My recent work celebrates the analog and it begins with the past. I build my drawing grounds from dictionary pages more than a century old, then largely erase them under gesso. Sometimes a wash of ordinary house paint sits over the gesso, tinting the ground, but the buried pages still show through. On top of this I draw in silverpoint, an unforgiving Old Master medium. We're living through a moment when language, and meaning itself, is being obscured. When the dictionary, a place we once turned to for fixed definitions, no longer holds meaning. Instead it holds these analog images that celebrate and record a pre-digital world. Silverpoint feels innately antiquated. It can't be undone or easily revised; it shines because it's a precious metal, but then tarnishes and ages the way the paper beneath it already has. Which makes it the perfect counterweight to our culture of instantly generated, infinitely revisable imagery. I want the work to hold two things at once: conceptualism in the sense of time being layered into the aging of the materials and the obliterated dictionary entries reading as intentional; but also the decades-long discipline of a technically exacting drawing practice. Often I see figurative realism that has no interest in ideas, or conceptual work with no interest in craft. These works obviously attempt to reconcile the two. The drawings themselves are figurative explorations of movement and metaphor; recalling an analog, organic, world we've only just left behind, but seem fated never to return to. Bonus points: I got my undergraduate degree in writing (poetry) with a double major in US Literature, and have spent 25 years trying to figure out how to incorporate words into my visual vocabulary, without it feeling forced or fake; and the obliterated dictionary pages were worth waiting for.