I grew up in a town with fewer than 800 people, 30 miles from the nearest stoplight. The local art scene was, perhaps unsurprisingly, sparse and overlooked. My mother and grandmothers were craft-people: quilts, doilies, and scrapbooks filled the houses; the men in my family all worked with their hands, building houses and fixing cars. The act of creation surrounded me, but it seemed to always need a purpose. Initially, the purpose of my own creations was simple time-filling; polymer clay crafts and how-to-draw-cartoon books were, quite simply, the most personally interesting ways to spend weekends and summers. Later, it became assignment-driven; as I was introduced to more complicated media and styles, I started becoming captivated by the processes involved in picture making.
My first works were representational, if only because it freed my time to focus on the picture-making process. Sharpie stippling attracted me for its repetition, precision, permanency, and importantly, its portability. My work’s purpose soon became finding the capabilities of the media-process, exploring what could and could not be accurately represented by fine dots of ink. This exploration never branched into the abstract, even though the subjects of my work was a secondary, even tertiary thought – the images I used were almost invariably photographs from nature magazines or portraits from volumes of National Geographic, both for their already interesting, though pre-chosen, subjects and their accessibility.
Presently, I still have significant interest in the physical means of creating pieces, but now subject has moved to occupy more of my thought about creating new works. It is my intention to engage more with the stories and ideas of classical antiquity in my future work, so as to re-orient them to both the contemporary art scene and contemporary values, and highlight the continued influence the ancient world has on our own. The themes, myths, and ideas of ancient Greece and Rome hold veins of value, and to assume that all inspiration has already been mined from them is to overlook the application of Herodotus’ history to modern historical exaggeration, or the more modern re-analysis of the myths of Persephone or of Medusa. These have been explored intensely in the realm of classical academia, but without art or literature to bring these conversations back into the modern arena, these stories exist in the popular imagination in un-nuanced, antiquated forms – or, more tragically, disappearing from the popular imagination entirely.
Bringing the conversations of academia into the general discourse may seem unnecessary; but having grown up in an area where so much information is imparted through media and not through educational institutions, I see great value in classicism’s reintroduction. On the same token, it must be admitted that art that exists in museums, or operates at the avant-garde level, will likely miss this mark as the academic thesis is. Therefore, it is necessary that my work be made not only physically accessible, but intellectually accessible as well – this is not a problem for which I have any immediate solution, but is one I will continue to seek as I continue to create.
