Graphite
Drawings

My Intentions as an Artist

Discovery

I don't begin a drawing knowing what it will look like when it's finished. In fact, because I have aphantasia, I can't picture a finished drawing in my mind. I've come to see that as an advantage.

I make a mark, see what happened, respond to it, and continue. The drawing grows out of hundreds of those decisions. I'm not trying to reproduce an image I already have. I'm trying to discover an image I haven't seen before.

Recognition and Uncertainty

I'm especially interested in the territory between abstraction and recognition. A shape may begin to look mechanical, geological, architectural, biological, or like some object you ought to recognize. But just when the mind thinks it has figured it out, the thing slips away again.

I like that moment. The viewer may think: I believe this thing, but I can't name this thing.

I've started thinking of this quality in my work as Perceptual Realism. The objects aren't literally real, but sometimes they become convincing enough that the mind treats them as though they are.

The mind is quick to label what it sees, often trading deeper understanding for the comfort of recognition. Once we know what something is, we often stop looking. These works resist that easy resolution, allowing the visual qualities themselves to come forward.

Distance Scale and Time

I want a drawing to offer more than one experience. From across a room, it may be about a large black shape, white space, or movement. Walk closer and another drawing begins to appear. Get very close and tiny marks, fragments, and relationships become visible.

You can't really take in the drawing all at once. You have to move around and spend some time with it. I like the idea that space and time are both part of the drawing.

Beauty

My allegiance is to beauty, though I don't mean prettiness.

Beauty can contain tension, awkwardness, weight, delicacy, rupture, mystery, humor, and things that almost shouldn't work together but somehow do. I want the work to surprise the viewer without betraying their trust.

Faith and the Work

My Christian faith is inseparable from the way I work.

Before I begin, I ask Jesus to guide and inspire what happens. But I'm not interested in making illustrations of Christian ideas or hiding religious symbols in drawings for people to decode. I don't want the viewer to have to believe what I believe in order to experience the work.

If something of God remains in the drawing, I would rather it work more like a fragrance than an argument.

Faith may reveal what was already there. With eyes to see, the viewer may sense the dance between Creator and created from which these marks emerged.

Where the Work Fits

A Larger Conversation

I don't think of art history as one generation replacing another. It seems more like a long conversation. Artists inherit questions, change them, abandon them, rediscover them, and occasionally ask them in a slightly different way.

I can see connections between my work and several parts of that conversation. The Surrealists used automatic drawing to make images they hadn't completely planned. Abstract Expressionists allowed the physical act of making marks to become part of the meaning of the work.

Artists such as Paul Klee, Arshile Gorky, Roberto Matta, Terry Winters, Julie Mehretu, and Vija Celmins have all explored, in very different ways, the territory between drawing, space, invented structures, recognizable things, and pure marks.

I also feel a connection to Man Ray's photograms. He could begin with a real object and, through the photographic process, turn it into something mysterious. My drawings sometimes seem to travel the other direction: something that began as a mark starts looking strangely real, even though there may be no actual object behind it.

A Slightly Different Question

Modern abstraction often asked: Can a mark simply be a mark without representing anything?

I'm increasingly interested in almost the opposite question: How little information does the mind need before it decides a mark represents something?

My drawings give the mind enough evidence to start guessing, but often not enough to finish the job. The image can move from mark to object, into uncertainty, and back to mark again. That movement interests me more than either pure abstraction or straightforward representation.

Science Perception and Emergence

Seeing isn't simply a camera recording the world. The brain is constantly interpreting incomplete information, looking for edges, objects, patterns, depth, and relationships. That makes perception an active participant in my drawings. The viewer helps make the image.

I'm also fascinated by emergence, the way complicated order can arise from many smaller interactions without the final form being planned in advance. That's very close to how I work.

One mark affects the next. Relationships appear. Some survive and others disappear. Eventually a larger structure emerges that I couldn't have designed beforehand. The drawing isn't accidental, but neither is it fully imposed. It is discovered through interaction.

Making Slow Images in a Fast Culture

We live in an extraordinary flood of images. We scroll, recognize, classify, and move on. Now images can even be generated almost instantly from a sentence.

My drawings aren't particularly cooperative with that world. They're lousy thumbnails.

Some of their most important information disappears when they're small. The physical drawing asks the viewer to come closer, move away, return, and look again.

The drawings reward continued looking while resisting the mind’s urge to make everything familiar.

Maybe taking time to look has value in itself.

Mystery

We're surrounded by information, yet enormous parts of existence remain mysterious. Science reveals realities that don't fit ordinary human experience. Technology makes it harder to distinguish between objects and simulations of objects. Artificial intelligence raises questions about images, creativity, authorship, and what it means to make something.

Against all of that, I find myself interested in a very simple question: Is there something here?

My drawings don't necessarily answer it. And that's important. Mystery doesn't have to mean emptiness. Something can be present before we understand it.

Why the Work Might Matter

I certainly can't decide whether my drawings will matter in the larger history of art. History gets to make that call. But I know what I'm trying to contribute.

I'm interested in whether an image can convince us that something is present without telling us exactly what that something is. And that leads to a larger question: Can we remain attentive in the presence of something we don't immediately understand?

That question reaches beyond art. It touches science, faith, relationships, nature, and everyday life.

If the drawings have something worthwhile to say, perhaps it's simply this:

Not knowing doesn't require us to stop looking.