day 1 drawing 1 troika 19

As I said in my last post, I keep returning frameworks of order and disarray, order and bucking against or teasing into that order.

There’s an analogy that makes sense to me and maybe you get this too: some of the most striking and delightful planting designs follow a rigid grid when the plants are first installed on site — but what catches my attention is how a couple years later, after they’ve established and bulked up, you can see the plants jostling for space, how they thrive or fail, or colonize into new areas. The initial design matures into an unanticipated, evolving entity, one that is robust, resilient and surprising. We enter into a relationship with what we’ve planted — where we try things, add or subtract new material — we experiment. We see what happens and the design takes on a life and trajectory of its own, that we could not have pinned down or predicted.

I take these ideas into my drawings and installations. I start with a grid or a snapshot of an order, and then the piece grows from there—seemingly on its own, but certainly through my own intuition, compulsions, desire and frustration. What results is a drawing that captures a dialogue between mark-making and erasing, choices and decisions, input and feedback. I stop when the dialogue appears to end.

day 1, drawing 1: Troika 19, 1/2019, image 14 ½” x 10 ¼”, archival print on a Hahnemuhle photo rag 19” x 13” sheet, edition of 10, signed, stamped, chopped, and numbered.