Past and Future Travels of Here Right Now is a collection of 300 drawings created over one year. The drawings of Past and Future Travels of Here Right Now are a counter-expression to my painting works. My paintings are large and colorful; an abstract meeting of pigments meant to capture the atmosphere of specific personal relationships between people and environment. The paintings are physically dear to me as objects—they are difficult for me to part with. I wanted to create something in mass; something so numerous that I simply could not be attached to any piece. This experiment was of course a failure, as if a mother of twelve loves her children less than a mother of three.
I settled on representational, colorless drawings to allow me to experiment in various compositions and further examine the meaning of ‘place,’ an idea I often explore in my paintings.
My family went on a lot of road trips when I was a kid—a flowing view of mountains, trees, farm, clouds, and hills punctuated with cities, power plants, highways, and the ever-connecting power lines passed by my mini-van window (of which I was ordered to stare out, and my sister ordered to stare out of hers). The power lines were as certain as the road before us, drawing long parallels from one rest stop to the next.
Even deep in the mountains it was impossible to take a photo of the scenic land without catching a telephone pole or electric wires in the viewfinder. Human construction runs to the core of our earth—can it ever be escaped to see the beauty without our created structures? And yet this interruption of nature connects us with each other across great distances, across mountains and oceans, across space.
In each voyage or errand-running drive, my surroundings became the drawings. After seeing the launching of the space shuttle, the scene quickly became a popular theme. The oil spilling into the ocean near my home spilled into the drawings. At a Christmas in Boston I began adding snow.
The rocketship soon meant more to me than other elements. The icon and history of US space travel is one of phenomenal power, exploration, and industry to our nation, and I have admired it from a young age. The rocketship became something very different as the natural story of the drawings progressed, representing necessary and desperate escape as much as freedom.
Although many drawings show present and past land, cloud, and cityscapes, a future is also displayed. Planets of energy production machines to support the planets filled with cities; worlds too mountainous to inhabit; the constant growth of the constructed into the created.
I settled on representational, colorless drawings to allow me to experiment in various compositions and further examine the meaning of ‘place,’ an idea I often explore in my paintings.
My family went on a lot of road trips when I was a kid—a flowing view of mountains, trees, farm, clouds, and hills punctuated with cities, power plants, highways, and the ever-connecting power lines passed by my mini-van window (of which I was ordered to stare out, and my sister ordered to stare out of hers). The power lines were as certain as the road before us, drawing long parallels from one rest stop to the next.
Even deep in the mountains it was impossible to take a photo of the scenic land without catching a telephone pole or electric wires in the viewfinder. Human construction runs to the core of our earth—can it ever be escaped to see the beauty without our created structures? And yet this interruption of nature connects us with each other across great distances, across mountains and oceans, across space.
In each voyage or errand-running drive, my surroundings became the drawings. After seeing the launching of the space shuttle, the scene quickly became a popular theme. The oil spilling into the ocean near my home spilled into the drawings. At a Christmas in Boston I began adding snow.
The rocketship soon meant more to me than other elements. The icon and history of US space travel is one of phenomenal power, exploration, and industry to our nation, and I have admired it from a young age. The rocketship became something very different as the natural story of the drawings progressed, representing necessary and desperate escape as much as freedom.
Although many drawings show present and past land, cloud, and cityscapes, a future is also displayed. Planets of energy production machines to support the planets filled with cities; worlds too mountainous to inhabit; the constant growth of the constructed into the created.