Walter Sickert said, “Drawing is about captivity. Painting is about freedom.” The process of rendering the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface is the first step in grafting an image directly onto the nervous system. I have been drawing for as long as I can remember; the thrill of rubbing a No. 5B pencil on cream paper satisfies like nothing else. My favorite thing to draw is a solitary tree, and I’ve sat under thousands of them, from the jack pines of Algonquin National Forest in Ontario to the sycamores of Central Park and the banyans of Florida, but nothing comes close to the Southern live oak. I am obsessed with drawing their trunks, torqued and full of sad knowledge. Everything I am after in the conceptual framework of my paintings is embodied in that immovable marking of location.
My tree drawings are realistic because my work has to be tethered to the observable landscape; depiction allows for a broader range of expression (political, poetic, formal) because it expands things to which we can all relate. Claiming to represent the act of seeing is provocative, but what does that mean? The reason I draw a tree in great detail is not to make it appear but vanish. Each carefully rendered leaf and strand of bark nudges me further from visible reality into a crafted one, leaving me both depleted and supplied. A good drawing is the visible vibration of its subject. I believe that there is a parallel world running concurrently with this one, and, now and then, we crack into it. Drawing and painting are an attempt to keep that world around a little longer. The coast of South Carolina taught me about the density of place. I am where I go. I love the outdoors but didn’t become a landscape painter until I came inside.