Nexus: Red Venus de Willendorf
A recently completed piece:
Nexus: Red Venus de Willendorf
Etching and inkjet on paper & film
51.8 x 40.5 cm.
Nexus: Vyg & Willendorf
Nexus: Vyg & Willendorf
inkjet print on Hahnemuhle watercolour paper
59 x 69 cm.
This is my latest print, still to be editioned. The three skiers are Finno-Ugric rock carvings from the Vyg River, near the White Sea in the Karelia region of northwestern Russia, based on a photograph by Loit Joekalda of Tallinn, Estonia and used with his permission. The female figures are my drawings of the Paleolithic Venus de Willendorf figure found in Austria, a recurring image in many of my works. More pictures of Venus can be seen here if you are interested.
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Human Marks
For the past decade now, my work has largely been concerned with the marks left by humans and their art upon their environment. It is also about nature’s marks on humankind’s traces and upon nature itself.
My ideas come from a gathering together of experiences, particularly SEEING images that have a kind of pull or tug for me, with a sense of time, history, weathering, and aesthetic qualities. Some important places have been Italy, Germany, Finland, and Hornby Island, Alberta hoodoos and Royal Tyrrell Museum in Canada, and research on rock art from books and the internet.
Taking photographs when possible is a way of gathering materials and archiving images for possible future use in artmaking. Later, in the image-making process I respond again to certain collected photographs with a flash of intuition and excitement (inspiration?) when I see the connections between seemingly disparate imagery and discovering serendipitious things.
These works rarely show human figures except as indirectly represented, as in some rock art images, but there is a strong sense of human presence in the work. For example, this presence is very strong in Nexus IX & Nexus X.
“Nexus” means connections. I am intrigued by the multitude of connections between the past and present, between places, and even within my own work over many years of artmaking. I often reuse my past images in new combinations as I keep discovering new threads.
Nexus/Blue prints
Nexus/Blue I (inkjet & etching, on 73.5 x 60.7 cm. paper and film)
Nexus/Blue II (inkjet, on 71 x 75 cm. paper & film)
Nexus/Blue III (inkjet, on 57.8 x 40.5 cm polypropylene & film)
Nexus/Blue IV (inkjet & etching, on 33 x 48.25 cm. paper)
