I don’t draw. I write code that becomes drawing by a machine. Though I have art training, I never really learned to draw that well. I’m a conceptualist. I dwell mostly in the realm of ideas. I explore the aesthetic shadows of thinking.
So what interested me, and motivated my time in Michael Markowitz's 23rd Street Studio, was the interplay between my own mind and body's habits and tendencies, and the possibilities of paper and charcoal — which are also distinct and particular.
Abstraction came before the figure in the curriculum. We spent 10 weeks in the presence of a live model but not drawing them. As frustrating as that was, the most obvious utility of that exercise was to allow time to become acquainted with the paper and charcoal itself. And looking back, i realize, acquainted as well with the bodies of the models, and the situation. Michael's insistant proding also effected some sort of defamiliarizing of the body, that was maybe later helpful for actually drawing the figure — "letting it come," as he says.
There is a kind of revelatory intimacy in drawing. The hand. Its signature. It’s character. Its desires. These are apparent in the artifacts that come from the touch of the body. They are legible in its surface. In the marks. And there is something emotional in what is conveyed by the marks. The transmission, which is extralinguistic, is literally “fascinating” — it mesmerizes the viewer and provokes feelings. Resonates. Invokes. Drawing creates evocative surfaces.