More often than not, our first experiences with paintings or drawings are from a book. The nature of the print medium sets us up for an expectation of an experience that was never intended by the artist. A book exposes a point of view that does not exist in the real world. As the printed image is so far removed form its source, new stories and perceptions can be attached to what is viewed that the artists could have never anticipated. Inflaming this disintegration is the generations of images created from the original photographs of the object. Colors change and quality is lost. Couple this with the fact that a camera records only a fraction of a second, and that a painting is constantly reflecting light. Images made through a lens will, in fact, have subtle changes from photo to photo and photographer to photographer. This is why when you look at different photographic reproductions of De Kooning’s “Woman and Bicycle”; in some she appears to be riding the bike, and in others to be standing. It is impossible to mechanically capture the essence of this painting at all, as he painted it in a style he called “slipping glimpses”, which relied on the medium’s character to have reflective views to create the illusion of different actions from within the surface.

Starting with original observational drawings of my own sculptures, this process is magnified in this suite of drawings. Represented here are five generations of decay and change. In order to reconfigure the image to the next generation a new process of intervention is employed: one for each new stage. In this way each process builds on the last using either another persons intervention (my three year old niece) or a mechanical tool like a scanner or computer program to distort what was. All sequences are then painstakingly reproduced in their latest form in colored pencil to become original unique experiences linked to, but independent of, each other.

As the generations progress, the original image stays an element, but is not faithful to the observations you would have with the original. In fact, each new evolution of the series maintains only a small fraction of the experience you would have with the one before it. The true experience I intend becomes a question. Even though all drawings offer valid experiences, only one is true to the original object. However, it does not come close to viewing the actual objects that these colored pencil explorations have come from. Unless you actively seek out the original sculptures you will never see the real object.