Tide Drawings Hamburg, 2014, installed at The Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Each drawing 46” x 46” (116 x 116 cm), pigmented ink on Japanese gampi mounted on rag.

Studies for The Great New England Hurricane of 1938. Pigment on gampi, 2024

Hurricane Wilma (New York Harbor), 2009, 45” x 45” (114 x 114 cm), pigmented ink on Japanese gampi mounted on rag.

The edge of the land-based world, along with the winds, weather and movement of the celestial universe combine to create wave and water level patterns. It occurred to me several decades ago that the changes in height between the ebb and flow of the sea might be drawn to reveal distinctive patterns of place. The resulting drawings encompassed the daily movements of sea tides, the pulsing currents of rivers and imaginings of eddies and whorls. Each, with its own unique series of straight and curved lines, express the constantly moving, ever-changing, fluidity of our surroundings and the living world.

Rebecca Solnit has observed that the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm. 

Drawn by hand on Japanese gampi, my drawings are made with ruling pens and pigmented ink on this tissue-thin paper and are then mounted onto a watercolor base paper. During the mounting process, the drawing is suspended in a water bath before being lifted out onto the support, affording a brief interaction with the elements and a moment that allows the drawing to move, creating micro shifts in the linear pattern.