The animal drawings began as an outgrowth of my life-drawing   class demonstrations.  Not having a live model away from school, I chose my dog Cleo as a subject.  I tried to evolve the drawings from very loose suggestive gestures to more finished works, in the same way that I was teaching students.  Since my demonstrations in class were of necessity quite short, I brought in pieces to show how loose beginnings could resolve into finished pieces.

I became quite interested in these common animals as subjects, and moved from pencil to full color. I devised a rather innovative technique moving from graphite drawings using erasure, to larger scale, using dry pigments, which were applied directly to the paper with rolled up pieces of sweatshirt.

Expressing the character and personality of a dog or cat became fully as interesting as any subject I’ve worked with.  After this series, I engaged in other interest for a while before beginning the completely new Automata project which can be found in “Links.”