artist statements
Listening to and Remembering Bill Frisell
Over the pandemic, a musician friend of mine introduced me to the music of guitarist Bill Frisell. As an amateur musician myself, I was struck by Frisell’s note progressions and clean, ethereal sound on the album Music Is. Frisell’s guitar work on that album created an abstract sonic landscape that I wanted to experience as a drawing. I explored this idea in series of drawings, but my engagement with the dynamic energy of Frisell’s performances still felt unresolved when I set the series aside in 2021.
This past summer I had time at a residency and the combination of solitude and an unfamiliar landscape inspired me to revisit this project. Wearing headphones to immerse myself in the music, I would listen to one song from the album with my eyes closed and draw with a soft graphite pencil in one hand and a gold-colored pencil in the other. For me, the metallic gold evoked the electric medium of Frisell’s guitar sound, and I used it to provide warmth and contrast to the graphite’s cool grey tones. When the music ended, I removed my headphones, opened my eyes, and replaced the pencils with a watery brush. With the song fresh in my mind, I reworked the lines and forms that I had drawn with a wash effect.
Each drawing represents a complete engagement with one track on the album Music Is. I returned to several tracks multiple times, each iteration revealing a different drawing as I gained familiarity with the music and heard new layers in the sound.
To Weave on a Stone and Textile Drawings
In 2021, I explored lithography for the first time, working with master printer David Wolfe in Portland, Maine. I revisited a drawing technique I had developed years earlier—one that evokes the movement, structure, and pattern of textiles.
These drawings and prints begin with a loosely marked grid structure across the surface. I then make marks by placing my finger on the top of the drawing implement and pushing down and away, resulting in a short “flicked” line that fades from dark to light. As the pencil makes the forced line and then leaves my hand, it bounces across the drawing surface and scatters unpredictable marks on the paper. My repetitive movement to make these marks across the grid results in a repetitive percussive sound. In the silence of my studio, my drawing process generates a physical and aural rhythm that evokes the movement of a weaving shuttle and the clatter of a loom’s heddles. In these series of prints and drawings, the combination of a strict grid and my variable mark-making technique creates the effect the mark woven into the fabric of the paper in an imperfect pattern. This tension between control and chaos, the illusion of emerging and descending lines in a grid, references both the resonant sound of the drawing’s making and the movement of threads in textile.