Artist Statement
My primary focus is the common-place landscapes of American industrial agriculture, its past and present. These aren’t hidden away in factories; the factories are the fields and structures beside rural roads and along the interstates.
I’m interested for several reasons. To me, as a student of landscape, these places and their antecedents are beautiful. Stripped bare or lined for planting, or packed tightly with erupting growth, are endless patterns, multiplied by changes of light and moisture levels. I want to pay attention to the subtle beauties of these problematic landscapes, and make them visible.
My medium for this work is earth pigment in soy milk. The substrate is typically linen, an ancient invention made from flax, and I use stitch to add texture or focus or color.
The work is abstract but referential, not about a specific place, but rather about the circumstances of a particular kind of landscape and its related architectures.
Bio
I was a shy kid who drew and made things with string, tape, paper and my mother’s embroidery scissors. And I was a reader. We moved a lot, mainly to warmer places where my dad could lay bricks year-round – also great for playing outdoors, for making forts and hide-outs.
Drawing and making – or making up stuff – was a good background for college. I began in Fine Arts, but after reflection and relocation, decided to continue in Architecture. It was the right choice. But after working on several projects in practice that were more about landscape than architecture, the spaces between buildings became more compelling, and potentially more meaningful.
A mature student, I went to graduate school in Landscape Architecture. It was intense, and a deeply satisfying time: the license to read, to draw and make models, and to learn stuff from interesting people. The closest to prolonging that experience was teaching, which is what I then did for 23 years. As retirement approached a curious compulsion began: to have cloth in my hands, and use thread to make marks and add color – like drawing lines on fabric, not knowing where it might lead.
My prior ‘lives’ gave me a way of thinking and relating to large and small spaces; to wonder about who lived there, on the land, in the past and present; to see color and texture and line . . . and to make something with it, or tell stories about it, or to show ways of thinking about a place or landscape . . . with a piece of colored cloth.
Drawings and Pastels
Three Little Pigs 2021
Exit Strategy 2024
Rowdy and Mr T 2021
Drawing is a habit and source of entertainment. With a pencil and piece of paper, it’s impossible to be bored. Artist Jim Dine said “drawing insists that you look.” My horse, cat and pig pictures are excuses to watch creatures I enjoy, going about their business. Drawing is also a tool for clarifying thought and for planning – ‘what if…’ – essential in my other artwork.
Would you like to know more about Fiber Art?
Click here for a New York Times article by Julia Halperin,
Sept 2023: “Fiber Art is Finally Being Taken Seriously.”
This link is not currently working; efforts are underway to get access. Please check back. Thanks!