The "My Tokaido" series of ball point pen drawings
In 1984 I started a series of landscape drawings of places I passed by on my commute to work or in my other more or less regular trips around the area of Upstate N.Y. where I live.Initially started with no "great plan" after I had done 3 or 4 I remembered Ando Hiroshiga's landscape series of woodcuts and thought I would set the goal of doing my own "53 stops on the Tokaido Road" since this was, in a sense, my Tokaido or, put another way, stops on my journey.In art school I enjoyed drawing with a ball point pen on clay coated paper so that was the medium I used. I really liked the look and vernacular, non art material commonality of it.
Each drawing is done with the same brand of pen on 12"X18" clay coated paper.
The first 26 were exhibited at the Ithaca House Gallery in Ithaca in 1985 and the completed series of 53 was exhibited at the Schweinfurth Museum in Auburn, NY in 1986.All 53 plus a new series of 4 large ball point pen drawings (18"X24") of farm ponds was exhibited in a one person show at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University in 1987.
In the ensuing years about half have been sold so I do not have a digital image of those.
Scarecrow series
In Fall 1998 I sketched a scarecrow I'd built to discourage the various wildlife that seasonally pirated my vegetable garden. Over the next 2 years I occassionally drew, painted and did prints based on the metamorphosis of this doppleganger like form. The seasons, time and weather made for strange and interesting moods and I used a variety of media and sizes as I worked my way through the series. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, male or female, funny or downright creepy, I ve always liked the series. Lately I'm finding each time I exhibit one of the works it is sold and so I wanted to give you a chance to see as many of the artworks as possible in the order in which they were done. I have never exhibited them as a complete group and now, as they leave the nest one by one I thought I would have as close to a complete "scarecrow" show as I can muster.I thought I might not have images of all the pieces but after some hunting around I found a slide or copy of each!
