Mad World

Archived Series, 2011 to 2014

Mad World is where the practice became conscious of itself. For years the work had been moving toward a single subject without naming it, structures caught in the act of forming and coming apart, systems yielding to forces larger than themselves. Here, for the first time, I stopped to ask what exactly I was making, rather than only making it. These drawings are that question, worked out by hand. The work turned to graphite because the density demanded it. What I was after had become too intricate to paint, thousands of interlocking parts erupting outward from a center, infrastructure and growth tangled together in the same mass, building and dissolving at once. Drawing was the only way to hold that complexity. Stripped of color, the structure could be seen plainly, examined rather than seduced. These are not studies for paintings. They are the place where the subject came into focus. This is also the hinge of the longer practice. Before Mad World, the condition was present but unrecognized, carried by imagery without being the point. After it, the work pursued that condition deliberately. The drawings could never be painted directly, and the attempt to paint them anyway led to everything that followed. Mad World is the turn from making toward knowing what is being made.