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. 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.