#ShapeShifters
It started with anger, growing from shadows.
I play with the ironic, the sublime, the sad and the secret. My work is generally representational and most often grounded in natural landscapes. I use landscape imagery to tell my tales and use titles to nudge the viewer along with the story. This has been me. The artist I describe to myself and others. Quiet, thoughtful, silently amused and meditative.
But lately, I have felt a tug…no a pounding rush of something louder, stronger, angrier. Quiet reflection and subtle nuance are giving way to shouting, screaming lines with punched in blackest of black charcoal. Rough scrapping sounds, powdery dust and smell of burnt wood – it’s intoxicating – makes me drunk, awake, a seer of visions, a prophet, an instigator….the other side of my own quiet coin. I’m becoming my own dark twin.
Where I’ve always used charcoal in my work, lovingly formed with my own hands by burning pieces and parts of trees I meet….now charcoal is burned, raging fires that engulf, destroy and char. Maybe to match the wildfires that ravage the land around me here in Oregon, maybe to match the political unrest and tension that surround my digital world.
My drawings include more figurative suggestions; both beast and man. They are forced together into new beings, rougher, unhappy with itself as its never truly of nature or man any longer. Werewolves of all shapes and ancestries.
So that is where I’ve been, and that is where I’m going. I’m in the midst of a transformation, one of painful deliberation as a new darker side emerges to flourish. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being scared of what my work…what I will become.
But I must find out.
