When I started making art in my younger years, I was very focused on abstraction, layering, and materials. I worked in that direction for a number of years, getting immersed in assemblage and sculptural ideations. A couple years into college I was visited by some friends who brought me a Polyphemus moth they had found at the Dismal Nitch rest area.
I made many drawings of that moth over the next couple years and it is because of that moth that I began to find excitement and meaning in drawing and painting things from the natural world. I was also more and more falling in love with different kinds of art: Japanese prints, Morris Graves, Odilon Redon, naturalist drawings, folk art, and early manuscripts, and codices. I have always loved things that seemed direct, without too much pretension and the crutch of overwrought conceptualism (even though that is mainly what was being taught in school).
