explorations of the body

In these drawings (click on the image to view the whole thing), I am working with a model, L., who is moving slowly, constantly, throughout the session, changing poses, clothes, expression, becoming an extended torso or a more compressed mass, and I capture the energy and dynamics of the inner and outer experience. I want to embody the inevitable separateness of bodies, the interconnectedness between the interior and exterior body, the integration and overlap of parts, how forms evolve, disintegrate, warp, and invert. The body is an unpredictable terrain, where shadows and light collide and diverge, bury, consume, and exhume details and nuances of flesh, hair, folds, surfaces, porousness, liquidity, and hidden bone, blood, and organs.

Drawing becomes the lover of the body who blindly traces what is imagined, felt to enhance, cherish, and celebrate what it cannot touch. Drawing is an act of deep intimacy, attention, meditation, and awakens the soul. On a thin paper sheet, charcoal meets thicknesses, mounds, convex dips, teardrop holes between skin and skin, where the ends meet the endless. Lines morph and follow, degenerate and shift to become something else eventually in a play and shedding of realism for motifs and patterns that repeat, which the body itself disrupts.  Subtleties emerge, unforeseen shapes surface. It is not in the knowing, and not the seeing places where one encounters questions and possibilities. The arrangements are infinite, as one limb exposes another while hiding still some other part, and complicit with light, exposes nothing and something at the same time.

Our attraction and fascination with the body beholds a longing to locate an essence, a purpose, a closeness to one another while yielding to that we cannot grasp, define, or determine. It is within those indeterminate places of the body we linger the most, as they captivate and anticipate our desire to surrender and not judge the body or ourselves. That acceptance and embrace of humanity is what sustains us in the most trying of trials, uncertainties, and challenges. Time is suspended in these moments, and each scratch of the crude instrument against a fragile fiber layer witnesses our potential, a longevity we crave and advance only by rejecting the will to control our direction, and listening more acutely for that which lurks and lives in silence. The enigma of creativity is that.