Growing in lightness darkness and contrasts.
Growing in lightness colors become seen.
Shadows follow the line,
drawing boundaries between the hues
and territories defined.
A shift to night brings the void into sight.
color is the light.
Heavy shade,
colors hidden.
Deeper now and full of weight.
Through growth, changes happen.
Light breaks the lines of contrast.
Hard boundaries revealed in depth.
Two distinct parts,
tangled as one.
Contrasts solidify.
A shape now fully known.
The process of drawing for me is a form of distilling my thoughts, ideas, and feelings into something concrete that can be better understood and, hopefully, communicated to others. I enjoy drawing in books because the resulting illustrations tell their own story when read in a sequence and as ink penetrates from one page to the next, each segment becomes concretely connected to the page that came before it as well as the next. Not only are the visual representations connected, often when filling pages of a book, so are the ideas. However, when drawings are bound within a book, distributing them presents a challenge. A way to get around this is through printmaking. One can edit a plate or draw over previous editions to move a narrative along. When drawing on a tablet I realized I can accomplish something very similar by drawing in layers over completed work, one after another.
I used to keep small poem books, at some point these practices merged and I began to write my poems through imagery. The above poem, in both its visual and verbal representations above, is one such poem.
Growing In Lightness, Darkness, and Contrasts is now available as 3 prints and 1 digital download from the shop.
