Drawing Lines - Experiment in Altered Photo

River's Edge: Downward, Outward, and Upward, 2015
Full Spring Studio

 When we were babies, before we learned to name and to draw mental lines around the shapes of the world, what did we see? Did we see a wholeness before the world was divided? Or was it an illegible and frightening blur? I'm interested in work that helps put the world's pieces back together, though I don't want to erase the history--the cracks between the fragments that show the process.  Here's a work that explores the dividing lines that inform our seeing.


This winter, I returned to a technique I'd tried before of overlaying colored pencil on a photograph. In the past, I'd altered a photo substantially before combining it with colored pencil, but this time I was interested in the contrast between a "realistic" photograph and a drawing that places an interpretive layer over the image. I followed edges of color and subject matter in the photo, dividing the view into "human" and "natural" and further dividing the shapes within the natural into sub-parts, much like the outlines in a color-by-number.


The tryptic, called "River's Edge: Downward, Outward, and Upward," is created from photographs taken as part of an art-led environmental education/ participatory public art project called River Journey that is taking place this school year with River's Edge Academy charter high school. The pictures are taken from the balcony of the St. Paul Water Intake, where the journey of the school's drinking water supply begins. This place is picturesque with its old building perched on the river, but it is also a significant turning point, where water as "river" turns into water as commodity. It is the same water, but it has crossed the lines in our picture of the world.

Upstream of the faucets of St. Paul,
a white temple stands at river’s edge.
Inside, noisy blue pumps slurp the Mississippi.
Outside, it is quiet.