I create visual hybrids of drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation that are experiential in nature. It was drawing, or I should say “doodling,” that facilitated the transition from an impersonal to a more personal form of expression. For me, doodling is simultaneously a process and an image. Doodling is a visual way of thinking or of tracing one’s thoughts.Like many artists, I want to translate into abstract visual language my thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Some concern the inner workings of the mind – the impulses to play, to invent, and to change. Others have to do with systems and patterns that possess an endless labyrinthine complexity – for example, the visual display of quantitative information. In recent years I have been attracted to graphing devices ranging from the eighteenth-century French Encyclopedia to the recent IBM History Flow Project, which maps the creation of Wiki pages on the Internet. Because doodling is, I think, an expression of the unconscious, it sometimes captures inner connections and becomes, in its way, a system. Conversely, we might think of some of the graphic systems we are familiar with as society’s unconscious doodling.
I am increasingly attracted to photography, which I’ve been using over many years to create a kind of sketchbook of abstract forms taken from the urban and technological environment we now inhabit. Close-ups of the painted lines on airport tarmacs, subway seats, and construction fencing are some of the things I am drawn to. Seen properly, these things have more strangeness and beauty than we think when we rush by them. By presenting them out of context and away from natural forms, these photos seem to re-enchant a seemingly hard and standardized world. I believe what one student wrote on a wall during the 1968 Paris demonstrations, “underneath the pavement – the beach.”
