Artist Statement
“A Walk in the Woods” is a love story between me and the natural world. When I was a child, my parents bought a farm in the rolling hills of Mono, an hour and a half drive from Toronto. All my childhood weekends were spent there and I learned about the quiet growing of the natural world. From it I learned about wonder and beauty.
This show is about trees.
I sit and draw in front of my subject. Each drawing is a record of that particular day. Weather, time, light, sounds and bugs are all part of the drawing. It often takes two days to complete one.
It turned out one day that one drawing wasn’t enough, so I made another to join up with the first. Some of the pieces in this show are the result of this joining up. Each of the drawings is still complete in itself, a documentation of that day, but is intimately related to the drawing beside it. Each separate drawing is signed and dated for the day it was made. It is a delight to see the joined up pieces develop. Often they go together imperfectly but I consider this to be an acceptable result of the process.
Huge, quiet, long lived and slow growing, trees experience time in a different way. The trees that our ancestors planted live through generations. They soar upwards. They make us look up with awe. They are survivors. They adapt and carry on living. Their bark shows the lines of growth, their leaves move with the wind and absorb the sun. They show us that life is complicated and splendid.