PRINTS and DRAWINGS
I have worked in a number of printmaking media since early teen linocuts, formal undergraduate and graduate school study, to the present. Techniques include woodcut, etching, screen printing, lithography, monoprints, and digitally-produced Giclee prints. Following are a series of monoprints from the 1990s dealing with cosmology, dualism, and our connection to the earth and sky. They are all 22" X 30". DRAWINGS follow the prints.
DRAWINGS
This first series of pastel drawings, the "El Valle Series" (1998) was made in that northern New Mexico village while I was on sabbatical from teaching. It includes typical sights there as well as more subjective impressions of the powers and forces at play in that unique area. They are 22" x 30" and 24" square.
Pen & Ink
The following pen and ink drawings were made in the late 1980s to suggest environmentally friendly energy alternatives to the prevailing (and continuing) over-consumption of fossil fuels. They were later incorporated into digital composites for the children's book Adventure to Eco Earth: Eco Animals! Please see BOOKS in the main menu for digitally "painted" prints of these eco-creatures that appear in the book.
The marker drawings that follow from the 1970-90s, to which I added digitally-generated borders in 2016, appear in two coloring books published in 2017. With respect, the Udders were inspired by the Venus of Willendorf (23,000 BCE, Google her) and the thousands of fertility goddesses that followed her throughout Art History. For more details about Anudder Coloring Book and Yet Anudder Coloring Book, please see this website.
Right: My back and front cover art for Anudder, and further explication of its udderly divine content.
In many of the "Udders," I am interested in challenging preconceptions of traditional pictorial space (and content!) by interweaving elements that cannot exist in physical reality. Some are akin to Escher's impossible structures, and support Duchamp's point that it was "not a pipe," but rather, art (a painting) instead. The following drawings, called “Ambiguous Solids,” explore this theoretical issue. I feel that the surprise of confronting ambiguity may offer viewers a window for conceptual growth and the possibility of raising consciousness. See also: MIXED MEDIA PAINTINGS .
