These works were created using improvisatory methods- ink washes of red, blue and green were laid semi-randomly on the paper. While I have an idea of what I will draw I deliberately leave the washes rough, inviting accident, hitting the “wrong” notes. Once dry, the forms suggested in the crenelated pigment are picked out using vine charcoal- a medium easily erased and adjusted. Conté crayon in black and white are then added to define the forms. This is my methodology, which harkens all the way back to Leonardo Da Vinci’s admonition ‘to rouse the mind to new inventions’ by looking at stained walls, clouds and the like. But even before I encountered the genius of Leonardo; since I was a small child, I have found it easy to “see” in this way, to find faces, figures and animals in woodgrain and clouds. Learning to use this imagery has taken me much longer.

In this recent work The Dragon of the Apocalypse and A Whale’s Dream in the Anthropocene I have tried not to edit the imagery, to let the imagination run a bit wild, to plumb the unknown, to give breath and depth to the imagination, to challenge myself to think differently about how I communicate. It is a way of being in the moment that I have found essential to finding my voice.

I want to create images that simultaneously frighten and entrance. I want to make it clear to the viewer that it is time to pay attention if we wish not to follow the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the Dodo, the Great Auk into oblivion. It is clear now that our writing and language have not prepared us for the challenges and crises of our current world. In fact, language has been used to cleverly obscure the very real and pressing issues of our time. We are at a precipice; species are disappearing before they have even been discovered in the Anthropocene, the great whales are dying off, their populations a shadow of what they once were—We seem incapable of the drastic actions necessary to stop the destruction and yet…the arts, creating images that speak to the current climate chaos just may help nudge our collective consciousness into action.