitivity. In my life and in my work I derive purpose and direction from the constancy and dependability of change present in nature’s amorphous whole.
In searching for a way to visually create an experience that resonates with the idea of nature as ineffable and omnipresent I have developed a working method based in several dualities: controlled and uncontrolled, objective and non-objective, forceful and delicate, detailed and obscured, dark and light. I use materials that are conventional and manufactured as well as unexpected natural materials. Feathers, branches, charcoal, ashes, dirt, decayed tree, achiote, and wax are my media. My color palette is limited, brown, red, and yellow earthtones, as well as grays, and blacks. These colors reference the various colors found in dirt. In selecting, referencing, and utilizing natural materials in my process I reveal my attitude towards nature as one of elevation.
The larger-than-life-size scale of the drawings on paper is akin to the immensity and the potential power of nature’s forces and affects. Each work begins with aggressive marks, full body gestures, and a loose sense of the initial drawing’s intended composition. They are completed by gaining control of and ordering the results of the initial drawing’s frenetic birth through slow, meditative detailing, asserting strong value contrasts and spatial relationships, wiping out and layering, and creating subtle, mysterious, numinous lighting. The kind of gestural energy used to make the marks, explosive or reserved, becomes as much the subject matter as the density, organic textures, unbounded natural forms, and animating light.
The evolution of the drawings is an organic struggle and involves an open attitude to the changing condition of the drawing’s needs and surface. I often have to destroy well-developed fragments in order to achieve a greater pictorial harmony. Within this activity there is a fusion of sacrifice, faith, and individuation. These aspects convert the studio ritual into an act of devotion and prayer. Doing the work also provides time for reflection and memories to roam freely through my mind and hands. Visual mystery is present in the work and reflects my valuation of nature, which is that it is physically and intellectually unboundable, pervasive in its effects, and incomprehensible in its totality.
The duality of order and chaos in nature, which is commonly spoken of in philosophy, math, and science, presents mankind with a limit to what is knowable and a sense of unlimited ‘unknowables’. The perceived power of natural processes is enhanced by the ordered beauty of what is directly observable and by that which cannot be observed in a lifetime or known. It is from the exquisite, fractal complexities of the physical products of nature in things such as stones, trees, riverbeds, and leaves, and from the intuitive awareness of the infinite connections of natural laws and processes that a sense of spirituality emerges and can be visually explored.
