My colored-pencil drawings depict hand-crafted things that have stood the test of time – musical instruments, books, architecture – each skillfully rendered for its purpose. My subject is not so
much the object itself but the unseen yet insistent presence of the craftsman’s hands.
I favor subjects made that you encounter actively – a staircase you climb, a book you hold in your lap – assembled long ago by artisans whose names are lost but who silently survive within their creations. The wood in an antique viola was hewn with a saw, carved with chisel, adze, and blade, and finished with stains and lacquers applied with the brush.
Books, the cleverest and most fascinating of objects, hold within themselves countless personal stories, memories of nations, the accumulated knowledge of man, all of which we may hold in the palms of our hands.
In the digital age, the printed book is no longer our primary archive. If we lose the physical encounter, the physicality of things, aren’t we losing something that makes us who we are?