Floating Line Drawing, 2011, oil pastel on Japanese gampi mounted on rag, 32” x 32” (81 x 81 cm).

The discovery of the Japanese paper, gampi, provided me with a material to push beyond the drawings I had been making for my site-specific installation work. Gampi has a unique surface luminosity that captures and projects light. It is shear, yet long-fibered and therefore incredibly strong, even when quite thin. These properties along with techniques I developed to reintroduce the paper to water and float linear strokes allowed me to use the “empty space” of a drawing as an active, transforming structure. Like variations on a melody in classical music, a drawn line is suspended and floated in an unending series of visual improvisations. These “floating line” drawings have been part of my visual vocabulary for several decades.