Drawings

I have been drawing the Holyoke Mountain Range for 36 years. The main peak has a shape I can never get right the first many times I draw it. I always have to find it again, each drawing. The search is what give the drawing it’s inner life. People think drawing comes easily to me, or that it is about talent, but neither is accurate. I am an explorer. Both the day and seasonal light changes on the mountains constantly, and I go after that with curiosity. I set my easel up overlooking one of the only east-west axis mountain ranges in this country, formed by glaciers. I work and rework each drawing for many days, obtaining a specific light from the sky falling on the mountains that will never bring these particular colors again. Everything in the drawing has equal importance; the tree is as important as the mountain behind it, the sky as important moving behind them, as important the foreground coming up towards the viewer. Everything is democratically related, a conglomeration of spatial movements interrelated, needing each other to survive. I have kept journals since I was ten. Whatever goes on ‘out there’ is about what I write. Whenever I came back from drawing all day, I wrote about how much even more I learned to trust my eyes to tell my hand how to move the oil crayon across the paper. I kept my eyes out there rather than looking at the drawing, so the drawing would be in a constant state of search. The abstract paintings create nonrepresentational movement of space that eliminates the sense of gravity in the drawings of sky-earth relationship. I explain that difference, and how I need to do both, looking directly at nature in the first, imagination in the second.

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