Drawing has always been a way of thinking for me. For the past few years I have been trying to understand its language. As a teacher of English as a Second Language, I have often been amazed how, despite violations of grammar, scrambled syntax, un-conjugated verbs, something is communicated. This stripped-down language is often all the more powerful and poetic for its spare, telegraphic intensity. What, I have been wondering, is the essence of visual communication -- its grammar and alphabet? Is there anything universal about the language of mark-making?
As part of the process of understanding, exploring and developing the right, intuitive side of the brain, I have drawn exclusively with my left, non-dominant hand for the past several years. While some of my work is figurative, other work is more concerned with the ethereal body: memories, dreams, hopes and fears, inner conflicts and epiphanies, Virginia Woolf's "moments of being". That which we carry within us, invisible, intangible, somehow etched into facial lines, the curve of a spine-- weighing us down and keeping us achingly alive.
