A great hodge-podge of some of my early-works from the seventies; much energy chanelled into brief empirical restrictions. Expression (repeating the same questions,) searching for meaning... I can remember many more works, that would fit variously within the extended scope pictured here. Maybe every artist goes through similar searches... some are more discerning... some refute any resolution and discover ever-expanding creative coils.

Many of these works are gestural and loosely figurative; repetitive marks or imprints attempt to encircle accumulated moments and develop a particular touch-response between media and substrate. In many ways it seemed that there was one image that was attempting to remake itself. This approach became more deliberate later on with a series of blue-pencil drawings of projected video-frames of the ocean. The individual raster-lines of the video images were drawn out on paper mounted against drywall-- the textural quality of the lines were identical. I abandonned this project has being too labor-intensive and meticulous, but it may be revived sometime. Another drawing exercise from the same period involved tracing on a map, the route walked from home to work each day, and then retracing the tracings repeatedly on very large sheets of refolded tracing paper. Another used a fan-trellis (without the horizontal cross-members) as a flexible template for restrained repetitive gestural marking... you get the idea.

Eventually this collection will be pared down (as my disk-quota becomes too expensive); I thought it would be interesting to initially view a through range of these early surviving graphic works. This impulse to draw is currently attracted to an extended series of red-inked-white-lino-printed works entitled, Millennium Project, (see *commission).

Reproductions:

retrospective