Drawing, Painting, Print

Drawing is at the root of my creative practices.  I have a busy mind, and immediacy is essential when many ideas are always coming and going. Using a hand tool as an extension of the body is old and foundational to the mark-making of written language and drawing, though I sometimes draw directly with my hands, feet, or other parts of me. Daily walks are an important part of my practice, and I think of them as drawings I make with my body.

Drawing as love.

Drawing as expulsion, as invitation. 

Drawing as laughter, as prayer, as revenge.  

Drawing as poetics, as physics, as line-dancing.   Drawing as labor.  Drawing as meditation, as liberation, as propagation.  Drawing as home, as exit.  Drawing as curiosity, as dreaming.  Drawing as iron, as syncopation, as fury, as portal.  Drawing as mycelial network, as invisible jet, as elbow and hips, as bruise.  Drawing as ritual, as hyperbole, as onomatopoeia.  

Drawing as blood and guts, as cicada wing, as business casual, as thigh-high boots.  Drawing as scrawling, as brawling.  Drawing as toupee, as seduction, as incantation, as coding, as code-switching, as switch-hitting, as hitting one out of the park. Drawing as care.  

Drawing as surrender. Drawing as afterthought, as schematic, as play. Drawing as connector, as closing the distance–a diminishing line between two points. 

Drawing as feeling, as doing, as being.

Drawing as courage, as presence. 

Drawing as work. 

In 2021, I was offered a four-month residency in an artist-run space in Chapel Hill through a drawing collective called Drawing Room.  They handed me the keys and told me to do whatever I wanted in the space.  At the time, I was over a year into a long ritual of walking: what would become one-thousand consecutive days of walking at least five miles, regardless of weather, mood, or location, through neighborhoods and parking lots, airports and forests, highways and hiking trails.  

I used the organizational structure of the grid to explore, through walking and drawing, the ideas of agency and free will, pathfinding, and borders. The image is of sixteen paper grid tiles that can be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled.  This is an ongoing drawing with ninety-eight pieces so far, many of which are mounted on magnetized panels for modular installation.

Eventually, a new question began to coalesce: where does one thing end and another begin?

I opened the studio to the public every weekend.  Friends and strangers, artists and non-artists, old, young, and in-between–the community trickled and then flooded in to make ambling drawings on gridded paper as our wandering conversations, from philosophical  or scientific reflections to celebrity gossip to personal conversations about the nature of love, aging, and learning.  The room, in the end, did become a community Drawing Room.

The image below is one of many images that stem from a moment in my life that I think of as “the sound that came through me.” This is a large woodcut print that I made with Big Ink at Art Space in Raleigh, NC; it is one of three in this series.

My curiosity guides me through material explorations. Above is a drawing from my smoke, salt, and soot series, Ways of Knowing, and below is a wall installation of an investigation into ink, language, and maps, followed by some videos of other experimentation.

Lately, I’ve been making drawings with objects on the wall.

I use cartographic strategies fairly often in my drawings. Above is a map of memory, and below are seven walking maps, overlaid, to map where my body traveled in a week’s time.

Sometimes I draw with paint.

In 2023, I collaborated with a friend, Peter Deligdisch, to create another immersive drawing installation in the Gatewood Gallery of the University of North Carolina–Greensboro. Over a few weeks, we allowed the language of our drawing to be the primary language of our work. With an initial agreement over limiting the palette of our drawings, we improvised a spatial drawing with scavenged cardboard, paint, and ink, riffing off each other’s lines and shapes without doing much talking. Eventually, we opened the space for others to come and help us build our drawing…the day before we took it all down!