Lately, I’ve been drawing with a brush, with gouache paints, mustering the confidence and commitment that comes with that medium. I’m drawing what’s on my tables inside, or what I notice outside. I’m interested in everyday beauty and making compositions out of random arrangements of ordinary objects or natural forms. I’ve worked so much in color in my work, that I found using just black and sometimes white a simplified pleasure. When I do use color, I tried to use it primarily as colored, drawn gestural marks.
Gouache paint, also known as opaque watercolor, soaks into paper quickly, making it hard to change or remove. It can be used with enough water to keep it transparent, but the quality I love about it is its definitiveness and solidity. For decades, I’ve made drawings, prints, paintings, animations and murals. Whatever the medium, it’s always about the marks and how they immediately create forms and space. Here, in these drawings, the marks also add up to, magically, tell small stories. The stories are about of the relationship of the mark and the forms and the relationships between forms, The marks make the forms but also, I hope, convey the energy and joy of seeing, anywhere I look.
Most of the drypoints shown are inspired by a place on the Northampton Bike Trail. Drypoint, a kind of intaglio print, is made by drawing directly into a metal or plastic plate. Etching ink is pushed into lines or scratches and then the surface is gently wiped to remove all the ink that isn’t held by what’s been drawn below the surface. Printed drypoint lines have warmth and surprise, as the ink catches, is held and creates quiet auras around the lines. I love how the process of drypoint. transforms drawing into something with more weight and atmosphere.