REBIRTH

Line Value Shape = Motionless Movement grew out of something I experienced while living in northern Nigeria. During the rainy season, storms could arrive with an intensity that seemed to change everything at once. Heavy rain and wind would blur the landscape until foreground, middle ground, and background began to merge. Forms that had seemed solid and separate only moments before suddenly overlapped, disappeared, reappeared, and became part of one another. That experience stayed with me. I began thinking less about objects as separate things and more about the spaces between them. A line did not always have to stop where one figure ended and another began. Edges could dissolve. Shapes could overlap. Dark and light could move through one another without anything on the page actually moving. That contradiction became important to me: movement without motion. In these drawings, line, value, and shape create a kind of visual vibration. The eye moves even when the figures remain still. Forms pass through one another, separate, and come together again. At times I think of it almost at the level of atoms—everything appearing solid while, at another level, constantly interacting with everything around it. Over time this way of seeing moved beyond charcoal drawing and into my torn-paper work. The torn edge became another kind of line. Pieces of paper became shape and value. Instead of using collage simply to build an image, I began using it as another way of drawing. Motionless Movement is not a technique I invented first and then applied to the work. It developed slowly from observation, experience, and years of trying to understand what I was visualizing. It became a way of seeing.