Love Letter Etchings

My Love Letters Etching Series stems from my deep obsession with diversity of flora and fauna in the natural world, and most specifically from the ocean. I see these new works like deep and intense obsessions with celebrities. I desire to write love letters to all my heroes in the form of small, process driven intaglio prints. I’m interested in the balance between the menacing/beautiful and between the man-made/natural. I seek to both catalog and respond to various natural phenomena and micro to macro relationships in the art making process. How many letters can I write and how many different organisms or sources can I incorporate into my work? Naturalist, biologist, and artist Ernest Haeckel drew over 5,000 species of radiolaria during his lifetime. I seek to incorporate a similar number of flora and fauna into my work during my lifetime. New species are still being discovered every day and we have only explored less than 10% of what is actually in our oceans. While my works are inspired by the natural world, the forms don’t necessarily exist and are created through inventing and adjusting actual references. It’s important that I’m combining a variety of source material in the work and not just documenting different species. My paintings series, The Pocket Pod Series, includes over 250 original works made between 2008-09. My last big series completed in 2012, The Daily Drawing Project, encompasses 52 weekly series with 366 original works. The Love Letter Etchings builds on those ideas and but takes cues from the Census of Marine Life, a 10-year research project that involved 2,700 scientists and 6,000+ potential species.

She's Carnivorous, 5" x 7" etching, soft ground, aquatint, and drypoint, 2013

She’s Carnivorous

She’s Carnivorous, inspired by the newly discovered Carnivorous Harp Sponge, is strikingly beautiful like a harp, but it is also very ominous at same time. The balance between the menacing and the beautiful is exciting to explore in the printmaking process. I’m interested in investigating the duality present in a variety of creatures and environments. 

Icon Star, 5" x 7" etching and aquatint, 2013

Icon Star

Icon Star, inspired by the Iconoclaster Longimanus, has a life span that is similar to humans and their skin looks like a man-made electronic device. Icon Stars grow very slowly and often live in dark deep waters. The balance between the man-made/natural can be ambiguous, and many creatures in the oceans can often seem fictional or synthetic. I see this as a powerful idea, image, and tool to source in the intaglio process.

 

Radiant, 5" x 7" etching and aquatint, 2013

Radiant

My third piece Radiant, draws from the diversity of diatoms or plankton living in the ocean. Diatoms are single celled alga enclosed within an inorganic cell wall composed of silica. The forms are often bilaterally symmetrical and the diversity of form is really fascinating to explore compositionally. Radiant not only emanates light but I also see it as a metaphor for powerful emotions like happiness. While happiness and beauty can be sort of a bad word in the context of the social norms of art world, I see the single cell of the diatom as similar to a single emotion that can influence everything that is around it. Diatoms are single celled but they also exist in groups or colonies and that was something I thought about while making this piece. Drawing from micro to macro relationships remains at the core of my motivation as an artist.