I guess it does all begins with an idea. Or less specifically. an instinct. There is so much that goes into making a painting (or fill in the blank object) and you never know where inspiration will surface. What is also interesting is what visual language that you create and build on as you go. When you can look back on years of making and have an image surface over and over, a color, a way of making a mark. These become like tattoos on a body, telling a story of one’s life. Lately, the wrapped rock, a Zen practice, has come back into my work. I am in the process of creating a new piece about this imagery that has resurfaced again and again in my work.

The first time I encountered it, I was at a retreat in Greece, on the island of Samos. My sculpture teacher from college, and the reason I was there, made wrapped rock art from the smooth, rounded corner pebbles that were on the beach. No sand, just salt from the Aegean sea rolling them over day after day. It stuck with me. She gave them as gifts. They started surfacing in my drawings there onsite and stayed on and off with me just shy of 25 years.

They are stories, they are compulsion. They aggregate materials to make something new, a kind of visual Dialectic. One can have presence. A quiet. 3 are starting to shift thinking. 100 is a riot of thoughts.

I will continue to add layers of colors to this piece, adding layers to the story, the conversations that are happening, and continue to bank my visual language that will see me to the next piece.

I guess it does all begins with an idea. Or less specifically. an instinct. There is so much that goes into making a painting (or fill in the blank object) and you never know where inspiration will surface. What is also interesting is what visual language that you create and build on as you go. When you can look back on years of making and have an image surface over and over, a color, a way of making a mark. These become like tattoos on a body, telling a story of one’s life. Lately, the wrapped rock, a Zen practice, has come back into my work. I am in the process of creating a new piece about this imagery that has resurfaced again and again in my work.

The first time I encountered it, I was at a retreat in Greece, on the island of Samos. My sculpture teacher from college, and the reason I was there, made wrapped rock art from the smooth, rounded corner pebbles that were on the beach. No sand, just salt from the Aegean sea rolling them over day after day. It stuck with me. She gave them as gifts. They started surfacing in my drawings there onsite and stayed on and off with me just shy of 25 years.

They are stories, they are compulsion. They aggregate materials to make something new, a kind of visual Dialectic. One can have presence. A quiet. 3 are starting to shift thinking. 100 is a riot of thoughts.

I will continue to add layers of colors to this piece, adding layers to the story, the conversations that are happening, and continue to bank my visual language that will see me to the next piece.