Ink

It’s hard to explain why I love working in ink. I appreciate its cleanliness and permanence in a world that is messy and temporary.

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I enjoy the simplicity. Clean lines, black ink on white paper, and a steady hand. No waiting for anything to dry, no textures or colors to confuse the artistic flow, just ink and paper.

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Sometimes my work is realistic, sometimes design, and often a combination of the two. As with all things in my life, the subject is usually an animal.

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The scales and textures of reptiles lend themselves well to my methodical and somewhat obsessive pattern making. I love to learn how each scale lays, the location of every spine.

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A turtle’s shell is an opportunity for a myriad of tiny designs, some realistic, some fanciful.

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When I draw birds, I tend to lose myself in the design. Perhaps it is because I think of birds as always moving that their shape seems less substantial, more fluid.

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Birds offer me the opportunity to explain the miracle and grace of flight in my own way, a chaotic flood of motion and rhythm, all beating from a single source.

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A bird at rest is an opportunity to marvel in feathers, so like and yet so unlike the scales of a reptile.

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And then there is the sea. The ocean was a significant part of my life as a child, and its creatures still feel to me like some sort of strange siblings, playmates for an only child in a lonely place.

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If such a thing as magic existed, surely it would hide in the endless complexity and diversity of the ocean, where nothing is as it is on dry land, and so many things are not as they appear.

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The seahorse, especially, in all of its dragonish forms, intrigues me to draw it over and over again. Everything about this animal draws me in, from its insanely effective disguises to its graceful slow movement and gripping tail, and even the violent way in which it feeds, huffing its meal’s exoskeleton out its gills.

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Sometimes, I want to capture more than the subject. I want to create a little slice of a world.

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Creating a scene presents unique challenges, especially when it is pulled entirely from my mind.

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I prefer to create tightly packed scenes. I find a distinct pleasure in each detail.

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My fiance is a great lover of movies, and so for him, I strayed from my usual subjects and style.

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I drew these from movies by Quentin Tarantino, a favorite director of my fiance.

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These drawings challenged me in a new way. I wanted to capture something of the distinct gritty style of these movies.

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The result was unlike anything that I had produced before. It’s so important for me, and any artist for that matter, to remember to challenge myself, reach beyond my own creative impulses, and create something new.

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Sometimes, I don’t want to limit my creativity at all, not even to the bounds of making something discernable.

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In these moods, I make art with little or no rhyme or reason. Most of them seem to beg to be colored, but I rarely do.

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If you like the work featured here, don’t hesitate to commission a piece of your own! Just let me know what you’re thinking of and I’ll work out a price. Some of the pieces displayed here are also still available for sale.

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