OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY

Ink on paper, 12 x 18in

If you were living or working in Manhattan – particularly Lower Manhattan – on September 11th 2001 you remember the eerie stillness that seemed to settle over the city in the days and weeks to follow. There was a spookiness in the air that had nothing to do with Halloween. As area airports began to re-open, low-flying planes making their approaches to LaGuardia stopped you dead in your tracks. “Is this the second wave?” Regular New York City weirdos on the subways with backpacks or cardboard boxes suddenly seemed to have more sinister potential.

I began making a series of drawings I loosely referred to as THE TERRORIST DRAWINGS as a kind of exorcism for those nervous thoughts and times. The act of drawing has saved me in so many ways over the years. The world felt impossibly precarious then, and while making a drawing hardly answers any questions, a drawing is a tangible thing. I could deal with the spooks playing their nefarious games in black and white on the pages of my folio. The Real World, as it’s often called, was too overwhelmingly unreal to fathom.

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THE APPROACH

Ink on paper, 12 x 15 3/4in

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THE DAY AFTER

Ink on paper, 12 x 9in

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CAVE PAINTING

Ink on paper, 12 x 18in

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BOTH SIDES NOW

Ink on paper, 12 x 9 1/2in