The Northern Mines Region of California was my stomping ground as a youth. The area was dotted with abandoned mines, hydraulic diggings and coyote holes. Small hamlets lay scattered throughout the hills, but much of the country was wild. I grew up appreciating the wildness, but also fascinated by the history of the area and the aesthetics of decay as the works of man gradually merged back into nature.
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Old horse barn in Livengood, 70 miles north of Fairbanks – 6″ x 9″
While attending Alaska Methodist University and taking studio art classes from Bill Kimura, I studied the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic that stresses the beauty of the “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete,” and this resonated with my interest in the aesthetics of decay and transience.
I use Pigma Micron pens (.15 mm tip) and Arches 140# hot-pressed watercolor paper for most of my art. The choice of monochromatic pen-&-ink as a working medium is partly due to my being partially color blind. I also enjoy the challenge of translating the myriad shadings and visual cues of a colored world into monochromatic images.
I have been influenced by black and white photography (particularly early photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams), printmaking (Francisco Goya, Kathy Kollwitz, Rockwell Kent & others), and Japanese sumi-e painting (Kubota Beisin, 1852-1906, expressed the wish to give up color entirely and, “use sumi-e [black pigment] alone for all effects in painting”).
When I first began seriously investing time in drawing with pen and ink I used smooth bristol board, and pens with larger nibs (.25 mm to .45 mm). I also produced larger-size drawings than I do now.
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Fairbanks Creek blacksmith shop – 7″ x 5″
As my style has changed I have moved to exclusively using small-nibbed pens (.15 mm), and the size of my drawings has shrunk. Many of the drawings I do now are only 5″ x 7″ in size. In comparing my early drawings to ones I do now, I think I pack as many lines into my current small drawings as I used to put in my earlier large drawings.
I have also moved to heavy-weight Arches hot-pressed watercolor paper. The hot-pressed paper is fairly smooth but has a slight bit of tooth to it. The Pigma Micron pens I use are fiber-tipped, and if I angle my pen to about 30° or less I can lay a light discontinuous line down on the top of just the paper’s tooth. This allows me, through hatching and cross-hatching, to develop very fine gradations of gray.
Since the ink is lying just on top of the tooth, as long as I haven’t built up the ink layer too much, I can also erase at least some of the ink. In this way I can either lighten up an area, or selectively “erase” in details such as tree trunks in a darkened forest background.