Movement and Time
Brrrr, it is cold! This is an acrylic mixed-media collage that, to me, evokes January cold. The wolves running joyfully don’t seem to mind. I did not grow up in a part of northern Wisconsin that had wolves, at least at that time, but my elderly neighbor Ellis had been a wolf bounty hunter back in the day. He had a lot of pelts in his house and a lot of stories to tell. I did not hold it against him because he was nearly a century old. Time passes, and things change. When wolves were successfully re-introduced to Isle Royale, in Lake Superior, I was thrilled. Since then I can only assume they have spread back into northern Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The wolves in my image are just running around, but I have long been interested in the large scale migrational movements of animals in landscapes. I think this is related to an obsession with a feeling of movement in art in general. Often I try to establish a feeling of wind or try to enliven a surface with slashing diagonal marks. It is not just movement in the moment that interests me though, but movement in a temporal sense. It is the movement of the four seasons in constant change, day by day. It is the movement through time at an evolutionary scale, at a geological pace, or according to the clockwork intervals of planetary systems, large and long enough to be hard to grasp, much less picture. These artworks all have that sense of movement, migration, and constant change. The last drawing combines a micro and a macro scale, combining a landscape of tissues I have viewed through a microscope with pillars of text as monumental as Egyptian cuneiform columns, and embedded within that matrix you will find a migrating herd, moving in ways life has always moved. Constant change according to natural laws produces cycling repetitions and hopeful predictability that life will endure. It is bigger and longer than us.
