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A disturbance on the surface of the ocean creates waves.
Waves are particles of water which move in a circular orbit.
These are the first lines in my 1984 degree project from the Rhode Island School of Design, a book comprised of text and hand-drawn diagrams illustrating how a simple wind wave begins as a churning, chaotic mass out at sea and eventually becomes a singular wave crashing on the shore. I turned to the physics of waves to better understand why the experience of looking at ocean waves is so universally mesmerizing. Ideas about change and constancy, order and variation, movement and stillness continue to fuel my imagination and underlie my work. The ocean, with its shifting dichotomies, is my base beat, my sporadic rhythm, even as I’ve explored many other subjects over the years.
I remain drawn to subjects that embody a natural visible duration: a wave, a beaver dam decaying, a blossoming flower, a reflected sliver of sky, a tornado, flames. I’m interested in the way in which we perceive singular moments of beauty or clarity within the flux and flow of daily life. Each drawing project, whether using graphite, India ink, or colored pencil, begins with a personal point of connection—a discovery, an interaction, a question. When starting a drawing I turn to photography as a tool to pull an object/event from the stream and thus capture and isolate it. While a photograph provides the initial capture, the thousands of decisions required to translate and distill the photographic image into a drawing give the resulting work a focus and singularity that transcend the original photograph to create a separate reality.
Waves are particles of water which move in a circular orbit.
These are the first lines in my 1984 degree project from the Rhode Island School of Design, a book comprised of text and hand-drawn diagrams illustrating how a simple wind wave begins as a churning, chaotic mass out at sea and eventually becomes a singular wave crashing on the shore. I turned to the physics of waves to better understand why the experience of looking at ocean waves is so universally mesmerizing. Ideas about change and constancy, order and variation, movement and stillness continue to fuel my imagination and underlie my work. The ocean, with its shifting dichotomies, is my base beat, my sporadic rhythm, even as I’ve explored many other subjects over the years.
I remain drawn to subjects that embody a natural visible duration: a wave, a beaver dam decaying, a blossoming flower, a reflected sliver of sky, a tornado, flames. I’m interested in the way in which we perceive singular moments of beauty or clarity within the flux and flow of daily life. Each drawing project, whether using graphite, India ink, or colored pencil, begins with a personal point of connection—a discovery, an interaction, a question. When starting a drawing I turn to photography as a tool to pull an object/event from the stream and thus capture and isolate it. While a photograph provides the initial capture, the thousands of decisions required to translate and distill the photographic image into a drawing give the resulting work a focus and singularity that transcend the original photograph to create a separate reality.
