On Death and Drawing

A timeless and human quest: to understand our own mortality. We leave behind markers of time, then scrawl and shade and blur those marks. A specific task it is, to render the unknown, death: how we understand our idea of life, how we digest violence and loss. Meaning is rendered in simple materials: a devotional relic, a memorial. Art—the thing that differentiates us from all other living things—is intrinsically nostalgic; as soon as the work is finished it becomes a marker of our collective and personal pasts. In this particular moment, this kind of image making may not be cutting edge.

It may be that there is a small group of people who do not know each other, living in the same city, from many places, of varying ages, who are devoting their time to drawing in a classical fashion, creating highly sensitive and intensive works, which are sincere investigations of morbid curiosity and/or a personal investment in haunting, stark, or contemplative images. Perhaps the ephemeral and the sentimental have been marginalized for the moment. But this work seeks to recall an archaic language, when it was possible to consider an art form an "embodiment" of expressionistic evocation. These considerations manifest themselves in works of poetry that detail a never-ending waltz with death and drawing, presenting beautiful, highly rigorous practices which can be viewed, in a certain light, as mementos mori.