In creating a grisaille, such as these, markmaking is much like music, an act of harmony and continuity between intention and body, of physicality as it traces gestures, inscribes boundaries, imposes layers, drags and fills nuances, creates segues.  Doing so in grayscale (grisaille) is for me drawing, writ large.  Composition is found, for me, in overarching patterns that the eye connects.  Not all lines are drawn.

Such work is often assumed to be mere underpainting, the provisional work done before a painter executes the real stuff.  It is also said that drawings and underpaintings give insight into the unmediated and unconscious workings of the artist’s true and natural "habits of mind".  Of the two notions, the latter is mostly true in my work, the former generally is not. For me, drawing and painting are of one cloth—complete works, not studies or a models for something else.