CdV 84 Drawing

I was born in and raised near Washington D.C. The first of two year long forays to the Middle East led to a childhood sojourn in Rome. A family visit to Pompeii continues to influence me today. While they were there his circumspect father was shown certain murals while the children and women waited in an ancient street, but he never said what they were. In 1970 I spent the first of three summers in Massachusetts, at the Cummington Community of the Arts, before moving to the West Coast to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts. In the 1980s I began studying printmaking at Fort Mason, and was a member of the Fort Mason Printmakers for over twenty years. A drawing class at City College of San Francisco led to saucing printmaking papers with color washes, then sending them through a press to add lithography inks. O still sauce, or paint directly on the paper, and adds printed scraps when appropriate. After a long series of interpreting classical mythology in gay male terms, I presently draws figures from personal family postcards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, antique cartes de visite, or found photographs, sometimes combining them with modern models. Birds, fish, or animals appear as a drawing demands. The drawings are a conduit for exploring different kinds of marks and how a simple variation in a line or a tiny stroke can transform an image. They attempt to explore the extraordinary beauty of ordinary people, to recapture those unseen Pompeian paintings, those ancient and more recently vanished lives, and to preserve ours. My work continues to evolve. I hope to express the extraordinary beauty of ordinary people.