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I am infatuated with line: the quality and shape, the fat and skinny, the robust and meaty, the quiet and almost silent. There is a music to line on paper that I cannot escape. While color has always been home, lately line has been my obsession. It holds me captive in both abstraction and figuration. Its rhythm and unharnessed freedom can describe happy and sad, violence and elation, innocence and sex all at once. My interest in line has come to me both directly and indirectly: directly through formal training and searching in my own work, and indirectly through the necessity of creating cartoon, illustration and caricatures to keep myself fed. I didn't realize that there would be any overlap with my haphazard illustration career and my serious work as a visual artist. The result, though unpredicted, was that comedy, humor, and unfettered line would find its way into the thoughtful and serious; that silly and sporadic chaos and abstraction would elbow its way past the academic, classical, and decidedly narrative underpinnings of my work. These lines, which I quite honestly learned to create in redundant drawings that I didn't care about (except for the money they harvested), were created out of the urgent need to pay rent, so they were never weighted with the same pressures as my fine art. Strangely though, the nonchalance that they encouraged found its way into my sketchbook, onto the canvas, and then ultimately into large scale charcoal and ink drawings. I find mark making to have its own character. Though unpredictable and disconcerting at times, it has melted, almost inexplicably, into the fabric of my ideas. In my work, I explore how religion, most specifically Christianity, has molded and classified our thoughts and perceptions. In the West, the body, sexuality, gender and God have been defined through this tradition. This dominant spiritual tradition has coated the minds of many, secular and observant alike, with a seemingly standardized set of values and assumptions. In my drawings and paintings, I try to unravel visually what is considered sacred and impenetrable and unearth how we arrive at our personal and spiritual beliefs. For the last several years I have been working with Elaine Pagels (Princeton University) and other scholars to investigate the diversity of Christian origins. I have used as a direct narrative, themes from the ancient Gnostic texts discovered in 1945, in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. I am interested in how these lost myths and images might have changed the Christian pictorial tradition had they not been suppressed by the early Church. Hidden in a cave in Upper Egypt, most likely for the incompliant scriptural booty that they contained, when they were discovered almost 2000 years later, these texts shocked everyone. Describing God as masculine, feminine, and non-gendered, showing souls arriving at God directly through their own intuition, describing Creation as a sexual act between male and female Gods, these gospels have completely rearranged how many interpreted the earliest years of Christianity. I am compelled by the comparisons they force us to consider: the chasm between a seemingly unflappable tradition of Christian images and literature and what might have been had Christian depictions been derived from these suppressed sacred texts. I attempt to show these comparisons in my work. For example, in my painting Creation, I compare the creation stories of the Bible to creation myths from Gnostic scriptures. More recently, as I mentioned, I have been experimenting with the immediacy of charcoal, ink, and brush on paper to explore the quality of line. Much of this recent work has been directly inspired from a passage in The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, called The Rise of the Soul. This series of spindly and stringy abstracted figurative landscapes are also my response to the gruesome and thoughtless destruction wrought by the war in Iraq. Experiencing New York City on September 11, 2001 and feeling both helpless and enraged by the political chaos that ensued, my recent works show the blood and loss of body parts that takes place each day. They question how a soul could ever rest after such a premature and violent end. This political climate forces us to question the ethnic and religious divide that we now stare down. It forces us to question the very origin of a value system that would lead us towards such actions. As a result, my recent work seems like a series of questions. The undefined and fragmented bodies are blown apart, freed, making love, groping and bloody. They are confused, enraged, soft and yearning. It is a series of emotions one must feel perhaps when one is dying, and one is being born. |
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