flash drawings
Covid-19 is a vivid messenger standing at our door, laying bare the intertwined relationships between social inequities and human health while squarely exposing our unpreparedness for climate change. The weight of the moment is palpable, as the virus exposes a myriad of issues that cannot be disconnected. Access to potable water, deforestation, poor air quality, melting icecaps, insect infestations, and extreme weather events are indications of an unhealthy planet. The pandemic is one of many symptoms. Our interconnected global pathways of communication, travel and commerce creates fertile ground for the fast exponential spread of disease. Systemic economic, racial, housing and healthcare injustices are all sunlit and “unmasked” by these conditions at this global inflection point.
In the first weeks of lockdown due to Covid-19 in early March 2020 in New York State, I began a series of small mostly square drawings, made in graphite and colored pencil. They are honest instinctual visualizations, with a visceral quality, that reflect my experience in these uncertain times. What emerged is a series of flash drawings -- tonal fields with interruptions, disturbances, and flashes of errant color; a rendering of the messenger. This work, richly layered with striking passages of reds, chartreuse, orange, and fuchsia, represents my psychological state at this time of upheaval and national reckoning. They are expressions of captivation and despair, at once rhythmic and jarring, attempting a response to this critical moment.
These flash drawings allow me to speak to lived emotional experience as it mingles with objective reality during uncertain and constantly fluctuating times. While daily news inspires the creation of each drawing, the drawings are not literal illustrations nor representations of specifics. Rather, news developments are triggers for the temperament, intensity, color and forms in the drawings and therefore become representations of emotional and psychological states. My use of color, density, tonal variations, rhythm, pattern and the buildup of lines express a kind of emotional data visualization in real time, reflecting changing facts, vaccine developments, societal moods, economic pressures, political shifts.
These flash drawings reflect an acute and pressing need to make ongoing work that focuses on current events. We are living intense realities. These drawings embody triangulation - time, experimentation and the urgency of global events. They deeply connected to where I am, where we are as a nation, and how it can fuel new directions going forward.
These images represent a selected group from the flash drawing series.
