Drawing From The Lifeline -
Early Works - 1980 - 1987

When I arrived in northern Nigeria in 1980, I thought I already knew what kind of artist I was. I had been trained to draw, paint, observe, compose, and make decisions within a way of seeing that I understood. Nigeria did not erase that training, but it challenged it. Slowly, almost without my realizing it, the people, the land, the weather, the rhythms of daily life, and the very different relationship between people and space began to change the way I looked at everything. At first, I was drawing what was around me. Village meetings. Fulani herdsmen. Women preparing food. Children carrying water. Sallah celebrations. Family gatherings. Workers. Elders. People sitting, talking, waiting, moving through the ordinary routines of life. But after a while, I began to understand that I was not simply recording subjects. I was learning another way to see. The distances between people felt different. The landscape opened up space in a way I had not known before. Rain could come so hard that foreground, middle ground, and background seemed to collapse into one another. Dust softened edges. Light changed the weight of a figure. Forms appeared, disappeared, and reappeared through weather, movement, and atmosphere. That began to work its way into the drawings. I became less interested in separating one thing neatly from another. Lines began to cross boundaries. Values moved through figures and surrounding space. Edges became less fixed. The drawing was no longer only about the person standing in front of me. It was also about everything happening around that person and how all of it belonged to the same visual field. Nigeria also changed the way I understood the people I drew. I had come from America with my own history, assumptions, and experiences. Living there for seven years made it impossible to remain a visitor looking in from the outside. I taught there. I made friends. I became part of families. I watched children grow. I experienced celebrations, disagreements, loss, humor, generosity, hardship, and the daily complications of ordinary life. The people stopped being subjects. They became part of my life. That difference mattered to the work. The drawings became less about describing what someone looked like and more about trying to understand presence. Gesture, posture, silence, exhaustion, pride, humor, concentration, and the spaces people occupied began to carry as much meaning as the features of a face. Much of what later developed into Line Value Shape = Motionless Movement can be traced back to those years. But I did not know that at the time. I was simply working, looking, drawing, and allowing the experience to change me. I went to Nigeria believing I was taking my art with me. Seven years later, I understood that Nigeria had given me another way to make it.