The way I draw

For me drawing and sculpting are very different because I tend to make sculptures from images and ideas in my head but when I draw it is what I see in front of me that ends up on the paper.  I feel like drawing for me  is not something that comes easy , it is an activity where I am always on the precipice of completely loosing control.  Part of it is the way I draw which is by laying down a quick series of lines capturing the gesture and a few contours of what I am drawing, followed by aggressively erasing most of the drawing with large bold strokes with a white vinyl eraser.  I then pick up a few of the lines that remain as a ghost image and build upon it , adding some shadows and searching for a crisp contour line here and there.  Again I erase most of the image and repeat the process slowly building the image in layers.  Such aggressive use of an eraser does two things which I like and are integral to my images the first is it adds tooth to the paper, allowing it to accept more graphite than it normally would, and it leaves ghost lines and smeared graphite streaks which are wonderfully expressive marks.  

I always draw with five or six ebony pencils and a white vinyl eraser in one hand and whichever pencil has the sharpest point on it in my other hand.  Every so often I venture into oil pastels or pen and ink or..., but there something seductive about the velvety rich ebony pencil that I just can't leave alone for too long.

As you might imagine  my style of drawing can be very hard on a sheet of paper and I have torn a hole in more than one drawing.  For the past few years I have been drawing on Sennillier paper which I have found to be extremely strong.

"Figure as Landscape" series

A few years ago I had a commission for a carved wood headboard for a bed.  The idea was that it would be almost like a piece of art on the wall.  What I came up with was a landscape image that depending on how you looked at it could be either a pictorial image with rolling hills in the foreground with a strip of clear sky and some rolling clouds above that, or It could also be seen as a topographic image with the strip of sky becoming a dry creek and the clouds becoming more rolling hills.  As is often the case I chose to make a small scale model of my idea rather than a series of drawings.  In this case the imagery took on a third reference as I completed the model, two partial figures.

In preparation of the full scale commission I began emphasizing the contours of the figure during the bimonthly drawing group I attend, knowing that maintaining some of the subtle curves of the figures contour would be very important in an image that was intended to be primarily a landscape was to have figurative references.  Soon I began to see more landscape shapes and came to think of many of my