A New Home

charcoal on paper, 22" x 30"

     So we're starting to settle in down here in Charleston...the boxes are disappearing and we're finding our way around...I mostly feel like I'm on vacation, with lots of visits to the beach and eating lots of seafood. The home we bought is truly stunning: designed and built for efficiency, it's beauty and craftsmanship amaze me. It seems like a logical place for me to start...a stepping stone back into my art. I'm consciously beginning this new chapter with drawings, similar to the ones I was doing when I left Brooklyn. I think it's here that I can search and find my bearings...a space to find my place.

pencil drawing from sketchbook

      Our house is newly built (2008) and the previous owners had barely lived in it. It's as close to a blank slate as can be, as opposed to our house in Brooklyn, where I literally demoed and stripped everything back and then rebuilt it. Almost every square inch of it I knew like the back of my hand: from behind the walls, where the wires and the pipes were, to how many layers of plaster were on the walls. I figure that I'll 'work' my way out from this space, exploring the landscape of our family and our re-location.

pencil drawing from sketchbook

     I've mostly started with pencil drawings in my sketch-book, the next step being larger charcoal versions. This new house reminds me of a quote I read by one of my favorite artists, Antonio Lopez Garcia, commenting on working in his new studio:

    "The building was new and it fascinated me. The sensation of standing before something new, surrounded by things that were totally new and without history, coincided with a period in my own life in which I wanted to break with the past. The conditions were perfect for me to undertake this project. For about five or six years I focused on depicting this space, over which I had complete control. The loneliness, the silence, the emptiness of the walls, the absence of other people's experiences and memories-it was all new to me...It was also practical for my way of working: I could leave my things as they lay and find them in exactly the same place from one day to the next, which allowed me to start each day in a spirit of calm."

     The artists I admire most tend to be the ones that use their everyday life and experiences as the subject matter for their art. Antonio Lopez-Garcia, Fairfield Porter, Alberto Giacometti, and Pierre Bonnard were all searching for that universal experience with Truth in the mundane and commonplace. We'll see where all this leads...

pencil drawing from sketchbook