Facts on the Ground I

graphite, conte, pastel, photograph, tinted, transparent Plexiglas, enamelled hardware, h 30" x w 50" (2 panels, framed together)

Exhibition Statement: 
Castleton Downtown Gallery: “See Feelingly: Weigh and Balance”

Some months back, when I began orchestrating this exhibit in my mind’s eye, I felt the lure of words spoken by the Duke of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s most complex tragedy, “King Lear”: “I see it feelingly." Late in the play, Gloucester, having been horrifically blinded in the literal sense, humbly allows that he has thereby gained clarity in the moral sense. Now sightless, he claims he has instead greater insight into both the complex bonds of his immediate family and those of the broader political realm from which he is now alienated. And so, while not literally blind myself, I’ve appropriated Shakespeare’s subtle play with the metaphor of “sight”, because it best conveys the ultimate relatedness of what may seem unrelated elements in each of my mixed media pieces.

When I initiate a piece in my studio, I start with a drawing of some mundane emblem of modern life, most commonly those big, loud machines that routinely make inroads, for good or ill, on our natural environment. Less commonly, I draw a stretch of looped or knotted rope.  But the raw, bully reality of the machines, or the more pliant reality of the ropes, are just the beginning. As the graphite image emerges, I am alert to the equally “real” associations I’m making mentally, between the concrete here and now, and what I recall from my past: my travels and long stays on four continents, my exposure to virtually every variety of landscape and city- scape, and, of equal importance, personal attachments formed along the way. And those associations are suffused with feeling. As I sand and scar my paper to mimic the distressed surface of a shovel, I may recall my first encounter with the pillars of the ancient Roman marketplace in Jerusalem’s walled Old City, or I may call to mind the sloped walls of Kyoto’s Nijo Castle.

As my pencil defines each twist of a length of rope, I remember the sheer drop from the top edge of the Canyon de Chelly to the distant canyon floor, a floor only accessible by rope ladder for hundreds of years. And as I assemble the multiple elements of a piece - drawing, photograph, Plexiglas sheet or box, monochrome pastel or conté flat, enameled found object - I am weighing and balancing... medium with medium, perceptible present with recollected past, material fact with throbbing feeling, and hoping the result will convey seamless, but still dynamic equilibrium.