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Artist Statement for Blacksburg Motion Series Catalog
The work in this series was created during the summers of 2001 and 2002 in Blacksburg, a small university town in southwest Virginia. My studio was just south of town, a beautiful drive, each day, through the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Before discovering Blacksburg as a place that suited my needs for concentrated focus, I traveled to Vermont to work. Each summer, the churning experience of uprooting my studio (from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area) to paint in a new time zone, space and environment seemed to thrust my thinking in new directions. It was then that my interest in motion began to stir.
The exploration of movement also seemed a natural evolution from a previous investigation of duality. For years, I've been driven to paint as a way of investigating realness. I speculated that the speed of the mark, as an element in itself, might generate a disturbance of sorts that could allow some essence of realness to hatch out.
I wanted my hand to move fast, lines to indicate real speed, momentum and direction. I wanted movement to bypass intellect and I wanted to witness the physicality of my own energetic gesture. I've learned a great deal about making spirals; about the egg-shaped ovals my right arm is inclined to make; about how the speed of my hand varies the character of the line; how the circular direction alters the oval's look; how the tightness of the curve changes the texture of the "nest"; and how my wrist and arm can be propelled by my body to make subtle changes to the form of a spiraling mass.
Shifting my place of work to explore motion. At times, I make little of the connection. Yet, it's likely I'm wrong to do so. Surely as I moved my working space to Blacksburg, the place itself served as more than an influential backdrop to my investigation of what's real as unearthed through motion.
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