These most recent works in progress, created in 2004-2005, represent a departure from the norm in the way I have been drawing recently. Most of the time, I draw from specific scenes. Though my finished pieces are points of departure from those scenes, the source of the drawings has been a specific place, which I have often photographed extensively before the drawing begins. These pieces are different because I am drawing from memory and from emotion, rather than from a specific scene. A visit last summer to an evocative site of an 18th century Vermont farmhouse near the New Hampshire border stimulated this process. I hadn't my camera with me that day, but when I got home, so vivid was my recollection of the scene - the rolling hills, a crystal clear sky, the sharp daylight giving way to a silvery, shimmering evening - that I began drawing from memory - a first for me - and have been doing so every since. The results involve much more risk taking on the page than I usually give, as each piece has developed something of a life of its own. Dependent upon memory rather than witness, the eye and the hand both become quite fearless. It is a development in my work that seems natural and fortuitous and indeed is the process I used in the "Four Seasons" drawings as well. Click any icon to see a larger version.
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