Why Do I Draw?

Why do I draw? I love to. I crave it. I love to apply a pencil, a piece of conte, a pen to a piece of paper. I like to see ‘the dot that went for a walk.’ I want to see what happens when I put a mark here, a smudge there, a broad stroke, a narrow line. There’s no logical answer. Why do you breath? Why do you blink? It’s a part of you. That is what drawing is to me.

Why do I draw what I draw? I love the human form. I love horses. Both make me feel strong and free when I draw them.

I draw the female form in all its curvaceous-ness and the movement of the body through space and time. Work is representational, or repetitive, or intuitive, or embellished. Is this an objectified form seen through my eyes or am I objectifying myself through the form I put on paper?

I spend hours at a farm. A beautiful, messy, rolling hilled organic place. Shit happens - literally.

I ride horses; I feed horses; I clean horses; I clean after horses; I watch horses. I feed goats; I chase goats that have escaped. I fix fences.

I don’t like dirt. What I mean is that I don’t like to weed and garden. Let me shovel shit.

So I combine the things I love: the line, the form and the farm. 

Wind Farm

I work as a farm hand on windswept hills and around the ponds and with the animals, most notably the horses. I engage in cultural co-creation with them, negotiating centuries long practice of farming and agricultural stewardship. 

In much of my artwork life drawing calls up the female body and its usual locus in domestic interiors. In this work the life drawing generates the physical topography of the farm, mother earth. Images appear through intuitive leaps: the farm's hills, the wind disturbing the pond, the many animals.  In the monumental scale of the drawing the physicality of farm labour is repeated. The kinetic energy of the mark and the kinetic energy of the wind are one.