History
History 2001-2002
Materials: charcoal, graphite on paper
History Chapter I (2001) I am continuing my investigation of the space between drawing and writing. The marks reflect language as a desire and intent to record what happens. Our drive and ability to speak about our experience creates our framework, our sense of reality. The center of each piece is the space of experience. This is a different kind of time, one that doesn’t move, doesn’t progress, but is continually here, where we are, in the present. These two places, the intense need to describe and state, and the place of direct experience, seem almost unrelated. It seems that our need to understand and know what is going on, and in particular, to know the right thing to do, seems unrelated to what is actually happening. Sometimes I feel a profound despair in this. Sometimes I’m amused. There is a strange balance at play. Death and life dance with each other, and we live at the edges. There is irony in almost everything.
History Chapter II (Conversations with Dark) (2002)
This work is an exploration of dark. If we look behind what we experience and what we can understand, what is there? These pieces are difficult to see. “Difficult to see” is closer to our reality than clarity, really. We fool ourselves by what we are able to see. By not recognizing what we cannot see, what do we miss? Following are some studio notes that have come out of working on these and other pieces. These are not statements of fact, but observations: We assign meanings to darkness, but we can never grasp it. Darkness is our context. Light is an interruption of darkness. We think that light reveals but it also obscures. All we see is light bouncing off of things. Light draws our attention to surfaces. Light obliterates the unknown. Shadows are our reminders of the vast dark. Light and dark are not opposites. Varying levels of light are really degrees of darkness. There is never absolute light, only absolute darkness. I seem to have learned some things about light, but little about the dark. I’m left in the dark, with a flashlight and some charcoal. Note: It is virtually impossible to represent the ‘Dark’ images digitally. They have to be seen in person. Or use your imagination.