“What drives creativity?”

• The need for novel, varied, and complex stimulation

• The need to communicate ideas and values

• The need to solve problems

- From Human Motivation, 3rd ed., by Robert E. Franken

The language of drawing has fascinated me from an early age. I have come to appreciate the important role that drawing has played in human expression and communication. It is found throughout all civilizations, since before recorded history. Though I have worked with many forms of visual art media, I have been revisiting my first love of drawing as a language in which I am pushing my boundaries. In exploring what this visual language is capable of, I chose to depict the human body to capture its beauty, emotional depth, and complexity. I also use it as a vehicle for exploring the states of being conscious and physically occupying space within the world.

When I first started developing the drawings, I experimented by applying a different approach to mark-making and representation to each one. As I work on them and rework them, I have been unifying them to all display the same range of approaches.

Movement in Time and Space, panels 1-7. The figures in this drawing series have been rendered using gestural marks that indicate but do not completely describe anatomy, light, and shadow. Influenced by Frank Auerbach and Cy Twombly, the layers of marks blur the lines between abstraction and representation.

Inspiration was also drawn from the brilliant NFB film Pas De Deux (1968), in which animator Norman McLaren superimposed multiple images of two dancers moving through a series of ballet steps. The dream-like hypnotic effect freezes the silhouettes of the dancers in the picture plane, coalescing moments from the present together with the immediate past. In quantum physics, there are theories that time itself may be an illusion. Whether this is true or not, my work also tries to capture this temporal relationship.

Scale is an important factor. During my BFA at the Alberta College of Art and Design, I began exploring large-scale drawing as a form of installation. I was fascinated by the prospect of imbedding detail and information into a surface large enough for the viewer to almost walk into. I’m now returning to investigate these ideas again. Working on a large paper allows the figures to exist at nearly 1:1 scale, giving them the freedom to move across the surface as a real dancer might move across an open performance space. I hope the viewer gains an immediacy to the work, a feeling as if they are almost able to enter the image, or that the figures are about to move out into the space of the viewer. I was thinking of the large, highly detailed, and expressive drawings of Robert Longo when conceiving this aspect.

I hope my work reminds viewers that, in spite of the tragedies and suffering in the world, there is also great beauty and wonder.