Ten Thousand Flowers

This series of drawings began with the Gone to Feed the Roses portfolio, in which I worked directly from arrangements of my mother's funeral flowers, each drawing an invented, composite image of different bouquets as in Dutch flower paintings. (The title is based on Edna St. Vincent Millay's Dirge Without Music.)

Since that time, I have continued drawing flowers periodically with the larger series titled Ten Thousand Flowers (see poem by Zen Buddhist monk Wu Men). The works map a range of formal possibilities and expressive states through a varied orchestration of core drawing elements - line, value, space and mark-making - in a search for the precarious balance between absence and presence. Dislocations and instablity are part of the drawing process, which includes blind contour.