Bird Script v.1

Hydrangeas bloom in abundance in my neck of the woods and many years I pay tribute to their exuberance with a drawing or painting. The Hydrangea in Bird Script v.1 sits in the foreground, a refuge for the small birds, which are drawn in a single line like a script of text. Behind them is a smaller space, with bright green grass, maybe a garden or small meadow. The blue vertical form is the wobbly call of a nearby cardinal. The painting belongs to Answer Music, an extended series of drawings and paintings which record an exchange with the living world. The title, Answer Music, is another term for “call and response”, a form of worship in which the preacher makes a declaration and the congregation responds with fervid unity. To make these works I first take a walk and I find a good place to sit and wait for the call. If I’m near a river, the prompt may be a sound, like the mix of low rumbling and cheerful bubbling made by shallow water as it passes quickly over stones. Or if I’m in the woods, it might be a movement, like the trajectory of a dying leaf as it falls in a series of quick arcs to the ground. Once noted, I respond to this little gift by sketching motifs that seem essential to it. I take these notes back to the studio and assemble them on paper, often in horizontal lines as if they were a musical score. These works are rhythmic and repetitive like time spent watching a river and when I make them, I try to be as constant as the river. As hard as I try to be regular and repetitive, however, I can never sustain it. My arm tires, or my mind wanders and as a result the mark changes; but it’s these little failures which insert change into the process that I find most poignant, since they represent the mutability of life. At moments like this, I often think of John Cage and his passion for chance as the driving force in any creative, dynamic adventure. And as I collect motifs and combine them, I think of Sol LeWitt and his fascination with variables and the potential for beauty to be discovered in their permutations. But I also think about Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist, and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, who observed that the Potawatomi language has few nouns to indicate uniqueness, but endless verbs to describe the ceaseless exchange between all things. In the series, “Answer Music”, it’s my hope that through the direct study of nature I can find the abstract motifs and rhythms that depict, not the things, but the dynamic relationship between things and create a grammar of animacy in drawing and painting.