The works on view were drawn, often with very little direct forethought. A few are prints, and hold within them the records of the route taken in their making, but most are sketched directly on paper all in one sitting.
One or two is a painting made with gouache or watercolors, but I am as likely to refer to all these works as drawings, the way Jean Cocteau refers to all art as poetry. I might have dipped a bamboo brush in dark black sumi ink, or used a graphite pencil, or used a fat and well pointed round brush with its endless variety of line widths to draw colored lines in gouache paint, but my goal Is always to produce something worth looking at. Sometimes I pen rigid line over rigid line building up form and structure in pale imitation of Rembrandt and Durer; sometimes I let ink flow out like a puddle of rainwater. While 2 images might be of the same thing — for example a child’s face — one might be in walnut ink and the other in gouache, significantly altering their meanings. Much of the paper I made myself; other sheets were handmade by paper masters in Japan, where since 2011 I go to work regularly.
Sometimes I have an idea and I make a drawing. Sometimes I make a drawing to generate an idea.
I have tried to accompany the larger works, such as the large 9 panel piece Janus-Kuya Shonin, 2020, with some of the studies and sketches that led up to them.
I make these works, hang them up in the studio for a while to study them and enjoy them, share them with my husband before relegating them to the dark interior of a flat file. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to take them out and share them with you at the Haggerty.
Ozu Washi Book, 2019
23, watercolor, gouache and ink on Japanese papers
