A Kind Of Rescue

The central theme of this piece is the memories we carry with us across a lifetime.

The title “A kind of Rescue” has multiple meanings. 

The first is the rescue of the original drawing itself which, having begun in Italy, was one of a series of blind contour drawings made on a sketch pad held above our sleeping positions in the dark. I was fascinated to capture the night shapes a couple make and what they have to say about comfort and physical proximity. The best of the sketches seemed to me to have merit, but lacked a stand alone resolution, so I carried them and protected them in various ways across decades of travel.

Another part of that idea of rescue concerned the loss of things that are inevitable across any lifetime, be it proximity, or intimacy, or possessions, or sanity, or grace...or any of the other multitude of things that may be seen to be lost.

In the final resolution of the work I wanted to give voice to that kind of 'carrying' and the figures, now upright, seemed to lend themselves both to the ideas of distance and depth and longevity that I was working on in the landscapes.

There is a sense of returning after having come full circle, or at least across a great distance, which is how many of us seem to perceive time. As visual artists it occurs to me that we are often engaged in the process of rescuing the best of ourselves.