Works-2021-22

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Selected Works 2021-22

(Scroll down for works from my "almost daily drawings" practice)

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In these last two years: We moved from the Bay Area to the Sierra Foothills. I miss sidewalks but am loving the sprawl of oaks and pines. The country lived through a pandemic and the flourishing of capitalism, racism and theological tyranny, all ongoing. I’ve had the privilege of some of the most meaningful work I’ve ever done, working with CCA colleagues to organize a strike and bargain our second union contract. I’ve said goodbye to one studio and gained a new one, temporary and lovely, a bridge space as a new studio gets built. It also comes with constraints, the most consequential being that I can’t let charcoal dust fly and settle in it. I’ve taken the opportunity to clean my flat file drawers and return to painting after thirty years. In my drawers I’ve also found works that never resolved or got bogged down; they are now finding new life as fragments joined with others. I’m loving the expressiveness of torn edges, gaps, and forms made unrecognizable by ripping, and how they amass into something new with its own coherence. Painting is still a challenge (and a bit of a mystery), but I'm optimistic and having fun. Stay tuned.

Remake 1. In my thoughts: loss, both personal and cultural; land, tenderness, and violence; unraveling and reassessing; the pleasure of taking things apart and finding new relationships.

Mixed media - ink and charcoal on rag paper, aluminum foil, and printed matter mounted on chipboard.

18 X 24"

Remake 2, Intercession (Juror's Award, Face to Face exhibit, ARC Gallery SF; now showing in the exhibit Grayscale at MONCA)

Mixed Media (Charcoal, pastel, masking tape on rag papers)

22 x 36"

“Intercession.” The drawing “End of Summer 2017” torn and recombined with fragments from things I’ve been reading. Here, a line from the poem “Bird in the Boot” by Chris Dombrowski (Ragged Anthem 2019) and the epigraph to Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writing citing Karl Marx in September 1843.

Part of an ongoing series joining drawings of people I know with lines that others, many of whom I don’t know in person, have written; selected mostly because the language has caught me, and sometimes because they resonate with something intrinsic to my encounter with the person I’ve drawn. Maybe the look in their eyes, a driving passion or commitment they’ve shared with me, the social climate.

Remake 3. A childhood landscape, calm shrouding the expulsion and erasure of a Palestinian community that lived on it before my time there; memories of family that also tie into my thinking about social change - we lean on one another to make big things happen; an animal who lives with me; and learning how to paint.

Mixed media - ink, charcoal, acrylic and oil paint on rag paper mounted on archival cardboard.

18 X 24"

Remake 4. This Air was Made for the Echoing of Songs. Reading Anna Akhmatova, "The Return," 1940.

Mixed media - ink, charcoal, acrylic and oil paint on rag paper mounted on archival cardboard.

18 X 24"

Remake 5. Mothworks and Dish Towel

Mixed media - charcoal, acrylic and oil paint on rag paper, fabric scraps, collage mounted on archival cardboard.

18 X 24"

Remake 6. Head in the Clouds. I started this one thinking of hawks, sparrows, and some other private things. It became . . . this.

Mixed media - fragments from two ripped paintings on paper, ink drawings, an old collage, a dishtowel and a death notice collaged onto archival cardboard.

18 X 24"

ALMOST DAILY DRAWING PRACTICE - Selected Works.