Artist's Statements About Individual Works

Improvisation

Charcoal and pastel on sketchbook page, 1997, 9 x 12

On-going exploration in expressionism. Two quotations influence my non-commercial drawing: “After a short period of agony I took a great leap forward, from copying nature … to feeling the content of things – abstracting – conveying an extract.”

— Gabriel Munter, on her creative breakthrough in Murnau, 1908

“I didn’t begin to do anything passable on my trip to Africa until the moment when I had sufficiently forgotten small details and so remembered the striking and poetic side of things for my pictures; up to that point I was pursued by the love of exactitude which the majority of people mistake for truth.”

— From Delacroix's journal, Oct 17, 1853