I work in a variety of media including drawing, print-making, comics and animation. Drawing is the foundation of my practice and depending on the project I work from life, reference images, or my imagination. With my direct expressionistic lines I aim to capture the essential structure and spirit of figures and forms. My images sometimes lean toward the surreal making space for the imagination to wander, other times they pinpoint ideas and deliver them with clarity.
My daily journal drawings are made without a plan, pencil to paper and draw, inspired by automatic drawing of the Surrealists. Direct, firm, hard-edge lines are laid down quickly and loosely.I see them mostly as narrative instances, between figures and abstraction, a single frame with characters, often human/animal hybrids, that are holding, confronting, biting, nurturing one another. Or a solitary figure is gesturing toward its own aggression, fury, sex. Conflict is often present. Not resolved. In motion.
My animal drawing practice began years ago with a desire to understand animals and an impulse to draw them and has evolved to include woodblock prints and small wood constructions. I am interested in writing and research that explores the relationship between humans and animals and de-centers the human view. John Berger’s “Why we look at animals” and Donna Haraway’s work on inter-species kinship inspire me. I want to connect my animal images to other projects through collaboration, exploring regional terrain, relationship to the human world, or endangered or extinct status.
I’m still experimenting with styles and approaches to comic making. For some stories I design and ink a page in full, for others I draw images and text with ink or pencil and scan them combining different elements to create page spreads on the computer. I work to find metaphors and structures to embody and contain the ideas I’m trying to bring to life while also creating a mood or feeling to bring the reader into the feeling of the concepts.