Parchment Drawings

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These drawings explore the visual, historical, and psychological tensions that exisit between languages of abstraction and representation through the use of rendered human form and calligraphic line.  There is a particular emphasis on how these languages are capable of altering one another, how their meaning and contextual reading shifts, and how in turn, their expressive capabilities are effectively changed and given new meaning through the activity of drawing itself.

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As the connection between art and language is paramount, the artist chose an Italian parchment paper initially designed as a writing surface to draw out this relationship further.  This is an important consideration as the fluid drawing style employed in the abstraction has a calligraphic influence that can be understoood as a written art form, just as a viewer is often thought of as "reading" a drawing.  The colors relate directly to landscape, particularly the cleansing aspects of water and air, acting as a metaphor for visual art's relationship to the human condition.

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The abstract cofigurations of brushwork dissolve into the paper with subsequent reworking, rewetting and revising of passages that imbue these works with an effiminate delicacy.  In this, they serve as compositional studies for a series of related paintings, while the bareness and translucency lends them a striking emotional resonance.  The fluctuating rhythms and dynamics of the mind and hand direct the expressive potential of line, as its nuances change from benevolent to malevolent, registering various attitudinal effects in between.  The skin-like surface of the parchment allows lines to cut, scratch, and caress the paper and the figures below, alternately creating their own sensual realities that relect the spirit of ancient erotic texts, while the visual clarity and innovative drawing methods present these as absolutely modern.