Statement

Within the past two years I have begun to use charcoal as a medium, before that was watercolor and before that pastels and on and on the befores go. Charcoal starts as plant material in tree or vine form. It’s black, so black and powdery and incredibly messy and dark. You can clean it up with soap and water, water does nothing to clean oneself of charcoal. If I don’t clean up it stays on my hands and face and gets onto everything. Charcoal absorbs light, charcoal is not lightfast, it stays the way it stays. The use of charcoal for humans goes back to 30,000 to 28,000 thousand years ago. The cave drawings in the Chauvet Cave in Ardèche, France have these ancient drawings. I wonder if the people who painted on these cave walls figured out ways to make the charcoal they made from burning fires better than it was from the stick or wood that was in the fire? Did they use specific types of plants as their favorite material? Charcoal has a long history with humans and it is an amazing pigment. This pigment starts as a plant and then is created by burning in a fire. When it is made now the wood is burned in a low oxygen kiln. I sometimes make my own charcoal but mostly I purchase it. Createacolor brand is one of my favorites next to Nitral. I burned sticks as a child in summer campfires then quickly dipped the stick into the lake to stop the burning reaction so that I didn’t end up with ash, the dust from burning. As a kid its fun to burn the end of the stick and see the red at the end and wildly whip it around in the air until you need to put it in the fire again. Thankfully I did this at the beach so I could stick the end into the sand or lake if anything got a little crazy or I was finished burning sticks. At this time in my life I only drew on rocks. Now I make drawings and even a sculpture using a lot of charcoal. It’s really fascinating. This piece is called, “All The Things We Cannot See”. It’s a metaphorical spiritual space of what we cannot see. What goes on around us when we are in the forest, or strolling by? But why all of the darkness? We cannot see in the dark. We need the darkness so that we can love the light, so we can love the sun, so that we can see the beauty all around us. In the words of author Hooper C. Dunbar from the book, “Forces of Our Time: The Dynamics of Light and Darkness”, he writes the following. “When in the Hidden Words Bahá’u’lláh asks, “Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust?” there are undoubtedly multiple levels of meaning but amongst these is also the simple physical reality that all known life is composed for the most part of the same elemental dust - oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon. Matter decomposes and is recomposed infinitely such that when we eat and breath we are quite literally taking in elements of one same substance.” Charcoal is a lightweight carbon part of this elemental quartet. Is making art using charcoal part of all of us? Are we looking at something so deep and dark there is really no way to get away from the ancientness of the material? Does it bond us on an atomic level? Do we strongly desire to see the things we cannot see?