Draw me a dog

Recent work is becoming comfortable settling into unsettled and uncomfortable, ambiguous spaces. I’m finding a work finished when I no longer know if it’s a drawing or a painting or a collage—I like the interstitial space between those things, and I like to see the awkwardness and process of something in the throws of becoming. Is it a landscape, figurative work, still life? Is that a frog, an insect, an organ, a cell? An artist friend said of this work, “it pulls me in but doesn’t quite let me land”. I’m good with that.

Conté, acrylic, estate sale coffee table books
16 8″ x 8″ cradled panels (Total size: 32″ square)
(2022)

You sat on a stool on the side of a hill
by a broken down fence
for 180 years

a microscope in your right hand
a telescope on your left
looking side to side until you couldn’t tell the atoms from the stars

You lay at the shore
one eye each in the sea and the sand
for 108 centuries

watching the scurrying from the water and back
the oceans becoming red blood and green blood
things came, and the things went

You stayed aloft for eons
and you saw the frogs become goats,
and the goats become fruiting trees,
and the trees become the big cats,
and the cats become dirt

And now in the room she asks you
to sit and she asks you,
she says,
draw me a dog