I love working big. Always have. In 1995 I was working in a huge basement of an old office building with 12-foot ceilings and a large expanse of sheetrock walls. I could stretch out a piece of unwaxed milk carton paper 8 feet high by 12 to 15 feet long. I drew old testament stories that confused and terrorized me as a child - figures life sized, landscapes that you could almost walk into. It would take six to ten months to complete the drawings. I was back directing theater.

When Koplin Del Rio asked if I could put together a show with smaller works I initially said no but soon got over my hubris and set about working on drawings 26 x 30 inches.

While I pride myself on muscle memory to draw, when faced with the simple matter of moving from large shoulder strokes to finger-based drawing, muscle memory is a hinderance. You are forced to consciously think through patterns, pressure, and speed of mark making that before just happened. Some artists love the challenge of new materials or approaches, but I dislike it. For me it’s a distraction. I am interested in the idea - expressing the idea visually. I don’t want to be burdened by how to make it. So, I had to retrain what was once second nature. Retraining took over six months of drawing, drawing out, throwing out, and the occasional shot of scotch.

How to retain the energy of the large work, the visual intensity, when, say, instead of running on a football field you are constrained to a parking space? It came down to surface. The large drawings were charcoal on unground paper. Direct, so that the tooth of the paper provided just enough resistance to force the stroke to slip occasionally (especially after erasing, wiping out and redrawing several times during the process). That slipping created an energy that I controlled to create a translation of the objects and environment I was drawing to the depicted surfaces on the paper. On a small piece of paper, there isn’t the space to do that. Experimenting, I found, if I applied an eggshell acrylic ground I could get the energy that the larger work had but within the confines of the smaller format.

That took care of the visual impact I wanted. However, muscle memory was still the hiccup. I no longer had a working translation from real to depiction. Follow here: Each stroke had a context (defining inside or outside of the object, contour or cross contour, pattern or texture, background or foreground) and with each stroke my conscious awareness of form building battled my muscle memory. It was a revelation. I began to see drawing in its particulars. Not as a transparent ether between idea and object but a set of very complex interactions–from the simple “what is a line," to the more complex “how does a particular line function within a drawing.” I discovered five fundamental marks that form the basis of all drawing, and discovered the steps from idea to thumbnail to constructing and finishing a drawing (see here if interested).

I bring all this up because I am going to be living in San Francisco for a couple of months and need to have drawings prepared to work on when I get there. Drawings that can’t be my current 52 x 60 inches but a drawing approximately the size of my first solo show at KDR in 2002. The theme hasn’t changed but now The Gatherings, my current series, has two versions.

I have long limited my materials to egg-shell acrylic ground, coffee, charcoal, eraser, and cloth on paper. But within that limitation, I can get to the core of bigger personal and public questions as an artist.