This first series of pastel drawings, the "El Valle Series" (1998) was made in that northern New Mexico village while I was on sabbatical from teaching. It includes typical sights there as well as more subjective impressions of the powers and forces at play in that unique area. They are 22" x 30" and 24" square.
These pen and ink drawings were made in the late 1980s to suggest environmentally friendly energy alternatives to the prevailing (and continuing) over-consumption of fossil fuels. They were later incorporated into digital composites for the children's book Adventure to Eco Earth: Eco Animals!.
The following marker drawings from the 1970-90s, to which I added digitally-generated borders in 2016, appear in two coloring books published in 2017. With respect, the Udders were inspired by the Venus of Willendorf (23,000 BCE) and the thousands of fertility goddesses that followed. For more details about Anudder Coloring Book and Yet Anudder Coloring Book, please see this website.
Neolithic Udderstones
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In many of the "Udders," I am interested in challenging preconceptions of traditional pictorial space (and content!) by interweaving elements that cannot exist in physical reality. Some are akin to Escher's impossible structures, and Duchamp's point that it was "not a pipe," but art (a painting) instead. The following drawings, called “Ambiguous Solids,” explore this theoretical issue. I feel that the surprise of confronting ambiguity may offer viewers a window for conceptual growth and the possibility of raising consciousness.
