Black Ink

Several people asked me about relationships between the ink drawings in Time and Attention and the prints. Many of the drawings were made during a period when I was working on images for Richard Loranger’s book Poems for Teeth.  Working with black ink and a brush, a drawing either coalesces or goes wrong. No reworking is really possible, and many are destroyed. One commits to a mark, uncertain of why, and with luck and grace, something emerges, vivid and surprising. Monotype, on the other hand (which makes up much of the exhibition) allows endless reworking, and an image can change into another image and yet another over the course of several hours. Still, though, there’s a moment where one has to commit, and run the plate through the press, and, like a gestural ink drawing, the image either coalesces or fails to work, irrevocably. The best images are often transformed by the press and come as a surprise, just as my favorite ink drawings startle me and make me feel like a fortunate spectator in a process I direct, but don’t really comprehend.