Sketchbooks and Figure Drawings

Everything I do begins with drawing.  Even if I am building a panel, finding wood and debris in the street, or slopping brown oil paint wash on a motorcycle sculpture, it all begins with doodles, figure drawings, crude diagrams, texture sketches, shading exercises and pure stream of consciousness drawing on the train, at work, at home, everywhere.  Drawing is the fundamental beginning of my art where my thoughts start to meld with the world outside of my head that I exist in.  It is wear my ideas and thinking begin to take form, and are given life, and are actually begun to be explored.  If I don’t jot something down from a thought, that thought almost never goes anywhere further than the next random view in the cosmic unknown that floats in my head.  Drawing is how I solve visual problems, psychological problems, it’s often where I find humor, memory, nostalgia, excitement for things to come, peace, and energy.  It is a road map for my brain to explore itself and have a document of how the thoughts can become and are connected, and how to make them bigger and better.  It is my foundation.  All of my work I see first in my head as a drawing.  When I close my eyes and let my pencil flow it is much like a dancer or jazz player improvising taking me to the place where I am just a conduit for the creative energy that exists in all things to move through me.  These are all drawings, different types, for different reasons.  They were never meant to be polished, they are often random, totally insane, whimsical, bizarre, perverse, and completely and totally honest.  They span months, years, some even a decade old.  From figure drawings and technique exercises to BART and Subway randomness, much of the time not looking any thing like my paintings, this is where it all starts, and where I sometimes have to go to find balance.