Artist Statement

I am the worst sort of detective. I just like to pile up clues and rearrange them into melancholic jokes, farcical calamities and occasional moments of grace.

When I am drawing, I am teasing out a knot or banging on a drum. My drawings have paint, of course, but they are not really paintings—the drawn line is what tells the tale. The pops and veils of color and the stained surfaces just hang around it like groupies. They provide a ragged sort of embellishment. The line is what makes the edges and directs the characters and each marks provides a kind of unstable punctuation.

My drawings have a cast of characters, images and elements, which live in flattened landscapes or ambiguous spaces that are flooded with intimations.

I think about thrownness, the ridiculous set of circumstances that make each person’s own horizon line. In these drawings, horizons are not there to separate earth and sky. They are a thing for standing on, ducking under or tripping over. They provide for points of appearance rather than vanishing.

We are perpetually in a state of medias res, the middle of the action. It feels like our lives are a story, but the past is soft and indistinct, the climax can’t be recognized and the denouement is necessarily unknowable. So the little world of my drawings is peculiar. The figures, the marks, even the little shiny spots are talking to themselves and each other. The viewer gets to listen in, and take a peek—even put in their two cents.

The way we travel, who shows up, the near misses and the head on collisions, are what make and unmake us. These little stories are the moment before a divination— the tea leaves have settled, the alomancer has flung the salt; the bones have clattered to the ground. But the signs don’t point to the future, they are this moment right here: a sort of prophecy of the present.