i steal words and images and use them in my art. a magazine photo of winding stairs got me going.
my manikin with her pink formal and raven head got to model next to those stairs and after some time working on the drawing the name of a song in the musical Hamilton seemed very appropriate, and so it became The Room Where It Happens.
one evening at Ledford House, people were staring out at the setting sun, hoping to see the green flash. even tho i didn't see that 2 second astounding light, i had to find out more and used the flash in drawings i had started earlier in the year, tracing silhouettes of characters from a 1999 painting (i steal from myself).
two books were influential—Lincoln in the Bardo by George Sanders, and Louise Erdrich's The Sentence. reading itself is an infusion of ideas and these two would not let me go.
in April i went to an artist retreat at Summer Lake, Oregon with fellow artist Bonnie Hull, and after we worked on our separate projects we put up a long piece of black paper and drew the lake in afternoon light, taking turns making the long marks.
