Fabula
In addition to color, perspective, pattern, and legibility, I control materiality and surface textures for the interplay of opacity, translucency, transparency, flatness, and iridescence. My drawings and paintings are hard to qualify as one or the other; for practical purposes, I call the works on sheets of paper, polypropylene, Mylar, or Duralar “drawings”, while referring to works on stretched canvas or reinforced panel as “paintings”. But all the works bear the perceptual and processual characteristics of both drawing and painting, and moreover, they all evince my affinity for the materiality and meaning of printed artforms. For example, I invoke the texture and delicacy of traditional Japanese woodcut by layering drafting vellum over sanded, gessoed canvas in the Fabula and Clearing paintings. In this way, the painted surface is finer and smoother than stretched canvas. Upon this layered substrate, I use water-based pigments - flashe, permanent drawing ink, and acrylic gouache – to mimic the effect of rice-based watercolor on rice paper. Whereas Japanese woodcuts typically depict the imagined “floating world” of Ukiyo-e, in Fabula I transmute the redundant ordinariness of commuting in the congested surface streets of Chicago into an otherworldly, wished-for, false-yet-real landscape.