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Exploring Ideas Through Drawing
Drawing is the most direct tool available to artists for working out ideas. The simplicity of the technique allows for quick execution that can be easily erased, revised, and modified as the concept develops. For me, drawing serves many purposes. I use life drawing and observation drawing to capture likenesses of people and places as I experience them. These drawings go into a sort of inventory of images that I recall and use in other works. I also do drawings from memory. These differ from the observation drawings in that they are much more revealing about my psychological bias, in terms of which details I remember, and which ones I do not seem to notice. I have used dreams and nightmares as subjects for twenty-five paintings over the last twenty-eight years. The expression of these subjects is also limited to how faithfully I can remember the details. I am not so interested in what these images mean, (as symbols, or metaphors). I am more interested in recreating that subjective experience of hying to remember exactly what the sequence of events, images, and moods were, that give every dream it's particular feeling. As a general rule, I consider the "back ground" in a picture, be it a landscape, an interior space, or just some colored shapes, to be the place to control the mood of the viewer. By trying different combinations of lines, forms, and textures, I try to create an unusual, unexpected combination of visual stimuli that aggressively pushes out at the viewer. I try to combine this abstract structure with a recognizable subject. This gives the viewer a sort of security blanket to grab on to while trying to come to terms with the uncertainty caused by the non?realistic color. The struggle is always to find new combinations of shapes, colors, and compositional strategies, to keep the picture alive.
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