My art is Virginia based and Shenandoah Valley centered. I work within and among interstices between wilderness and pastoral landscape. I believe that the sublime and the pastoral are not antithetical; rather, I aver their complementary and mutually energizing forces. Attracted to mountainous and hilly terrain—specifically, the Ridge and Valley region of Virginia--I draw landscapes that appear wild and even scoured, with little or no suggestions of habitation. I use multiple striations and lines to suggest cut or crystalline forms. During the drawing process, however, I “domesticate” them. I flood or stain the paper with washes. I lay curvilinear lines among the angular ones, then color in the entire network with graphite, pastel and colored pencils in variegated shades. Growing things intimate for me that, albeit rocky, this metaphorical landscape is watered and thus fertile. It can provide a home.
The Nimrod Hall Series is emplaced in Bath County, a region of south-central Virginia rich in subterranean springs and baths and the home of the Nimrod Hall Summer Arts Program for Artists and Writers. The series explores natural and cultural structures of the 18th-century lodge, which rambled into a clustered community of additions and cottages through the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Trees, rocks and branching clusters cling and root to the earth, pinned by swooping flourishes of the pencil or brush. These objects and elements intimate the presence and fecundity of living waters, bark, mortar and rock.
Common to the mixed-media drawings is a searching, almost fervid line. A track or trail that tends to expands to a thicket, the line interlaces itself above, around and within the landscape forms, clothing and at the same time disguising them. I think of these works as maps of uncharted lands or magical forests, the latter conjured from fairy tales of castles surrounded by brambles and thorns. Seemingly impenetrable and unreachable, with a touch of a magic wand or pencil they become approachable and nearly accessible, yet still beyond reach. They remain “sacred spaces.”
One need not search very far to find sacred spaces in the natural world. Assuredly they abound in protected regions such as national parks and wildlife refuges. But they also lie along well-trodden pocket-park paths, paved hike and bike trails, stolid scenic drives and places like Nimrod Hall. Sacred spaces—enclosures that are physically “in” the world yet mystically set apart from or tangential to it—can be found anywhere. In fact, they define and locate sources of spiritual healing and recuperation that are desperately needed in the wilderness lives we lead today. The art I make navigates, circulates and delicately bounds these spaces, interconnecting and making them visible and tangible and, in so doing, activating multi-sensual and multidimensional responses.
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