Ink, acrylic, and colored pencil on paper
April 2010

Many times I feel a need to take apart someone else’s art to figure out how it works (but not put it back together), just to satisfy my curiosity. These cloth studies were inspired by Pattie Lee Becker’s Ropes exhibit I saw at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this month. Her drawings brought me back several years ago to the memory of this dude who lived two apartments down from an ex-bf. His 300 sq. ft. efficiency was covered top to bottom in massive drawings and paintings of loops, knots and intertwined strings. The paintings weren’t really that great, I don’t think he’d ever shown any of his work, he just seemed like a normal guy who was obsessed with these shapes. This obsession perplexes me. Cloth studies aren’t anything new, but besides just a drawing exercise, I was also trying to get inside the mind of someone captivated by producing the same object over and over, seemingly indifferent to the evocative repercussions of repetition. While my work has themes, I feel like I’m trying to show different sides of the same thing in various ways. I suppose I tinker because in the future I may need to draw upon the lessons learned, kinesthetically figured out. For me, there’s really no better way to learn than to attempt and apply it to myself. I’m also fascinated by The Other: obsessive and compulsive artists who must be constantly active, people for whom drawing is an end in itself. The drawing I’ve done lately is a means to something else.